CHICAGO — One completed cycle on a washer in your self-service laundry—known as a “turn”—may not seem like much on the surface, but it factors into a calculation that can play a huge role in illustrating your store’s busyness and efficiency.
American Coin-Op invited representatives from vended laundry equipment manufacturers to answer some questions about the performance metric known as turns per day and its place in self-service laundry operations and management.
Q: Could the turns per day metric ever be misleading? For instance, comparing the throughput of small-capacity vs. large-capacity equipment? Or washers vs. dryers?
Mike Hand, vice president of direct distribution, Alliance Laundry Systems (including Huebsch and Speed Queen brands): I don’t personally think you can use turns per day as a metric for throughput. That is based more on time to wash and dry.
Kevin Hietpas, director of sales, Dexter Laundry: Turns/day is a good starting point, but the vend price of machines relative to one another can influence usage, as can the actual location within the store. Information like turns is just one metric that owners can use to keep improving the performance of their business.
Michael Buzzard, senior manager of commercial laundry product development, Whirlpool Corp. (including ADC, Maytag Commercial Laundry and Whirlpool brands): I think this is a really important point. Maximizing turns may not always mean maximizing revenue and, ultimately, your return on investment. Maximizing both revenue and return on investment means choosing the right machine mix to serve your customers’ needs, then pricing it competitively and appropriately against those needs. Especially for washers, it may make sense to experiment with a variety of cycle configurations, cycle options, base cycle pricing, option pricing, to find the optimal solution for your store and ultimately for your customers.
Q: Are there any other comments you’d like to add regarding turns per day?
Gary Gauthier, national sales manager, vended laundries, Pellerin Milnor Corp.: The pulse of a vended laundry is determined by its TPD data. And, like a physician, we need to monitor that vital statistic to determine the health of the patient and to compare it to others under our care.
Hietpas: No metric is perfect, but turns, especially looking at different capacities relative to one another, is a valuable metric to understand. For example, turns can tell you if your store has far too many, or too few, of a certain capacity (of) machine. Oftentimes, in order to lower the initial investment, a location will install too many smaller-capacity machines, and fewer large-capacity machines. This leads to high utilization of the very few large machines, but much lower utilization of the more numerous smaller machines.
Tod Sorensen, vice president of Girbau North America distributor Continental Girbau West: Turns per day is a useful metric and benchmark. Use it for the following:
- Benchmark to analyze vend price,
- Customer machine favorites in size and location,
- Maintenance and replacement,
- Analyze machine usage for wash/dry/fold vs self-service and commercial work, and
- Benchmark for calculating revenue with new or replacement equipment.
Buzzard: I think everybody in the industry knows that equipment mix is skewing larger. It’s possible that your store turns could come down if you mix larger while your revenue and return on investment go up. It’s important for owners not to get too anchored on that metric on its own. Certainly, in combination with pricing, it’s important for determining revenue, and then revenue against the cost of the equipment and other costs in your store is going to determine your return on investment.
That’s really what you’re targeting at the end of the day. You’re not targeting turns, you’re targeting return on investment. It’s important to make sure you consider each element of what drives your ROI so that you’re optimizing correctly to achieve that outcome.
Hand: We are all busy, especially laundromat owners. So, it’s important to do all you can to leverage technology to streamline gathering data such as turns per day. I recommend investing in a card system, app-based payment system or another type of reporting system that can assist in gauging your turns per day. Collecting coins makes this data gathering infinitely more difficult than it needs to be.
Missed earlier parts of this article? You can read them here: Part 1 – Part 2 - Part 3
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Bruce Beggs at [email protected].