Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hi, guys. Welcome to Laundry Talks, where we talk about all things textile rental. I'm your host, Eric Smith. Thanks for listening to today's episode. But before we start, I want to ask a favor from every one of you. Subscribe to this podcast. That way you won't miss out on great discussions. And don't stop there, because every single episode has something that you might be able to pick up and choose from to learn something new or help to make your life just a little bit of easier. So subscribe today. Okay, today's topic I'm calling future proofing your laundry business. And I want to know how the textile rental industry is evolving and what's happening out on the front lines. What are today's modern, modern laundry's doing to get to the top and to stay there? I don't know all the answers. So to help me today, I've brought in someone special.
My guest today isn't an operator in the industry, and he's not a supplier either. Today's guest is Joe Ricci, president and CEO of TRSA, the textile rental services association. TRSA represents companies that supply, launder, and maintain linens, uniforms, and other textile rental products and services. And in many ways, they are the collective voice of our industry, particularly for regulatory and legislative policy. TRSA does a lot of other things too, and I hope to find out more. Now, I pride myself on traveling to a lot of operations all over the country, but there's no way that I've been to as many places as Joe. Every week I see him pop up somewhere visiting TRSA operator or supplier members and companies, and it's that experience and knowledge that I want to tap into today. So, Joe, thanks for joining me, and welcome to laundry Talks.
This is the podcast for the textile rental operator community to learn new things, share ideas, and drive conversations. Welcome to Laundry Talks with your host, Eric Smith. This episode is brought to you by Alliance Systems.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: Thanks, Eric. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. And you're right, it is.
I often see you guys on the road under the Alliant systems team is out there all the time. So kudos to you guys for getting out there. That's how you learn about the business, right? Getting out and talking to customers and prospects, everybody else.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: That's true now. And I've known you for a long time, and I see you often, although most of the most of the time, it's at an event, maybe a cocktail reception. And I feel like a lot of times we only get to talk for a few minutes. So today is a real treat we've got you all to ourselves and get to have some uninterrupted time to learn a little bit more about you and TRSA. So why don't we start out with tell us something that no one in the industry knows about Joe Ricci.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: Sure. So I think one of the things, and kind of goes back to my background a little bit, but I'm probably the only person out there that has been in 500 plus laundries, fired a grenade launcher and picked out 19 catabra heads out of a refrigerator for oral surgery. So there's nobody that can match that. I mean, that's, that's a very unique experience that you can bring.
[00:03:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Now, if we have the three things, one of those stood out to me that I've got to have a follow up question about. Why don't we talk about the cadaver heads? Can you give some perspective there, too?
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Sure. So before coming to TRSA, I worked at an association management company. So I ran three associations. One was for National association of security Companies, which was security guard companies, which was kind of how I ended up here. One was the national structured settlement trade association. So another unique fact is I'm a certified structured settlement professional, but don't ask me to do a structured settlement where I don't have any idea what to do. But they made me get certified as part of the job. And the other group I ran was the association of Oral and Maxial Facial Surgeons. So oral maxillofacial surgeons, a lot of facial reconstruction, accelerated orthodontia, those types of things. So traveled to New Orleans, probably the first month I was with the organization, we had a vet down there where we were demonstrating or expediated surgery for arthrode. And as part of my job, which I didn't know anything about, they led me into the LSU medical facility to a freezer, and they said, well, we need 19 cadaver heads to do surgery tomorrow, and you have to pick out the cadavers, and they have to have enough teeth where we can do the maxcal facial surgeries. If there are many teeth or they have an odd structure, then we can't use them. So I spent 2 hours opening plastic bags of cadaver heads to see what kind of teeth they have. And what I learned quickly was that how you end up donated to medical science is that you're probably indigent, homeless, or don't have much money, so they don't have a lot of teeth. So that was a big issue.
And the other thing I learned was that, you know, regardless of what you hear about people going peacefully, none of these people look like they went peacefully. So it was a real learning curve from that kind of experience as well. But, you know, the next day we were working on Cadaver Eyes. I never thought I'd have to do that, but it was certainly, certainly interesting.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: See, I've got, I have a list of questions in front of me, and I had no idea we were going to cover this topic today.
Thank you. That's awesome. All right. So, like a lot of laundry, people have kind of this industry in their blood. You have association management in your blood and. But you want to talk a little bit about how you found your way to kind of your current role at TRSA?
