If Don Desrosiers asks you for the shirt
off your back, it’s probably only to make sure that it is
cleaned and finished properly. After all, he has spent most of
the past 23 years thinking about shirts. “I have starch
in my veins,” Don said.
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Now, over two decades later, Don serves
the industry as a workflow engineer, a.k.a. consultant, who
helps clients achieve profitability in their plants, especially
within their shirt department, which, traditionally, has not
been a money-making venture for most cleaners. Don teaches
proven methods that have worked over the years. However, he
still isn’t satisfied. He is continually trying to
improve his ideas. “I’m a mental man,” he
admitted. “I always want to know, what could I have done
better? How did this work out?”
Working for his father for about eleven
years wasn’t always easy. “It wasn’t the
smoothest sailing,” Don pointed out. “My father and
I were never really that close. It’s not that easy to
work for your dad.”
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Suddenly, Don had a challenge to overcome
and that was enough to make him thrive. “Being the Type A
overachiever that I am, I always, always, always needed a
challenge. I got bored very easily,” Don said.
In a short time, the plant’s
workload increased from 6,000 shirts a week to 10,000 shirts a
week. However, fate intervened once again. After only three
months, the new owner died abruptly of a heart attack and his
young step-children took control of the business. “They
were liars, thieves and crooks... terrible, terrible people,”
Don recalled. He left one month later in September of 1989, but
Don’s father held a note on the drycleaning equipment in
case the new owners went out of business.
At that point in his life, Don took a
six-month hiatus from the industry and worked as an independent
truck driver for six months. He had an aggressive route with
long daily drives. “I couldn’t really separate from
the business,” Don said. “All I would think about
was the shirt business. I would think about every issue that
was nauseating the customers... all that kind of stuff.”
Even though he hates the cliche “thinking
outside the box,” Don realized that stepping away from
the industry gave him a new perspective on it. “Plant
owners can’t tell where that box is because they’re
buried in it. For me, I was really out of the box for a long
time and I really thought about it. I started to formulate a
plan,” he recalled.
His business plan for a huge wholesale
shirt plant caught the attention of an old school friend. By
August of 1990, they had one of the biggest shirts-only plants
in the country. Forty employees worked in a 12,000 sq. ft.
workspace processing as many as 22,000 shirts a week during the
business’s peak.
Despite the impressive statistics, the
business still didn’t achieve an acceptable profit
margin. “We had all the problems that anybody could have
in this business,” Don recalled. “I looked at it
and said there’s no way that I could have been dealt such
a bad hand in life that the thing that I’m good at is the
one thing that you can’t make money on. I couldn’t
believe it. The thing I never did was think that’s just
the way it is in this business.”
When his friend informed him in January of
1996 that the plant was shutting down in eight days, Don became
more determined than ever. Though he had no money to lose and
was feeling very desperate, he managed to have a new plant of
his own up and running in only 22 days. He called in a lot of
favors and he even used the drycleaning equipment that had once
operated at Highlander Cleaners. His father’s predictions
that the plant’s new owners would go out of business had
proved true.
One great thing about not having any money
to lose is that you are forced to find creative, inexpensive
ways to solve your problems. That is precisely what Don did
with his new company, Tailwind Shirt Service. He tried new
techniques to improve efficiency and his ideas worked well.
Even though he was doing 1/3 of the shirt volume that his
previous plant achieved, he was accomplishing it with 1/4 of
the number of employees.
Don was aware that his production
strategies were unique, so he spent his spare time in the next
two years writing all of his thoughts and ideas down in book
form. Of course, then he had to decide whether or not he would
share his ideas with others. “It’s in my blood not
to share,” Don noted. “My grandfather was a very
gifted painter and decorator, and there were certain techniques
that he had that he never shared. It was kind of a shame that
things he devised he simply died with. I felt that wasn’t
right.” As a result of his decision, Don finished the
book and began consulting in his spare time.
In the beginning, Don knew he had one
strong factor in his favor: his system really worked and it
could work in a plant no matter its size. The next step was to
set a goal. Not one to settle for low expectations, Don aimed
high. “My goal was to have everybody in the world on this
system I had developed because I knew it was different,”
he said.
Don quickly learned that his goal would be
impossible to achieve as long as he devoted much of his time to
his plant’s operation. It took a lot of time for him to
visit plants one at a time and his services were too expensive
for many cleaners.
To solve the problem, Don began writing a
second book: a do-it-yourself manual that people could purchase
and incorporate Don’s Tailwind Shirt System into their
plants themselves.
In a bold move, Don sold his plant in
March of 1999 so he could devote all of his time to achieving
his goal of putting everybody on his system. It has been a
dramatic change of pace, but one that has agreed with him. “I
have the lifestyle that people dream of,” he said. “I
don’t have to run over to the plant every morning. I have
a home office. All in all, it worked out really well.”
Landing on his feet has always been one of
Don’s trademarks, probably because he has strong business
instincts and isn’t afraid to follow them. “Several
times in my life I found myself without a job, without any
money, without anything. Several times I came out of it, not
just with a job that paid the bills, but a job that paid very
well.”
Making it all possible is his strong
desire to finish what he starts. A perfect example of this
would be when Don flew in a helicopter when he was 12 years
old. “I went up. I went down. It lasted like a minute. I
thought, ‘I have to learn how to do that.’”
Between all of his business ventures,
education pursuits (he has an M.A. in engineering), and
spending time with his family (his daughter Sally is 19 and his
son Gary is 16), Don never had any time left over to take
flying lessons. But, 25 years after he made the promise to
himself, he finally took the plunge.
“I put the lessons on a credit card.
Every week, I would just go to the airport, rent an airplane
and take a lesson. My first solo was on Nov. 25, 1994. Now, I’m
an instrumental pilot, which means I can fly in fog and clouds,”
he said.
Don certainly has made an impact on the
industry. His efforts to revolutionize the shirt industry have
captured a lot of people’s attention, not to mention, he
has helped a lot of cleaners through trade show seminars and
his monthly columns in Korean Cleaners Monthly and National
Clothesline. In fact, the International Fabricare Institute
recognized him recently at the Clean Show 2001 by giving him
its Commitment to Professionalism Award.
Though he certainly appreciates the
recognition, Don really just wants to do his job. “The
reality is that I have a clientele that humbles me,” he
explained. “I have people who have been in the industry
for three generations.” Though he has a considerable
amount of experience of his own, Don enjoys the daily
opportunity to learn more from others.
After all, the secret to his own success
is quite simple. “I made all the mistakes that everybody
else did ten times over,” he laughed. “But the
problem is, I have this compulsion not to repeat the mistakes.
I think that’s the key. I’ve made every mistake
that there is. All the people you have ever met in business, I’ve
made every one of the mistakes they made, but I’m
convinced that I will always learn from my mistakes.”
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