Laundry “Matt” shares 3 tips on how to acquire commercial laundry clients. If you want to increase the rate of commercial client acquisition, you need to follow these 3 tips. And if you already are acquiring commercial clients at a fast rate, you should make sure you are doing these 3 things optimally. There is always room for improvement.
[TRANSCRIPT]
Welcome to State of the Laundry Industry with Laundry Mat Episode 50: Three Tips for Growing Your Commercial Laundry Business. I want to share with you some tips on how to grow your commercial business because a lot of our clients who are doing really well are also making a lot of inroads not just with residential, which is the bread and butter, but they’re also growing on the commercial side as well. So it’s nice to have revenue from both residential and commercial.
There are three secrets to getting and attracting commercial accounts. Number one is your web presence. Customers need to be able to find you. If you haven’t seen the webinar on commercial accounts, it is about an hour but it’s worth a listen because this will help you focus your website and online presence on how to get those commercial accounts. And at Curbside Laundries, we provide top-notch websites for our clients. The client who just sent me the text message about making forty-some thousand dollars in one month, well, he’s using a Curbside Laundries website that we made for him.
Number two, besides your web presence, is you need to answer your phone. I know that sounds obvious, but on commercial accounts, what number are they calling? Are they calling your laundromat? And is your attendant answering? Are they taking a message? Are they just hoping the person calls back? Is fielding a phone call from a commercial account in the repertoire or their skill set? Maybe you hired them for something else. At our laundromat, Super Suds, our commercial accounts on average spend $175 per order, and many of them order more than once per week. So these calls are super important. They could change your entire trajectory if you have a plan in place to convert these.
In comparison, the average residential pickup and delivery order for us now is $85. It used to be about $70, but we’ve raised our prices, so that’s an easy way to get more money per order as well. So how do you field the phone calls? You need to make sure commercial pickup and delivery orders are routed to you. There are a lot of different phone system options out there. There are virtual assistants. One is Grasshopper.com, but there are many others. It could be press one for this, press two for that, or if you’re making a commercial inquiry, press number three. And when they push three, it calls your phone and you need to answer or have somebody who’s capable of converting those leads answer it.
So the third tip on how to get commercial accounts at your laundromat is to provide convenience. The most convenient thing is pickup and delivery. You can have the best website in the world, but if you’re not offering pickup and delivery, as soon as they find out you’re not picking it up or delivering, many of them will just call the next person because pickup and delivery is really everywhere, so you need to offer it too. They’re not going to be quibbling over 20 cents or 30 cents more per pound. That helps illustrate it. It’s not about price; it’s about convenience. Because you could have the cheapest price in the world, but they don’t want to drive it to your laundromat. If you could pick it up and deliver it to them at their place of business, that’s convenience. That’s value.
And the second part of convenience is not just pickup and delivery, but it’s when many of these commercial accounts have special needs. Many of these commercial accounts want their orders picked up at specific times of the day. So pay a lot of attention when they call you. You need to ask them when do you want your clothes picked up and find out how firm that is. How much do they need it picked up at that time? And if you could provide that convenience to them and somebody else can’t, they may go with you.
Some of our commercial accounts, we go there twice a day. But you know what? It’s worth it. One of the keys to retaining these customers is invoicing, and that’s something the Curbside Laundry software does very well. We send out invoices to the customer broken down by each one of the commercial account’s location. In addition, the customers can pay online, so it’s very convenient. And a neat part about the software is I get text messages saying you just got paid by this customer, and also get a daily email showing all the commercial accounts that are paid. So these commercial accounts are very profitable. You have to design your business to attract these commercial accounts and retain the commercial accounts, and that’s something we provide at Curbside Laundries – guidance on how to do exactly that.
If you found these tips helpful, please click like and subscribe. That helps other laundry owners find the podcast too. In addition, to find out more information about the Curbside Laundries pickup and delivery and wash and fold solution, go to curbsidelaundries.com.