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Sure. So as I mentioned before here, I worked in association management company, and prior to that, I spent 15 years in the private security industry, both in the association world as well as from the association world. I got recruited into, actually a for profit company. So I worked at a group called Vance International, which was here in really a global security company where my boss was the former director of the secret service. So I worked for them for about five years until they sold, which was kind of the plan they brought me in to give them more of a national brand, an international brand. And my background is really communications. I've done communications since my first job out of, out of college, and then from there I started my own business. So I actually spent five years running my own marketing communications business in the early two thousands when, when everybody wanted to be in security, all post 911, everybody wanted to own a security company or be in security. And I'd spent enough years in that business where I knew the ins and outs of it too much like now that I know the laundry business and so help people get into the business and work and communicate within that, within that industry. So really fascinating. I learned about what our guys have to do to make payroll and all the things that go into running a business and sleepless nights and doing accounting at 04:00 in the morning and all the things that go into running a business. I think that's helped me here at TRSA. So when I go visit members, I kind of can identify with them a little bit on running their family owned operated business or even the large international companies, what it takes to get the job done and the kind of issues they have with employees and customers and technology and all the things that impact their business. So with a really good learning curve for me.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: Awesome. Hey, you mentioned a little bit what you did straight out of college. Want to give a shout out to your alma mater here.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm a Virginia tech hokie.
Proud to say we have three hokies on staff here. Jason Risley, who does our podcast and our electronic media, and Meredith Ellington, who does a lot of our database stuff. But also is the, if you go on our website, she's the person that will live chat with you on the website. So we've got a couple of on the staff, and my whole family is Virginia Tech Hokies. My wife went to Virginia Tech, graduated a year after me. We didn't, we didn't meet till after college, but we've been married 31 years, and then both my kids played lacrosse at Virginia Tech and graduated in 2021. So. Got a lot of Virginia tech in our blood, so.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: Cool. Okay. So, and I think by my count, what you've, you've been in this role for 14 years starting in 2010, a.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: Little bit over 14 years.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: So 14 years. You've got to, you've, you have to. We're going to talk a little bit more about TRSA, some of the things you guys are doing, but you've obviously had enough time to craft a 62nd elevator pitch for TRSA. You know, why are people listening to this podcast? Why should they, why should they consider being a TRSA member?
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Sure. Sure. So TRSA represents companies that supply laundry maintained linens and uniforms for businesses, manufacturers, services, government healthcare, hospitality, and many other industries. And that's really, we do that through certification, information sharing, and primarily by advocating for fair, balanced regulation that helps to expand, promote and protect the linen uniform and facility services industry. So, as you mentioned, Eric, we're the voice of the industry. We do all the things, whether it's here at the federal level or at the state level, to do things that we can to expand the market and protect the market. Mostly lately, we've been really as proactive as we can be. But that's what we do. That's what differentiates us from other organizations that do some similar type things like networking and have their own issues that they deal with. But advocacy is really where we lead the way. And then certification is really the number two thing.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Perfect. All right. So you mentioned you've been in 500 laundries. Tell me a little bit about, on a year in, year out basis, what's your travel schedule like? How many members are you seeing each year, and what are you looking for when you go on those visits?
[00:09:45] Speaker B: Sure. There's a couple questions there. I'll start with. When I started 2010, one of the things the board said was we want you to commit to being a week, a month on the road to visit members, and that's really the only way to learn about the business. Go to somebody's facility, walk into their plant, let them walk you around the facility, let them show you what they do, how they do, what they do.
Everybody in the industry should be and is proud of how they do things. I mean, I can't tell you how many plants I walked into, and they're doing it the best way. They do all the best practices, and that's wonderful. So I spent a week, a month for the first, really, three or four years going out and visiting plants. We do them in chunks. We did a lot of driving, took the family with me on a couple of them. Kevin and I do a lot of road time.
Tom and I have done some road time together. So I would say after that it came down a little bit, but pretty much I'm probably on the road about 50%. And that's a combination of the events that we have. So we do anywhere from ten to 13 different events a year, whether they're big educational events or regional programs, or we're taking people to a Yankees game here in August. We're excited about that. So it could be regional events, it could be our legislative, state legislative conferences. So I traveled all those events. We're also very engaged with the European Textile Services association, which is kind of an umbrella group in Europe. And we work with what's called the national associations group. So there's 14 different associations that are engaged in that. And they're very similar, TRCA. They're smaller because they're country specific. In Europe, the us market is equal, you know, about equal to the whole european market. And we share ideas, we collaborate on research. We do.
