Growth and profitability are on the mind of every dry cleaner. Whatever your strategies are to achieve your financial goals, you’ll have even greater success if you communicate them to your employees.
Employees are the backbone of dry cleaning businesses. Business owners with multiple drop stores simply cannot handle operations and customer service without them. You can’t expect employees to do their jobs well, or keep showing up every day, if you aren’t communicating with them about your business. Dry cleaners should be upfront and transparent with employees so they can remain confident and informed about the direction of the business.
What should you communicate? In a word, everything, including revenue, expansion plans, operational changes like new equipment purchases, ideas for new services, and key performance indicators (KPIs), such as how pieces per hour are tracking.
Some business owners are reluctant to share financial details about the business with employees, out of fear that they’ll divulge the numbers to competitors. In the dry cleaning industry, that sort of fear is overblown.
What would knowing your quarterly revenue or profit growth enable a competing dry cleaner to do? If your business is doing a good job connecting with customers and providing service they value, the numbers are more valuable to your own employees than to competitors. Your employees will see the difference your strategic decisions are having, and they’ll be excited to help keep the momentum going.
In fact, employees can be a helpful resource for ideas to improve customer service and the profitability of your business. Employees are on the front lines of your business operations and know a lot about the day-to-day. If you give them a chance to share their observations and ideas, they’ll feel invested in your business, which leads to greater job satisfaction.
Consider for a minute what failure to communicate with employees will do. Employees will wonder if the business is healthy, if their jobs are secure, if you think they’re doing good work. If you don’t supply those answers, their imaginations will. Lack of communication fuels uncertainty, which makes employees nervous and more likely to leave.
Finding and keeping good employees is harder than ever today. Don’t let your best assets walk out the door. Come clean with them about how your business is doing, and involve them in helping it grow and stay profitable. Want to read more? Read more articles here and here.
For more ideas on how to grow your dry cleaning business, watch for more SMRT Systems insights, check out our past posts, or contact us at 919-849-5500.
