A professional laundry service will usually be more scalable, reliable, and green than trying to do laundry yourself. It’s all a matter of specialization. It’s hard to compete with the quality of service a company that has focused on laundry for decades or more can provide. When you use a business laundry service, you free up your time to focus on other areas of the business that matter more for your bottom line.
Hidden Benefits of Using a Business Laundry Service
Some of the potential benefits that often come with using a business laundry service include the following:
1. Scalability
Typically, a business laundry service can scale well with a client’s needs. Because these companies have multiple clients and many machines, it isn’t a big concern if a particular client needs to expand or reduce how much laundry they’re getting cleaned and prepared each month. Proportional to the total amount of laundry they’re processing regularly, it’d be difficult for the client to majorly impact their operation.
This isn’t always the case when doing your own laundry. This is because a company doing laundry on site has to commit space and supplies to machines. If their laundry needs expand, they don’t necessarily have the machines required to do that laundry in a reasonable time frame. Likewise, if their laundry needs scale down, the machines are already purchased and installed.
There is a floor to how much the company needs to commit to do its own laundry. It can’t easily undo certain decisions.
2. Reliability
Unsurprisingly, a laundry service company, if it's reputable, will try its very best to reliably provide the services it promises to clients. Barring major disaster, a client can expect to get their laundry cleaned to the promised standard and received within the promised time window.
When a company does its own laundry, guarantees like that are gone. If an issue occurs with a particular machine, power goes out, or any other problem occurs, laundry may get delayed. In some cases, laundry could even be damaged or ruined. These issues may admittedly be rare, but they can potentially cause expensive delays depending on when they occur.
3. Sustainability
One big advantage of companies that operate on a big scale is that they can often perform tasks more sustainably than those who aren’t as specialized in that niche. A professional laundry service can usually guarantee a level of sustainability to its laundering that would be very difficult for a company to compete with doing its own laundry.
We value sustainability at Alsco Uniforms Uniforms and strive to make our model ever greener. To note just a few of the traits that makes us a sustainable service, we have achieved a 50% reduction in water use at our facilities over the past 10 years, designed our delivery routes to reduce gasoline emissions, and have started an e-document account management system to help eliminate paper waste through electronic invoices and statements.
4. Quality Service
With what is often years of experience and a significant amount of money invested in setting up machines, building a supply chain, and training employees, business laundry service companies can offer a quality of service that is more or less impossible for a company to achieve doing its own laundry. This is another major benefit of specialization. It isn’t usually feasible for a company that isn’t specifically a laundry business to focus the necessary resources into that area to achieve the level of service a laundry company can achieve.
5. Time Savings
One advantage of using a professional laundry service is that it will almost always save a business time. Laundry is a task that has the potential to take at least several hours, between gathering dirty laundry, putting it into a washing machine, using the necessary supplies, waiting for the wash to complete, and then drying the clothes. While some parts of doing the laundry are passive, some elements of the process definitionally require human labor.
When you pay for a business laundry service, most of that time is now saved. Their machines run, and their workers do most of the labor. This is important not only for the sake of convenience but also because that saved time needs to be accounted for when weighing the cost of doing laundry yourself versus using a professional service.
6. Cost Savings
Because essentially all business needs to be profitable, it may be a surprise to learn that using a professional laundry service can sometimes result in savings. At the very least, it is often less expensive than a company might realize.
First, there’s the time saved, which we discussed above. There’s also the fact that specializing in doing laundry means a laundry company can often do that laundry cheaper than a non-specialist. Even when a service is priced so the company can profit, at least some of those savings can still go to the customer.
How Alsco Uniforms Can Benefit Your Business
Using a professional laundry service can be a major help in simplifying your model, often coming with a variety of benefits many people don’t expect. As long as you choose a reputable, competitively priced business to provide that service, there’s also often few downsides. In many cases, the cost is actually either comparable or even lower to doing the laundry yourself once you factor in things like time, supplies, and maintenance.
At Alsco Uniforms, we have over a century of experience laundering and refreshing all sorts of linens for our clients, ranging from uniforms to hospitality and medical linens. If you’re looking for a professional laundry service, read about how we here at Alsco Uniforms can help. We also encourage you to talk with our team if you have any specific needs or questions. Reach out today!