We visit laundries. So not only have I visited, you know, 500 plus laundries, but 100 plus vendor suppliers. And that's not just in the US, that's also in Europe. And when you're in Europe, you look for lots of different things.
Certainly they were leaders before in automation, which I think a lot of. We're looking to that now, and primarily in automation because it was expensive to employ people there.
We've caught up with that. If you look at the cost of labor here now and compensation and all the benefits that go were pretty close to what they pay in Europe. So automation now is being strong. Is a strong people looking to automation now here in the United States and in North America, Canada, Mexico. And I think now, I was just in Europe, I just did a presentation for ETSA, which was really interesting presentation I couldn't do here. What they asked me was to do 30 minutes on what the presidential election and the impact on the industry would be. So they've certainly got their position on things. We went in very, you know, very middle of the road, just kind of mapped out. Here's where we are administratively, here's the things that we, that are hurting could hurt the industry, whether they're environmental regulations or things around organized labor. Here's the things that we need to deal with globally, which, you know, we have to deal with. And it was pretty interesting and very, very well welcomed. And so we do a lot of that. You know, it's a lot of out there talking to industry. I'm going to speak to NAlsCo management training program. I go, came to the alliance systems program last year and a little cameo appearance. So I like to get out and meet people and be at these events. And I think it's really, really important.
The other thing you asked me just to carry on, Eric. Sorry, is you asked about what do I look for, right. So I've asked that question. A lot of people that I tour with. So when I go on these plant tours, sometimes I'm touring around with somebody who's been in the industry 35, 40 years, and I'll go with that. Right. And ask them what they're looking for. And oftentimes we're looking for one small thing. I remember I was talking to somebody, we're doing a plant tour, and he's talking to the young lady that was doing the plastic wrap on some towels. And he started to talk to her and I said, hey, you've been doing this a long time. What did you ask her? He said, well, I was asking her about the machine and how the plastic wrap was, and she was honest with me where she goes. If I go on my plant, sometimes people aren't going to be honest with me and they're not going to tell me that, hey, I've got issue. It depends on the wrap. One day we get really good plastic wrap and the next day it's not so good.
[00:13:53] Speaker A: That's a great point.
I've been on a lot of plant tours also, and sometimes some people really embrace them and embrace those tours. They're looking for things like that also. Sometimes you hear people that say, oh, you've seen one plant, two, or you've seen it all. That's not been my experience because I think you can always find that one small thing, whether it's just how someone's doing a process or maybe how a piece of equipment is situated.
Small things can make a huge difference in this industry.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: Sure. And it's so varied. When you go to these plants, it's the footprint of the plant makes a big issue, whether it's an older plant or a brand new plant that somebody built, whether they purchased it, an acquisition. And so it's not the normal facility that that organization runs.
Depends on your customer mix. You know, are you doing healthcare? Are you doing non acute? Are you doing uniforms? Are you doing some mixture? So all those things impact it tremendously. And so you see that when you're on the road. The other thing I have asked oftentimes is with CEO's, I said, I realize if you're acquiring a company, you're looking at all the business pieces, right? You're looking at financials and sales force and what their prospects are and their contracts, all those things. But if you just walk into a plant, what are you looking for? They're like, well, first thing we look for is cleanliness. If the plants not clean, they're probably not doing a good job. And so I see that all the time I've been in plants that wouldn't quite eefed off the floor, but you'd be close. And I've been in plants where it felt unsafe.
And so you pick that up really quickly. Did they recognize the GM when you walk around the floor, or whoever's giving you the tour? The owner operator, the GM, does he know people? Do they have safety equipment set up? Do they have the right safety signage up? Are they communicating with their employees? Are they using multiple suppliers, particularly post pandemic, to make sure they have supply chain sustainability, things like that? And really, what are they doing to innovate both technology wise, as you and I have talked about a little bit, but also, what are they doing to communicate and educate their employees? And I've seen some pretty interesting ways that companies have leveraged communications within their plant to improve safety, improve retention, really make sure the employees understand that they're providing an essential service.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So I appreciate all that input. We're going to turn to a few more detailed questions.
So as you make these visits or talk to people at industry events, I'm interested in some of the most pressing concerns that operators and industry leaders have.
What keeps them up at night today?
