How to staff a laundromat

As your business grows, you may realize you need more helping hands to aid you with the day-to-day running of your laundromat. Still, a lot of laundromat owners struggle when making a decision. If this is your situation keep reading to find out when and how to staff a laundromat.

First of all, different business models have different staffing needs:

  • Self-serve laundromats probably don’t need many employees. If this is your case, you might thing that you can do without any staff at all but, what about customer service? You need to make sure your patrons are taken care of if they need anything and that your machines are running smoothly.
  • Wash, dry, and fold businesses will need more staff as you don’t only need to make sure walk-in clients can do their laundry without any issues, orders also need to be filled with the best quality possible.
  • Pick up and delivery service adds even more staffing needs as you’ll need a reliable person to take care of pick ups and deliveries without causing any problems to the customer. One lost item, or late delivery can be enough to lose you clients.

When to hire more staff

The most important clue to take the leap is your customer base. Are you getting complaints about poor customer service, late deliveries or low quality?

Another important thing to consider is what you see for the future of your business. Are you looking to expand? Hiring more staff will help you achieve your goals.

how to staff a laundromat

How to staff a laundromat?

If you’ve decided it’s time to hire more staff then it’s time to start looking but, where to start?

Once again, the first thing to consider is your business model. As mentioned above, for a self service laundromat you’ll need someone to restock supplies, clean the facilities and help customers with any questions they may have.

In a wash, dry, and fold model you need people to do the tasks mentioned above plus fulfilling the wash orders. Other members of the staff can be in charge of drying and folding. It’s a good idea to have multiple people so the process goes quickly and there’s attention to detail.

Lastly, if you’ve decided to offer pick-up and delivery service you’ll need extra employees to take care exclusively of these orders. Sounds like a lot, but you want to make sure no aspect of the process is lacking and that you don’t put too much on any one employee.

How to find the perfect employee?

As this is a customer service position, personality is very important. Teaching a person the ins and outs of your store is not as difficult as teaching someone how to be friendly. Look for kind and friendly people.

Make sure the candidates can carry on all the tasks you need them to. A big plus is previous technical experience or at least feeling comfortable doing daily maintenance tasks on your equipment.

This last part is very important but not always possible. If you’re having trouble finding someone who can fill this role in your store, we recommend you consider a service plan that covers scheduled maintenance, all repairs, service and parts for a monthly fix price


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