I was recently rejected by the golf company FootJoy. It’s been a while since I was rejected. I’ve been on a roll with only success. I used to be rejected everyday. Well, this brought me back to my roots and I’m getting back to basics. This was not a good feeling, but a needed feeling since it hasn’t happened to me in a while.

Watch this video to get the whole story.

Tell me about your recent rejections in the comments below. Good to talk to you.

What should I do? Watch the video and find out:

Once You Get A Route Customer, How Do You Follow Up To Make Sure They Stay With You?

You Can Use My “7-STEP FOLLOW UP PLAN”

How do you do that? Here is what my successful members do to ensure over 92% return with their routes and 76% return to their stores. It’s easy, but most of you won’t do it. It takes some work to get the system set up, but once it’s on autopilot, it works like a charm.  Here are the 7-steps:

Step 1: Snail mail a Welcome Letter – Explain how your delivery service works or the hours of your store. Include some personal information about you, the owner. Include your picture, prices, and the guarantees you have.

"Once you put the 7-Step Plan into action, you too can be out winning golf tournaments." (It's a fake picture, but you get the gist of what I'm talking about --right?) -Greg Colosi

Step 2: Email the same thing – This means that you get their email address just like you get other info. Ask confidently and you’ll get it.

Step 3: Snail mail a short hand-written Thank You note -  Thank them for coming into your store or starting with your route. David Whitehurst, longtime member of my group has his counter people send out hand-written thank you notes every day. His new customer retention rate went from 48% to 76% when he did this.

Step 4: Video or phone call – I use my iPhone to create a short customer video and I email it to them. You can also call or have one of your counter people call and thank them for trying out your dry cleaners. Most of the time you’ll get the voicemail. Prepare a simple script that you or your people can use.

Step 5: Send out a Welcome Kit – After a week or so, I mail out a micro-fiber cloth and explain how to use it in your shower to always keep it shiny and clean. I also include one of my best newsletters and another letter explaining our dry cleaning services, Rug Doctor rental, house cleaning and other services that I broker from local companies.

Step 6: Send out a newsletter every month – You can attach to all your outgoing dry cleaning or send it out in the mail, or both. 99.9999% of all dry cleaners don’t send out a newsletter to their customers. If you don’t do this, you are missing a huge opportunity to get referrals and to build loyalty. My members constantly are getting referrals and customers telling them that they read the newsletter the moment it arrives.

Step 7: Email them at least once a week – Tell them about your deal of the month, referral program, and give them some dry cleaning tips they can use.

I do all these things and so do my successful members. Once you get this set up, it’s automatic and happens without your input.  I just back from a trip to the Dominican Republic and while I was gone everything went according to plan, without a hitch.

And one last step if you have a route, you’ve got to call them every week with a reminder. I use VoiceBlaze.com for my automatic calling. Most dry cleaners won’t do this either. They think they are intruding on their customers. Guess what, it’s NOT your decision, it’s your customers decision to decide if they want the reminder calls. How do you do that? There’s an opt-out option when they start getting the calls. If you do this right, over 90% will decide to get the reminder calls and your revenue will go up at least 15% on your routes. I have some members that got a 30% boost in revenue as soon as they implemented the automated reminder calls. Stop dragging your feet and get this going.

You do all these steps and you’ll keep most of the people signing up with you. Now get off your ass and get going!!

And if you’d like to find out more about the 7-Step Follow Up Plan, call Andrea @ 1-888-661-7992

I’m Italian. We stash money for rainy (or better yet, sunny) days. Sometimes we forget where we stash the cash.

I lost 30 pounds and I’m trying on a suit that I haven’t worn in 3 or 4 years. I notice a lump in the left inside pocket. I put my hand in their and to my surprise is 20 $100 bills.

I just found $2,000 big ones!!

I was surprised. Just the day before I found a bunch of pennies and a dime in front of my supermarket. I always bend down and pick up pennies. I think it’s good luck.

Anyway, I found some hidden money.

Do you know where the hidden money is in your dry cleaning business?

There is hidden money and if you know how to take advantage of it, you can make a ton of extra profits. In an extreme case, I just showed one of my members how to make an extra $40, 000+ per month. No he’s got a $4.7 million dollar dry cleaners and I gave him one technique and he had the balz to put into action. It’s been 2 months and he’s $80,000 large the better.

If you’ve got a big dollar volume dry cleaner, call my office @ 888-661-7992 and get a call scheduled with me.

Let’s move on.

(I’m assuming) you’ve got customers that love you because you do what you say you’re going to do and you’re quality is second to none. If you’ve got this kind of business, you’re leaving money on the table. I teach the concept of a “mini-conglomerate.”  This is where you get into or partner with all kinds of products and services to sell that loyal herd you have.

Simple services you can offer:

Rug Doctor Rental (I’ve got the program to do that)
Rug & Carpet Cleaning – farm it out
Duct Cleaning – farm it out
Grass Cutting
Painting
Roofing
Etc

I’m sure you get the drift. Build your “mini-conglomerate,” you deserve the extra money that you’ll make from your loyal and trusting customers.

I was.

So were a bunch of my members until I explained it this way:

Just click the button in your brain and raise your prices 10%. It really is that easy!

First of all, let’s see what raising your prices (in this down economy) would mean to your pocket. Remember, there is no expense to this. All of the price increase ends up immediately in your pocket.