[00:16:35] Speaker B: Sure. I mean, one of the things during the pandemic we did, and we'll talk about some of these other things later, but when we went out and visited people, they were using a lot of temporary labor. That doesn't seem to be the case. Now. We've heard most people are fully employed and not using temporary labor. When we talk about labor, the big thing we hear about is really production and maintenance. So production people, because there's a lot of turnover, they become increasingly expensive. And maintenance people, you just can't find. I mean, we're not. It's not an industry where, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, you were looking for somebody to grease an oil machinery. Now they've got to understand technology, they've got to understand preventive maintenance. They've got a lot more that they have to grapple with. And you see a lot of, we'll say, experienced maintenance engineers out there now that won't be in the industry ten years from now. So where's the next. Where's the next level of people going to? And that's also driving prices. So we do a compensation report.
When we look past, over the last few years, the only salaries that really have jumped any significant level have been production and maintenance, and they're up anywhere from 20% to 30%. In some cases, the engineers are the second or even the most highly compensated person on the team, but production is way up, too. And a lot of that's minimum wage requirements and changes in minimum wage, but also competition. Right? So when you're diary production people, you've got a lot more competition now, not only with, you know, your amazons and folks that are running warehouses in production, but, you know, people can work from home and you, you know, laundry needs somebody to show up at 435 o'clock in the morning sorting linen and, you know, sometimes working double shifts or into the night. So it's. You really got to be cognizant of that.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, I did. You know, we talked about that. I was recently at the TRSA production regional summit in Milwaukee, and that the discussion of the engineers, the inability to find qualified, you know, maintenance and engineering staff was a huge topic at that meeting. So we did some roundtables and it kind of, we were going to go on to multiple topics, but we kind of got stuck on that one topic for the entire time.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: I think we all face that. I mean, I'm sure even we do at TSA, trying to find the right people and retain them. I think I was actually right in my column for the July issue, the magazine's on play retention, recruitment. I mean, where do you find the people? How do you keep them? What do you need to do to tap and stay at your job and continue to perform temporary labor is such a slippery slope. Right? I mean, every day they're coming in, they don't know what they're doing. There's no commitment to the company. And a lot of our guys were sometimes 30, 40, 50% temporary labor, and that's just can't run a business that way.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: Yeah, and you mentioned a little bit ago you were talking about some of the problems operators were having during COVID And no secret, it was a challenging time for many in our industry for operators and suppliers. And towards the end of the pandemic, TRSA, or guys, your reopening tour, I think, is what it was called, where you were traveling the country in a bus or a van, and you visited a lot of TRSA member operator plants. And there's a lot of good social media associated with that. And that from a kind of an outsider, I remember that being a real hopeful time and a real hopeful message. So I'm just kind of curious about whose idea was that. Tell me more about that initiative. Kind of an impact it had for TRSA and some members.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: Sure. I mean, for those of us who travel quite frequently, sitting around the house for a year can be quite daunting.
Coming into the office, I was lucky enough to not work about a half mile from the office, so I was only not in the office about a week. So I was walking into work and it was just Tom and I pretty much in the office for probably six, eight months until people started to come back.
But we were sitting around the office. We were like, you know, we need to get out there and find out what's going on in the field. We were doing things like business poll surveys every month to kind of gauge how much people were down and was it bouncing back and what their issues were. We were working a lot on getting people recognized as an essential service. We're doing a lot of work.
We also noticed that our web traffic quadrupled during the process because people were looking for sources of information, curated content that, hey, this is good information. But we didn't know really what was going on. So I spent. I did call all of our members, all of our suppliers, and all of our operators during the pandemic, actually twice. And we talked to everybody, but I really wanted to get out and see them. That's what we do, is go out and see people and be in the field. So we ended up with about four or five different legs of our reopening tour, and we kind of did it as the country reopened. So our first tour was no shock into the south so we spent a lot of time in the south and driving from Washington, DC, all the way through to, through to Texas and back. And it was really interesting to see how companies were doing. You know, we were locked down in Washington, DC, and by the time we got to Richmond, nobody was wearing a mask. And by the time we got to the south, we were three deep at the bar in Nashville. So we see the difference in grand o how people were responding to Covid, and the markets were the same. We were in DC. Nobody was working. Alsco's got two plants here. One was shut down, one was running about 20%. By time we got down to Nashville, they were running nearly full tilt. Their big issue was they had nobody to turn over rooms. So they were lucky that they were. They were full the weekends and empty during the week. So we take them from Sunday to Wednesday to turn. Turn all the rooms over and get the laundry out and get it processed and get it back.
