LAUREL, Md. — Most drycleaning businesses are built around one person: the owner. That dependency, more than anything else, is what keeps a lot of small operations small.
Ricardo Torres, owner of Tiffany Couture Cleaners in Las Vegas, spent his first years in the business making sure not to disturb what he’d bought. A former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot who came to dry cleaning by way of commercial real estate and laundromats, Torres purchased Tiffany Couture Cleaners in 2023 from Dan and Judy Del Rossi, whose family had run the Las Vegas business since 1970. He shared how his thinking has changed since then during a Drycleaning & Laundry Institute (DLI) webinar titled “Position Your Team So You Can Step Out of the Day-to-Day Running of Your Business.”
“There’s a tremendous amount of story and character associated with the business,” Torres says. “So much so that when I bought it, I was extremely careful to not rock the boat too much. But I’ve been rocking the boat a little bit more since then.”
The Industry Is Changing
Part of what’s driving that shift is a change Torres is watching play out across the industry. Publicly traded EVI Industries’ recent acquisition of Sudsies, he says, is a signal that outside capital is starting to take dry cleaning seriously.
“This is a bit of a transition from their interest in commercial laundry,” Torres says. “This is really good for us. This is an industry that is misunderstood by a lot of folks. Private equity and publicly traded companies are typically not as interested in us, but now they are becoming that.”
Torres says the shift matters most for small operators. Dry cleaning has become “a bit of a falling knife” for mom-and-pop shops doing less than $400,000 to $500,000 a year, with many getting bought up by bigger competitors. He doesn’t think demand for the service itself is going anywhere.
“There will always be, in my opinion, an interest in nice clothing and in preserving your clothing, with the purchase price of things going up over time,” Torres says, which is why independents need to pay closer attention to their own numbers.
“It’s important for us to recognize that as business owners and as entrepreneurs, we should be looking sharp and acting sharp,” he says. “Part of that means knowing what your business is worth.”
Nose In, Hands Out
Torres sums up his operating philosophy in four words: nose in, hands out. Staying informed, in other words, without doing the work himself.
“If you’re spotting and pressing, if you’re working on the boiler, or if you’re taking clients at the drop store, it’s taking your precious time,” Torres says. “If your time can be worked on more strategic endeavors that carry a heavier hammer, you should be working those to drive in more nails.”
Under that model, the owner keeps strategy items, including pricing, market expansion, capital allocation, culture and leadership development. Management owns the daily things the owner should be extracting himself from, such as staffing, quality control, customer interactions and payroll.
“Your job is to hold them accountable, not step in and do it for them,” Torres says.
That starts, he adds, with picking the right numbers.
Three Numbers That Matter
Torres could hand his managers a long list of metrics. Instead, he’s narrowed it to three.
“What isn’t measured cannot be managed,” Torres says. He downloads ownership of those three numbers directly onto his management team, deliberately and transparently.
The first is labor as a percentage of revenue, typically the largest controllable expense in a drycleaning operation. Torres says he sees dry cleaners running between 38 and 43 percent of gross revenue in total labor costs. Managers who own the number, he says, learn to schedule precisely and catch overtime before it happens.
“I have a quick meeting with the team at the end of the week on Friday to assess if we’re trending to overtime or not,” Torres says. “If we are trending to overtime, can I thwart that? Can I get in front of it?”
Second is revenue per employee, a single ratio he uses to judge whether his team is productive or overstaffed. “Say you have 10 employees and your business is doing $1 million a year in revenue. That’s a good target ratio,” he says. Grow to 11 employees, and revenue should follow to $1.1 million; when it doesn’t, “that is a sign, that is a trend that perhaps you’re not getting as much out of the employees as you would like.”
He builds in one exception. A nonproductive hire, like the client relationship manager he added once Tiffany Couture Cleaners passed 28 employees, will drag that average down temporarily without signaling a real problem.
Third is customer retention. Acquiring a new customer, Torres notes, costs five to seven times more than keeping one, which is why he wants managers running win-back campaigns rather than chasing new business alone.
“It’s like fishing,” he says. “You take a boat out and you know there’s a certain amount of fish in a certain area, and the time of day has changed, or the week has changed. It doesn’t mean the fish have necessarily gone away. It just means that you may need to go back and use a different lure, or different bait.”
Come back Tuesday for Part 2 of this series, where we’ll look at how Torres reads his own cash flow, the framework he uses to decide when to grow and the low-cost ways he’s found to add revenue without adding customers.
