or Joe and Sandy
Waite, the married duo who own and operate Platinum Coast Cleaners, business has rarely been smooth. Working
day in and day out in the humid hotbed of Naples, Florida,
it’s easy to become burned out.
In fact, the couple reached the end of
their rope in 1993, only four years after they started the
business.
“Even though we were making money,
it didn’t seem to be worth the effort,” Joe
recalled. “The frustration levels were just too great. We
tried to sell the business.”
It wasn’t the first time that Joe
struggled just to keep a company afloat. In 1986, he and a
business partner watched their drycleaning plant, Tanglewood
Drapery & Drycleaning, fail after its doors had been
opened for a little over a year. Chalking
it up as a good learning experience, Joe felt lucky to escape
from the venture without too much personal damage.
 | ||
Within three years’ time, he and
Sandy tried to start a drycleaning business again, but,
unfortunately, they soon felt as if they had little control
over the business during its first four years. Selling seemed
like the wisest decision.
The prospect of starting a drycleaning
business wasn’t too terrifying for Sandy even though she
had no previous experience with professionally cleaning
clothes. She possessed good business skills and had always been
well-steeped in the fine art of fabric construction.
Originally from New York, she moved to
Florida at the age of four. Growing up as a fashion lover, she
kept her nimble fingers constantly busy with countless hours of
sewing.
After high school, she studied fibers and
fabrics at community college before she transferred to the
University of Florida in Gainesville.
“When I went to the university,
fabricare wasn’t an option, so I studied advertising with
some classes in management,” Sandy said.
During her collegiate days, Sandy
supplemented her income at Burdines. She worked for the
department store for over five years, and it was while she was
selling kids’ clothes there that she met Joe, who sold
shirts and ties in the store.
“I was trying to find somebody to
play hooky with me,” Joe recalled. “In Gainesville,
the beaches are two to two-and-a-half hours away, so it’s
a road trip for the day to go over and come back. I was looking
for some company.”
After 13 years of marriage, the couple
still play hooky together by escaping periodically to the open
seas with a chartered boat. However, during the first seven
years of Platinum’s existence, the couple would not even
consider taking a vacation. There simply wasn’t any spare
time.
hile Joe grew up in Decatur, Illinois, he
watched his father, Bill, tackle business problems on a daily
business. After first entering the industry at the age of 16,
Bill Waite managed Peacock Cleaners starting in the late 1950s
and eventually bought his own business, Waite’s
Drycleaners, in 1976. Joe worked at the plant during high
school, cleaning equipment and performing repairs, as well as
cleaning and finishing clothes.
When a girl Joe had dated all the way
through high school moved to Gainesville, Joe opted to head
that way, too. The relationship didn’t last, but it did
allow Joe a chance to eventually get a job with Burdines and
meet Sandy.
After Sandy graduated from college in
1987, she left Burdines and was employed as an underwriter for
a State Farm agent over the course of the next two years.
“It was actually a wonderful education because I learned
all about insurance in that position — the selling of
automobile insurance, homeowner’s, health, life —
everything,” she said.
Meanwhile, after his 1986 drycleaning
business project folded, Joe found work for a local cleaner as
a finisher.
“One thing about the business was
that it was run-down and the manager was horrible to
customers,” Joe noted. “From what I knew and what I
heard, they were losing money. I left there and went to work
for the Registry Resort, but every quarter Sandy and I would
call the owner of the cleaners and try to work out some
arrangement to buy the cleaners from him.”
Arrangements kept falling through, so Joe
spent several months managing the drycleaning department of the
Registry, a four-star hotel with close to 500 rooms.
“They employed 800-some people at
the hotel,” he said. “I walked in there and nobody
spoke English. They were either Hispanic or Haitian and that
was very much a shock to me. I enjoyed it nonetheless and
learned a lot.”
Though Joe and Sandy both felt they had a
lot of practical business experience under their belts by that
time, a few lessons remained ahead.
