Though he’s quite busy every day at his
Washington DC-based cleaning plant, Sterling Cleaners and Textile Services, Eugene “Skip” Jacobsen doesn’t
keep track of how many hours he works. After all, he doesn’t
think that’s important. What is important to him is that he
focuses his attention on keeping the company’s doors open for
business.
The Jacobsen family has accomplished that goal for
almost 75 years now, ever since Skip’s great-grandfather Charles
Jacobsen founded the plant.
“The laundry was originally a bottling
company,” Skip explained. “As prohibition came in, one
thing lead to another and in 1930 they formed Sterling Laundry. Why
Sterling? In those days there was a lot of anti-semitism. We’re
not Jewish, but at the same time, with a name like Jacobsen, we were
thought of as being Jewish, so they named it Sterling.”
Charles Jacobsen and his brother also owned a
hotel, but it floundered while the cleaning business survived.
“My grandfather and his brother
weren’t very adept at business,” Skip said. “They
were kind of ne’er-do-wells. I never knew my grandfather. He died
before I was born.”
Sterling eventually changed hands and generations
when Charles Jacobsen turned the company over to his sons, Charles and
Eugene “Randy”, Jr. (Skip’s father).
Randy initially took over as president in 1946
after he had finished his duties as a pilot for the United States
Marine Corps.
Skip’s father proved to be an active and
successful leader for the company, which, at the time, was fast
becoming a sinking ship.
“In those days, it was easy to save a
sinking ship because there were 54 laundries in the area. That was
before they made home washers,” Skip recalled. “Now,
there’s only two of them here.”
One way Randy Jacobsen jump- started the company
was to diversify.
“In the 1960s — when wash and wear
came in — my dad branched out to uniform rental,” Skip
recalled. “Uniform rental helped us a lot until 1990 when we sold
our uniform rental to Cintas.”
Another big change that occurred under the watch
of Skip’s father was the move to its current location, a facility
on Blair Rd. that houses close to 70,000 square feet.
In addition to fulfilling his duties as
Sterling’s president, Randy also proved to be active in the
industry. He was the first president of the International Fabricare
Institute following its 1972 merger of the National Institute of Dry
Cleaning and the American Institute of Laundering.
The year 1972 holds another significance for the
Jacobsen family: that is the year Skip started working at the plant as
a production manager.
Skip had previously logged some time on the clock
for the family business in the late 1950s.
“When I was 12 years old, I started working
during the summers at the plant,” Skip said. “It was OK.
You learned things. I helped pull washers — we had
washer-extractors. I worked in the wash room. I did a little bit of
everything.”
Following high school, Skip attended Washington
and Lee University where he received a B.S. degree in Commerce. After
that, however, his course steered into another direction.
“I joined the Navy and went into OCS in
August of 1968,” Skip said. “My first assignment was as a
navigator. Then I became the first division officer and then the first
lieutenant of the U.S.S. Nashville. I served on the west coast, the
east coast. I went to the Mediterranean. I made a Pacific cruise, but I
didn’t see any danger.”
In addition to gaining his sea legs, Skip’s
ship service gave him some handy experience that came into play when he
climbed aboard Sterling in December of 1972.
“When you’re the first lieutenant of a
ship, you’re in charge of the entire deck department,” Skip
explained. “I had three chiefs and two officers under me and
about 70 men.”
By the 1980s, Skip had worked his way up to be
Sterling’s president, a position he used to try to grow the
family business even more.
“My dad was into satisfying, not
maximizing,” Skip said. “But, I went ahead and bought a
cleaner who did a bunch of hotel valet jobs. From there, we built up
our valet business and wholesale laundry business.”
Nowadays, Sterling employs over 160 workers in its
three divisions. The hotel valet business has five pickup and delivery
routes that provide timely service for the guests and employees of more
than two dozen hotels.
The retail laundry and drycleaning division adds
another 12 routes with over 2,750 customers to the mix. The routes
cover a 50-mile radius.
