Md. — Most dry cleaners try to be everything to everyone. According to Dave Coyle, that’s the mistake that keeps an entire industry undifferentiated
“They end up being commoditized because they aren’t different from any other options,” says Coyle, owner ofIn the Bag Cleanersin Wichita, Kansas, and founder of theMaverick Drycleanerscoaching group. Coyle spoke at a recent webinar for theDrycleaning & Laundry Institute (DLI)about marketing methods that have worked for him and his group.
Rather than compete on being better than the cleaner down the street, Coyle argues operators should focus on being different enough that clients talk about them.
Coyle has tested that philosophy over 25 years, building In the Bag into an 11-store, six-route operation with more than $200 million in cumulative drycleaning and laundry sales in the Wichita market. He now spends less than two hours a week on daily operations, a byproduct, he says, of treating marketing as seriously as production.
“Marketing is one of my favorite things because it allows you to create revenue on demand,” Coyle says.
Top of the Pyramid
Coyle frames the industry as a pyramid: technicians at the bottom, then operators, then visionaries, conductors and investors at the top. The bottom 80 percent of owners, mostly operators still doing the daily work themselves, take home roughly 20 percent of the industry’s revenue. The top 20 percent, who’ve made their businesses self-operating, capture the rest.
“If you want to thrive and be in the top 20 percent of the industry, you really need to understand what those people are doing versus the 80 percent that are down at the bottom,” Coyle says.
The split, he says, usually comes down to one problem: An owner who is also the operator makes more work for themselves every time they bring in new business, whether or not they realize it. Once daily operations belong to a team instead of the owner, growth stops creating a bottleneck, and the owner is free to become what Coyle calls a visionary.
From there, Coyle says every marketing dollar should point toward one of three outcomes: more right-fit clients, more frequent visits from existing clients, or more revenue per visit. Winning back a client who’s drifted away, he notes, falls under increasing visit frequency, not acquisition, since it’s a client who’s already proven they’ll buy from you. A sponsorship or ad that doesn’t move one of those three numbers, Coyle says, isn’t worth the spend.
The Unemployment Poster
Coyle’s first recommendation for every member is what he calls the unemployment poster, an idea he traces back to the Nixon era. The sign, posted in store windows, reads: “If you are unemployed and need an outfit cleaned for an interview, we will clean it for free.”
The offer costs almost nothing to run, Coyle says, but it does something more valuable than simply drive transactions: It signals that the business runs onrelationships.
“You want to do everything possible to show the heart of your business,” Coyle says.
He points to two results as proof of its reach. A press release sent to local television and radio stations, he says, reliably earns a spot on the evening news. And one Maverick member in a small Oklahoma town saw a photo of the poster travel much further: It reached one of the Kardashian sisters, who shared it online.
“Now they’ve got an asset of Khloe Kardashian sharing one of the things that they do in their business,” Coyle says.
The Welcome Gift
Coyle’s second strategy addresses the moment a new client first walks in the door, a moment he believes most cleaners waste. In the Bag sends every new client home with a letter outlining the company’s guarantees, its story and its services, tucked alongside a theater-sized box of Mike and Ike candy in a small box with a ribbon.
“No one gives a welcome gift,” Coyle says, arguing that the gesture alone reframes a transactional first visit into the start of a relationship.
The candy, not the letter, is what clients remember. Coyle has watched members experiment with fancier alternatives, including a soy candle in one case, without success.
“Don’t try to reinvent the wheel here. Just copy it. It works,” he says. Chocolate is out, he adds, since it melts into a mess during the summer.
Come back Tuesday for Part 2, where we’ll examine how to win back lapsed clients, convert retail customers to routes and turn a neighborhood into a client base.