In 1987, the couple finally secured a
$15,000 loan and purchased their cleaners. Without any bosses,
they now had complete freedom... to do more and more work,
anyway. For several months, Joe did most of the cleaning and
finishing and repaired the equipment while Sandy manned the
front counter and tagged garments. At night, she performed all
of the alterations at home while Joe worked on the books.
The business managed to grow, but profits
did not. After four years of barely treading water, the
couple’s spirits plummeted down and a “For
Sale” sign went up. There were no takers, however, which
gave Joe and Sandy time to analyze how the business had gone
wrong. The answer was surprisingly simple.
“Most of the problems were basically
us,” Joe admitted. “We didn’t understand how
to really deal with employees in a constructive way. We started
running it like a business instead of what we thought it should
run like. We started positioning ourselves toward the high end
market and got our prices up. I think it was mostly the
mindset. It was a conscious effort to dedicate ourselves to the
discipline of running a successful business and quit thinking
of it as a burden around our neck.”
The new mindset worked. Success certainly
was worth the wait for the Waites. Both growth and profits have
risen for Platinum, which now has over 50 employees and seven
delivery routes. The company is in the process of moving its
production department into an 11,000 sq. ft. building that
currently hosts the main offices.
Simple ideas seem to work well for Joe and
Sandy, who have used many unique marketing programs over the
years to boost sales.
Living in Florida during the summer can be
quite draining, literally. Fortunately for its customers,
Platinum always keeps a refrigerator stocked with cold water
— all with the company logo on each bottle’s
surface.
“At first, I had to order it out of
state, but the freight costs got out of hand,” Sandy
said. “I researched how to get a hold of the labels
locally. Now, we have a standing order of a pallet, which is 60
cases a month to be delivered. The customers will complain if
we’re out of water, but they don’t care if their
clothes are ready.”
oe estimates the water costs the same as running
two slick ads annually. However, the water sticks out more in
customers’ minds because it is a “lifesaver.”
Another successful giveaway in the same vein is Buzz-Away, an
all-natural mosquito and bug repellent towelette adorned with
the Platinum logo.
“In the summer, there are outdoor
activities, concerts and what-have-you, and we just go to them
and distribute Buzz-Away throughout the whole crowd,” Joe
explained. “They evaporate. You’d think we were
giving away free alcohol. It’s phenomenal.”
Communication plays an integral role in
Platinum, also. After all, employees and customers should
always be on the same page.
“One of our challenges is learning
our clients to our CSRs,” Joe said. “They’re
from different ethnic backgrounds. They’re certainly
different on the financial side. Most of our clients are taken
care of financially, kind of well off. Our CSRs had a hard time
really finding any common ground to talk to them
about.”
To solve the problem, the company
initiates more person-to-person contact with its
“concierges” who are always available to address
problems and answer questions for route customers or customers
who drop off garments at the satellite location.
Additionally, Platinum has cut down on
communication problems in production by hiring bilingual
managers and offering access to English lessons.
“Our employees are all at a
different level of English,” Sandy said. “They are
wanting to learn or are learning, so we have a computer program
in our training room where they can go in on break and work
with it.”
Spare time is a little less of a rare
commodity these days for the Waites, but they keep quite busy
nonetheless. Joe has been on the board of directors for SEFA
for three years and is a member of two management groups:
Florida Biz Builder Group and Chief Executive Boards.
Sandy is the incoming vice president for
the American Businesswoman’s Association’s chapter
in Naples. She is also the secretary for the Florida
Drycleaners Coalition.
Participation in such groups is just
further evidence that the Waites have come a long way since the
days when the business ran them ragged. They are no longer
waiting for problems to fix themselves. The result has been
refreshing. “To me, work is not a four-letter
word,” Joe said. “It’s a three-letter word.
Work’s a lot of fun. We do a lot of neat things. There
are times when we’ve had enough of it. When that happens,
we just take off and do a whole lot of nothing.”
 |