The two divisions combine for sales that add up to
more than $1 million annually.
However, it’s Sterling’s
wholesale/hospital division that commands 60 percent of its business.
Five pickup and delivery routes visit 34 customers — hospitals,
hotels and nursing homes — that all require 24-hour
turnaround service.
In order to accomplish that feat, Sterling
constantly updates its equipment. Major pieces of machinery that help
them get the job done include a 13 module Lavatec Continuous Batch Wash
units that processes about 3,600 pieces per hour, five 450-lb.
high-efficiency gas dryers and four Super Sylon ironers.
They also offer a full service pressing department
and other related processing and finishing equipment.
Despite all of the impressive hardware on the
premises, Skip insists that the scale of his company doesn’t make
it any more complicated to manage on a daily basis.
“It’s like anything else, you get used
to it,” he said. “You make sure the managers manage. We
have controls where we try to keep the labor in certain percentages.
You just try to follow your budget. You know when your busy seasons are
and when your slow seasons are. Really, we’re just trying to get
our niche in the area. DC is a very difficult place to do business
because of the high taxes and the high costs associated with
it.”
Some high costs that Sterling has to contend with
are unpaid bills, a common problem that many cleaners face. For
Sterling, however, the scale of the problem can be a little bigger.
Outstanding debts from customers oftentimes total over a half-million
dollars, which means that a lot of Skip’s time is spent out of
the office and in the field.
“Right now, I’ve got to get
going,” he noted. “I’ve got to go out and try to
collect money and keep the cash flow at what it should be. At any given
time, we’ve got about $600,000 that’s owed to us.
I’ve got to make sure it gets collected.
“The problem is, most of my costs are energy
and labor. If people don’t get paid, they get excited — and
they get paid every two weeks. Plus, we’ve got to pay our utility
bills monthly and if I don’t get the money from the accounts, it
hurts because I’m a laundry, not a bank.”
Sometimes, it takes some drastic measures to keep
the company from sinking.
“I hold their work,” he said.
“They get upset, but I say, ‘Wait a second. You owe me
$50,000 and if you pay me, I’ll deliver.’ I have no problem
doing that. If they quit, it doesn’t matter. What good are they
if they don’t pay? It’s not something I like doing, but I
have to get paid.”
Aside from figuring out ways to get customers to
pay what they owe, Skip doesn’t believe there’s any great
secret on how to be a successful cleaner.
“You got to take care of customers. You got
to hire the right people,” he said. “It takes hard work.
You just have to do the best you can. You have to cut costs, raise
prices — all the normal things you have to do.”
One of the “normal” things that
cleaners have to do, according to Skip, is produce a fine quality
product.
“We do a good job,” he said. “We
wouldn’t be as big as we are if we did a bad job.”
The company stands out by striving hard to live up
to its memorable marketing slogan: “Not just clean, but Sterling
clean.”
Of course, dealing with so many large accounts,
the company doesn’t necessarily have to rely on its marketing
prowess. Skip prefers to cultivate strong relationships with customers
that instill a strong sense of loyalty.
“With the valet business and the commercial
hotel business, it’s usually a one-on-one thing,” he said.
“You can’t very well advertise to a 2,000-room hotel.
It’s one-on-one with the manager. Fortunately, I’ve been
fairly successful at getting accounts. Plus, our retail business
depends upon route men who go door to door to get customers.”
Outside of work, Skip has enjoyed a few strong
personal relationships, as well. He and his wife, Lisa, have been
married since 1978.
The couple have three children. Their daughter,
Christie, is 25 and lives in Columbus, Ohio. They also have two sons,
Kirk, 22, who studied law enforcement in South Carolina, and Kevin, a
sophomore at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Currently, none of Skip’s children have any
designs on taking Sterling into the fourth generation of the family,
but that doesn’t concern him much since he plans to steer on the
same course for a while.
“I’m going to keep going,” he
said, adding: “Who knows what’s going to happen?”
