Marketing Lessons From the Chicago WDF Conference

Last week, I was fortunate enough to attend and speak at the Wash-Dry-Fold (WDF) conference on the north side of Chicago. The collaboration was amazing and it started with both Coin Laundry Association (CLA) and DLI joining forces to help make this conference a success. Almost 200 were in attendance, about 80% were laundromat owners, and 20% were dry cleaners.

I have always felt like there are collaboration opportunities between laundromats and dry cleaners, ever since we took a small team and started building out our comforter service as well as our WDF business at the local laundromat. We could never have been as aggressive as we were if we did not have that collaboration with the laundromat.

At the conference, there was a lot of interest in Commercial WDF services, and I have seen this within our Maverick Mastermind Groups as well. I shared the list of industries that we’ve had success servicing. These are typically larger, more lucrative accounts (as opposed to residential WDF accounts) that require service 2-5 times per week. But the rewards can be awesome – we have a few companies on this list that give us $3,000+ per month in sales!

Here is the list:

• Sleep Clinics
• Assisted Living / Memory Centers
• Same Day Surgery Centers
• Massage / Day Spas
• Vascular Clinics
• Dentists
• Restaurants
• Coffee Shops
• Motels / Boutique hotels
• Casinos
• Security at Venues
• Restoration Companies
• Theatre Companies
• Sports Uniforms
• Fitness Centers
• Vacation Rentals (Air BnB, VRBO)

The goal is to find companies that are producing too much linen to handle themselves but not so much that they attract the larger linen companies like Cintas, AmeriPride, and UniFirst. There is tremendous potential to find this slot and get known by certain industries for doing a great job with linen and uniforms. And if you can’t quite get the work done, this is about joining forces and collaborating with a local laundromat that is hungry for more business too.