The Future Is Bright For This Shoeshine Biz

Question: I will graduate next year from Alabama State University with a degree in history. I operate a shoeshine business and I am the best shoe man in the city. I see a future in this business and I want to operate a dry-cleaning service, too. Should I pursue the shoeshine and dry-cleaning business, teach or find another job?

-- Clemente, Montgomery, Ala.

Clemente: It's not my life, Clemente, but you sound more like a hustling entrepreneur than a history teacher to me. "I am the best shoe man in the city" isn't a sentence often heard, and it conveys your pride and engagement with your shoeshine business.

You'd like to add dry-cleaning to your line of business? Dry-cleaning sounds simple -- clean the shirts, keep the orders together, apologize when the buttons come off.

The experience of a few notable businesspeople may be instructive. For instance, Tom Stemberg, the founder of Staples Inc., knew what he was doing when he launched the office-supply superstore. But growth for his Newton, Mass.-based Zoots dry-cleaning franchise, started in 1998, was initially slower and costlier than anticipated. Ken Langone, a co-founder of The Home Depot Inc. in Atlanta, also invested heavily in a dry-cleaning franchise called Micell Technologies Inc., which launched an ambitious chain called Hangers Cleaners. It was sold recently to Cool Clean Technologies Inc. in Burnsville, Minn.

It's not an easy business for a start-up, asserts Jon Meijer, vice president of membership for the International Fabricare Institute, based in Silver Spring, Md., the leading trade group for dry-cleaners. These business owners cope with long hours and slim margins. People don't wear fancy dry-clean-only clothes as much as they did in decades past, which has hurt sales. Moreover, there are about 32,000 dry-cleaners in the U.S., he points out. "There's too much competition," he says. "It's that simple."

For a college student, the capital outlay may be a significant barrier to entry. A start-up dry-cleaner should plan for about $150,000 in initial capital, he says, just for the machinery, not including real estate.

Still, for the best shoe man in town, one who instinctively understands good service, there is more than one way to clean a shirt, especially if you start small. Successful start-up dry-cleaners today must have a niche, says Mr. Meijer. Some pursue, for example, environmentally sound cleaning practices, eschewing the solvent perchloroethelene, used in the "perc" process that gives your dry-cleaned clothes that particular smell. (Mr. Meijer says that efficient new machinery has reduced the use of solvents such as "perc" by about 70% over the past decade.)

You might ask a busy, high-volume dry-cleaning operation if you could set up a shoe-shine kiosk in its space for a while. It would give you a feel for the business. Perhaps you might pay a small rent to the owner, or you might market yourself as an added service and convenience for his or her customers, another way for the owner to build traffic to his business.

You might also consider a pick-up, drop-off business in which you are a middle man, a sort of a concierge. You'd have a storefront in a busy spot, but no big outlay for the expensive cleaning machinery. You'd deliver the dirty clothes to a larger operation, and pick it up for your customers. There are franchises out there that do this (you can find them with a Google search).

For an even smaller initial investment, some dry-cleaning services operate from vans. They roll around town dropping off and picking up the dry-cleaning, and again, someone else does the actual cleaning. Your customers pay for the convenience and your excellent service, which could include an immaculate shoeshine.

What ever you do, with one year to go, it doesn't make sense to pull the plug on your college degree. But why not take a business course or two before graduation, if that's where your interests lie? If you pursue your business, you can still toss off historic anecdotes to your customers. You'll be known as the most erudite shoe man and dry-cleaner in town.

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