The Laundry List Blog

The definition of “marketing” from the Oxford Languages is The activity or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
 
Let me give you some additional ways to think of marketing:

Marketing is:

• What you say (the message)
• Who you say it t
...

The primary objection most drycleaners have to scaling retail wash, dry, and fold (WDF) service is they don’t have the right equipment mix. If you are limited on washers and dryers, you might want to expand your commercial WDF lines instead of your retail WDF lines.

The advantage to focusing on com...

Why is it critical to have a constant flow of new clients to your business?

Acquiring new clients is one of only three ways to increase your top-line sales. The other two are to increase the average frequency of your clients’ visits and to increase the average monetary value of each visit.

While a...

If you haven’t played around with Chat.openai.com, sign up for a free account and start playing around with it. As an example, I typed in “show me the most powerful marketing tools for a dry cleaner” and this response came back in about 12 seconds:

Certainly, here are some powerful marketing tools ...

One of my Maverick members asked me last week, “Dave, what’s the difference between a pixel and a cookie? How does it impact my digital marketing?” Great question! Here’s how I replied:
 
You first need to know what a web server and an ad server are. A server is a computer that delivers data to your...

Earl Nightingale in his famous recording “The Strangest Secret” summarizes this powerful concept. You become what you think about. Think about your rotten customers and you will have rotten customers. Think about not having money and you’ll never attract it.
 
Think about the bad nightly news storie...

In life, there are givers and takers.
 
Givers love to give, with little to no expectation of receiving anything in return.
Givers have an abundant mindset and understand there are plenty of resources to create the life of your dreams.
Givers find their batteries recharged once they give to others.
...

 In baseball, the greatest home run hitters become household names and heroes. Guys like Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Alex Rodriguez, Hank Aaron, Ken Griffey Jr., and Babe Ruth. I’m not a big baseball fan but these guys are legends.
 
I was a home run hitter for many, many years. I put so much pressure ...

This is one of my favorite quotes. 
 
Here’s why I love it:
 
It encourages you to take full responsibility for how and when you got to where you are today. Don’t blame others or your environment. That won’t do any good.
 
Everything you have been doing, and everyone you have been doing it with, hav...

The best marketers and business owners are pain detectives.
 
They seek out pain others are feeling, then they create a solution to help others with their pain.
 
People who are in survival mode and in pain, are not very good at solving their own pain. Trust me. I’ve been there many times. So have y...

80% of business owners work IN their business. They are either a technician, pressing/cleaning/assembling/delivering orders or they manage the technicians working in their business. By working IN the business, the owner can only focus on the daily operations.
 
To ascend into the 20% of business own...

A lot of drycleaners want to do more Wash-Dry-Fold (WDF) business, but they have limited washers and dryers, and they are nervous about mixing up tons of very small orders.
 
A great place to start is by getting a few commercial clients that give you consistently large orders of easy to process WDF....

The two most important words in marketing are “differentiation” and “specialization.”
 
Differentiation is all about how you are different from the other options you compete against. Notice I did not say “different from all of your competitors.” In some cases, you might be competing against a family...

Recently, one of my Mastermind Groups came to Wichita for our annual Maverick Summit. We take three days together, learn a lot about ourselves, our businesses, each other, new trends in the marketplace, and set goals to take our businesses to the next level. I also open In The Bag Cleaners for our m...

Almost every day, I see marketing done by fellow dry cleaners, and it is all about them. How great their service is, how their quality is second to none, how they have the best deals, and the friendliest CSRs, and so on. Most websites are the same way. The focus is on the business.
 
This is a criti...

“You can have everything you love in life as long as you give up what you hate.”
 -Dan Sullivan

This past April, I attended the Cleaners Showcase in Dallas, Texas, and it was an awesome conference! As the only live equipment show this year, the expectations were high. The entire team at SDA (especi...

Recently in church, at the beginning of the service, the congregation stood and the first song started playing. It was a familiar tune but I couldn’t quite place it. So, I did the one thing I probably should not have done – I pulled out my cell phone and Googled the chorus, “Gonna Have to Serve Some...

I closed my previous article with these words:

“Today, I would like to invite you to make the same decision. I want you to commit 100% to learning the business skills to create a strong product and service (operations), high top line sales (marketing), efficiency (finance), and joy in helping ot...

About 15 years ago, I made a decision that changed my life profoundly.
I was struggling in my personal life. I was in a dead end marriage and was working out how to get out of it. 
 
I was struggling with my business. I had a lot of sales because I loved marketing but I was not making much profit. 
 
Wit...