Five numbers that tell you what business you're in.
Every issue comes back to a handful of measures. Here is what each one is, what ours came out to, and the few minutes of work that gets you yours.
Ours, and how to get yours
Our figures are from one store, on a well, with an unmetered sewer, in a town of five thousand. Don't copy them. Measure your own.
Your real rate per pound. Our sign says $2.35. We collected $1.97. To get yours: take one month of laundry revenue from your POS and divide it by the laundry pounds for the same month. The gap between that and your posted rate is money you thought you were making.
Pounds per labor hour. Folded pounds divided by paid production hours. Ours reaches 35 by running four orders at once, not by folding faster. To get yours: pounds out the door for a week, divided by the hours on the clock for the people who washed and folded them.
Handling time per order. Everything that isn't folding: intake, tagging, sorting, loading, moving, packaging, the call when it's ready. We had it at 5 minutes. A stopwatch said 45. To get yours: time one order from the counter to the customer and take the folding out.
Folding time per pound. About a minute a pound, and we've confirmed it three different ways. It's the most stable number we have. To get yours: start a timer when the first piece hits the fold table and stop it when the last one is packed, then divide by the pounds.
What an hour of work actually earns. What the order pays, minus soap, water and power, divided by the labor hours it took. One order run by itself earned us $34 an hour. Our model had said $300. To get yours: put the two numbers above into the order you just timed.
How to use them
Your real rate per pound. It takes two numbers you already have and about two minutes, and it usually changes how you look at everything else.
Because the average store doesn't exist, and your water, your wages and your town are not ours. A method you can repeat beats a number you can't check.
Then you've found where to look. Ours were worse than we thought too — that's how most of these issues got written.
Send us your number.
Measure one of these, reply to any issue with it, and we'll run it with you.