humble man, Roman Nalley is
currently content to manage a staff of ten employees at Reeder’s
Cleaners in Clarksville, Indiana alongside his father, Douglas. He is
quick to confess his fondness for rambling off tangent during
conversations and he does not consider himself to be an ideal profile
candidate. After all, he is only 26 years old and has not had very much
time to gain experience in the drycleaning industry.
Yet, that is part of what makes him interesting.
At the age of 24 - when many are just starting a career on the heels of
college or still looking for direction in their life - Roman was
elected as president of the Indiana Drycleaners and Launderers
Association. By that time, he had already spent close to two years as a
board member.
“I went to my first [IFI] joint states
meeting where you have the president and executive director of each
state
association,” Roman recalled. “To be
frank, most of the people there are old enough to be my grandfather.
They’ve put in a lifetime of hard working labor into their
business and now it’s successful. I expected be seen as this
young guy who had no idea what he was talking about because he
doesn’t have any gray hair yet. It’s been exactly the
opposite. I think it has been an advantage for me - the fact that I am
young.”
After working for a couple of years as the IDLA
president, Roman believes he understands why he has been received so
openly.
“You can only do something for so long
before you start feeling like it’s a lost cause,” he said.
“The board at Indiana - they’re all great people - but they
are ready for some new blood to take over. They can’t get any.
Nobody is willing to put the time in.”
Apathy is often the biggest enemy of any group or
organization. Roman has tried to combat that particular problem by
making IDLA members feel like they belong to something important.
“I’m sure you get a lot of people who
are members of the association who sit there when it’s time to
write that [membership dues] check,” he explained. “They
send us $400, $600, $800, $1,000 - depending on how big of a plant they
are - and they might look at that check and wonder: ‘Why am I
writing a check to these people? All they do is send me a mailing every
couple of months and I can come to a seminar that I have to pay for and
that’s it. Otherwise, the only time I hear from them is when
it’s time to send them the money’.”
Roman decided that the association could improve
by offering more personalized service.
“I think there are between 10 and 15 members
per person on the board,” he noted. “If you split that up
and find some time in the quarter between each board meeting, you can
give them a call to see how they’re doing. There’s always a
situation where they are not sure of who to call, but that’s what
the association is there for. I’m trying to build a very large
network of people who can transfer ideas and information so if somebody
has a concern, they can call their director who will bring it up at the
next meeting.”
The way Roman sees it, that philosophy is quite
similar to any business owner’s philosophy when it comes to
retaining customers.
“I’ve been trying to keep the
association from dying, not trying to get new members but making the
current ones happy,” he said. “It’s the same thing
with customers. If they don’t feel like they’re getting
anything different from you that they can get from somewhere else, why
are they going to hang around?”
Reeder’s Cleaners - under the leadership of
the Nalley family - has kept customers hanging around for over 40
years.
Roman’s grandfather, Joe, was originally a
route supervisor for Swiss Cleaners, which was located across the river
from Clarksville, Indiana in the west end of Kentucky. After he served
in the military in World War II, he returned home with bigger dreams:
he purchased Reeder’s.
“I’m not exactly sure how he managed
to run a drycleaners after only running the routes, but he figured it
out,” Roman said. “I’ve seen some of the old
promotional materials and stuff from when he was in business, so
although he was good at drycleaning, he was very good at running a
business.”
Years later, Roman’s father took over the
family operation. In fact, he did so the same year Roman was born.
“He had a Master’s degree in physics
and he was working in research and development for Kimball
International,” he recalled. “He decided to come back to
the business.”
Like many third-generation cleaners, Roman spend a
lot of time growing up in the family plant.
“Basically, it was a second home for
us,” he said. “My earliest memories of the plant are
probably my brothers and I running around playing hide-n-seek. A lot of
family dinners were eaten in the back on a Sunday while we were all
there working on something.”
In high school, Roman had an afternoon job in the
production department, working form finishers and performing
inspections on the clothes, among other duties.
However, he soon opted to work at the Texas
Roadhouse restaurant in town where he spent almost five years
altogether. He had no intention of ever returning to the industry.
“I definitely felt that I didn’t want
to be in the business because I saw how hard my dad had to work,”
he said. “He was always there. Vacations didn’t happen like
they should.”
After attending the University of Southeast
Indiana for a couple of semesters, Roman’s priorities changed. He
had wanted to work toward a job in the Drug Enforcement Agency, but
then he wanted a family even more - preferably one who did not have to
worry about whether he was going to come home every night.
So, in 1997, he accepted his father’s offer
to work at the cleaners. Now that he has been married for four years
and has a daughter and two stepsons (one of which is only 11 years
younger than his very mature stepfather), he knows he made the right
choice. He cares a lot about his family, to be sure, but he also cares
an inordinate amount about cleaning - so much so that it sets him apart
from other young cleaners.
One concern Roman has about the industry is that
not enough of its members are concerned. “It seems to me like
lots of cleaners just plain don’t care,” he said. “I
would like to see the industry get to the point where the old saying
‘taken to the cleaners’ doesn’t count. It
doesn’t apply. There are so many cleaners who just don’t
care that it still applies.”
The way Roman sees it, the solution is really very
simple.
“It’s not hard to be a good
drycleaner,” he explained. “That’s the thing that
always gets me whenever these customers come in and say, ‘Can you
fix this? I just left so-and-so’s drycleaners.’ All you
have to do is care. It’s the same thing as just about anything
else in life. It would be so easy for drycleaners to turn out a good
product. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to meet the
customers’ desires.”
For Roman, the way to meet his customers’
desires lies in putting out the best possible product.
“We draw customers from 30 to 40 miles
away,” he said. “I take pride in doing the best job that
can be done. We’re not fast. We’re not cheap. We’re
not the most expensive in town. We charge a reasonable price to do the
best job we can. I tell people it took Jesus three days to rise from
the dead. I am not Jesus. I can’t do it that fast.”
Being active in IDLA has accelerated Roman’s
learning curve on the industry, and even though associations could
stand to get some more “new blood,” he’s confident
that the future of drycleaning is more secure than ever.
“I don’t see a time when there will be
no need for us - even if drycleaning itself became illegal - mainly
because everybody has had the ability to mow their grass for a long
time but the lawn service industry is very well-populated,” he
said. “Our best customers send us things they can easily do at
home; they just don’t want to. We do a good job of it. They like
having the time. That’s why the drycleaner who doesn’t care
shoots himself in the foot.”
When Roman’s term as IDLA president ends, he
will pass the gavel along to a predecessor, but he won’t leave
the board. He’ll stay as long as they’ll have him. After
all, he thinks it isn’t enough for cleaners to simply care about
their work. He thinks association participation is also paramount if
the industry is to ever render the old phrase “taken to the
cleaners” meaningless.
“I would like to see drycleaners belong to
their association,” he noted. “Say you have to pay $600 to
join. What is that - $2 a day? That’s like one leg of a pair of
pants. That’s what it costs to be a member. I spend more a year
on cigarettes than I do on association membership. It’s one of
the best investments cleaners can make.”
As for the future plans of his business, Roman has
several decades to shape it. He hopes to keep things small for now and
slowly expand from there.
“I do have lofty dreams of one time building
an empire, hopefully by the time I retire I’d like to build an
empire,” he said.
On the other hand, such a grand scale might not
suit his close, personal style. “Once I get to the point
I’m doing a thousand pieces a day, I can’t be there all the
time to say this is what needs to be done to this piece,” he
said. “I don’t want to lose what makes us different from
other cleaners.”