If you raise your prices 10%, what does that mean in extra spendable cash to you? If you’re doing $500,000/yr, that’s an extra $50,000 cashola.  And all you gotta do is have the BALZ (and the computer skills and spending 30 minutes of hard labor in your dry cleaning software program) to raise your prices.

What if you’re like my member Bill? Bill is doing over $3,000,000 per year. Bill just raised his prices 10% across the board. He just added a whopping $300,000 in moola to his coffers this year. Bill had to be talked into raising his prices just like I’m going to talk you into it.

What’s your net? 15%? 25% 30% or whatever?

Let’s say it’s 25%.

If you lost 25% of your business because you raised your prices, you’d still make the same amount as you do now. Do you think you’re going to loose 25% of your business? I don’t think so.

Last time I raised my prices, which was 3 months ago, I lost 1 customer. That’s right, I lost one customer from my route of over 1,000 customers. That’s not even 1%–that’s 1/10th of one percent.

Raise your prices!!  It’s time. Price is not what your customers love about you. As long as you’re in the ballpark for the level of service you provide, your prices are not the first factor your customers consider.

They look at your reliability first, your quality second and then finally they might get to your price.

That’s all I got. If I was talking to your directly right now, I would challenge you to change your prices today. I’d make a bet with you to see if you’ve got what it takes to make it happen.

You’re a business owner. Get a set! Raise your prices.  And if you’re gonna raise them, don’t go one or two percent…go the whole 10%!

Promise me in the comments below that you will follow through and raise your prices. Or if you just raised them, what happened?  Are you still in business? I wanna know.

Colosi member Arik Levey of the Laundry Locker is featured in the Chase Credit Card ads. I found this one today in the New York Times in the business section.

Colosi Member Arik Levy, Laundry Locker featured in Chase Ink Ad

Congratulations Arik!!

This post was written by member David Whitehurst. It talks about how to get positive reviews with Google, Yelp, and the other review sites. Take his advice and get some reviews fast.

Click on this to make bigger.

I mailed my monthly newsletter last Saturday with a request for customers to review my business on Google, Yelp and Angie’s List. As of Tuesday morning, I have gotten 16 favorable reviews spread between my 3 location listed in Google Places. Just Google “Champion Cleaners Birmingham Alabama” and take a look.

Getting reviews is something that should be important to everyone. It can have a positive impact on your business. When you ask your customers give you a review, I believe most often it will be a positive review. If you wait until you have a problem customer and that customer is trying to punish you for whatever she perceives you did to her, there is no doubt it will be a negative review.

I offered to give $5.00 in free cleaning to anyone who gave me a review. Just belfoe my newsletter went out, I had second thoughts about whether this was an ethical thing to do…giving free cleaning for a review. But I wrote that in my April newsletter on about March 15 and it was already being printed before my ethics kicked in. So it went out and now with the reviews coming in, I have reviewed those customers giving me the reviews. At least half are very new customers wanting the free cleaning, I assume.

The new customers writing the reviews are now…sort of…committed to me. And they have $5.00 in free cleaning. And the best thing yet is there is no cost to doing this…other than a little time.

I’ve concluded that this is not such a bad way to:

1. Get positive customer reviews
2. Have a personal connection with a customer
3. Encourage that customer to return to my business
4. Give a “treat” to a customer who reads my newsletter…so they will likely read it again
5. Encourage the readers of the newsletter to contact me if they have a problem with their cleaning or service.

Here is the paragraph I included on the first page of my 4 page newsletter:

Could You Do Us a Big Favor…And Get $5.00 For Your Efforts?

Would you go to Google and search for Champion Cleaners here in Birmingham and give us a rating in Google Places? It would mean a lot to help us build our on line reputation.

Are you a member of Angie’s List? You could rate us there as well.

We’re also active on Yelp so if you use Yelp, give us rating there, too.

Naturally, I’m hoping for good ratings. If you have something bad to say, call me at 902-1093 and let’s talk about it

I’ll give anyone $5.00 in free dry cleaning for helping us build our on-line reputation (no matter what you say) with any and all of these ratings. Just shoot me an e-mail at david@championcleaners.com and let me know you have rated us…and I will credit your account as a “thank you.”

One last comment about Customer Reviews. Don’t stop trying to get positive reviews. A review on Google Places that is 3 years old does not do much good…especially if you have negative reviews coming in since then. This process needs to be on-going. There is a “recency” bias with reviews. I’ve even read that a review older than 1 year has only a small benefit. I hope the same is true for negative reviews…but if you pile a number of positive reviews on top of an old negative reviews, you will dilute the caustic effect of the negative review.

Be proactive and get those reviews!

Comment below!

Do you know how to write a press release? If you don’t, you’re in luck. I just wrote one for Dan Forster, a member of the Colosi group. Take a look at it.

That's not a picture of Dan, it's me. But you get the idea, right?

You can double click on the press release above to make it bigger.

I’ve also included a template that you can use in your dry cleaning business. Download it here: Dry Cleaner Press Release Template. It’s in a .doc file so that you can fill in the blank and use the exact format. I hope this helps.

Watch this video first:

Are you clear on what you want your dry cleaning business to accomplish or are you just on the business treadmill? Are you aimlessly going through each day wondering how to get new customers? Or do you have a plan? A plan is better.

With a plan, you’ll know how many new customers will come in this week, this month and this year.

The book is only $19.95! Click here to get me to the order page!

Or get it on the Kindle for only $9.99: How to Get Route Customers WITHOUT Knocking on Doors