So it was really fascinating to see how different, different parts of the country work. And then we did the Midwest. So we drove from here to Chicago, through Iowa and Kansas and Missouri and Ohio and Pittsburgh. We did a California leg and a Florida leg. We ended up doing somewhere around 10,000 miles on the road, driving.
Probably visited somewhere like 110 to 120 facilities. And these were different visits. So oftentimes we'll visit corporate headquarters, we'll go to Mason, Ohio, and visit cintas, or we'll go to Massachusetts and visit unifirst, or you'll go to unitex corporate headquarters. But this was just stopping at every plant that was on as many plants as we could on the road and pulling over and spending, you know, half hour, 20 minutes, an hour, even. We visited a depot in unifirce depot in. In Tennessee. And that was just. It was just interesting to go talk to people that were every. Living it every day, you know, and how it impacted them every day and learning more about how it impacted them, not only, you know, professionally, but personally, and how they were responding to it, how their families were doing. And then we posted a lot of that. And I think one of the wonderful things we heard along the way and that we then highlighted and recorded was personal stories, not so much about the pandemic, but about the opportunities our industry offers to people. So we met a homeless woman in Cleveland who was now a production manager because she was given an opportunity to work. Formerly incarcerated individual that is now on the senior management team in Indianapolis. Folks that came into our industry with no skills, a young lady who immigrated here didn't speak English, taught herself English in 60 days. Three years later, she was a general manager of a plant. So people that pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and were trodging through the pandemic with an industry that's very resilient and just the opportunities, and I thought that was the most of all the other things we learned that was the most important thing, is that the opportunities that we offer people in this industry, no skill, low skill, that want to work hard, show up every day, do the work that's necessary to be part of a team, they can succeed in this industry. I think that's rare for any industry.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that's wonderful. So kudos to you. And say that didn't go unnoticed. It was great to see. I appreciated it. So let's talk a little bit more technology.
So there's a lot of innovation going on today in the industry from production, monitoring, new software systems. I'm even hearing a lot of information about the future of robotics in our industry.
Probably the number one thing outside of hearing about people needing maintenance and engineering is the prevalence of RFID in 2023 and 2024 in the industry.
Don't know if you have any specific thoughts, if you're seeing that yourself or anything as you visit operators, anything technological that you're seeing in the plants that's made you say, wow, sure, I'll start.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: Kind of in the beginning. So when I started, I would go and visit members and companies, and oddly enough, the big innovators in software, for whatever reason, were chemical companies. So, I mean, Dober now sfindle and other chemical companies were providing software, although that was really interesting, never really seen that before. And obviously it was for stickiness and all of the kinds of things, but they're tied to the machines and the monitoring. So there was some relevance. There had a lot of people were showing off all the data they were tracking, whether they were met, you know, employee metrics or I. But nobody could tell me what they were doing with it. I mean, it was like, hey, we're looking at all the data. I can get my phone, and I can tell you how the tunnel washer is doing. And they would show me the numbers on their phone, and I would say, what do you guys do with that? And nobody had a real good answer. And I think that was kind of an eye opener for me. And I think a big change I've seen is that we have a lot more technology, but our members now know how to better use technology. So you mentioned RFID. When I started it was relatively new. Not everybody was using it. There were some early adopters. Now you've got like, you've got companies that are significant adopters of RFID, and they're using it for a myriad of things, right? It's inventory tracking, it's production tracking, it's reporting out to customers. There's just so many things you can do with the RFID. We're seeing it now on handhelds when they're using it out in the field to measure what's in a restaurant or in a healthcare facility, to invoice for inventory that they can't rotate because it's sitting on shelves. It's a business tool, it's an educational tool. They're getting stuff back in their ability to track material. So we've seen a tremendous rise in RFID. One of the most interesting stories. I was just at service uniform down in San Antonio. I'm an alliance systems customer, and we were talking about RFID and their logo. They have a little man that they use as their logo, which is an old RFID chip, the old circular. Could I get this wrong? I think it's IHF. So the UHF, maybe that's wrong, but I'm not a technology guy, but they. That was their logo and they talked about that. It's part of their service and they're being. Their transparency with customers. And they said, well, for them, real win for that was utilization of their inventory. So that's the real win for our industry, right? I mean, we use recyclers, that's what we do. And they were able to use double the inventory. They were able to put back into the field that came in from either canceled contracts or employee changes, employee moves. So that reduced the amount of textiles they had to buy. They were better to use their inventory, which was always smarter, better, sustainable, much more sustainable. It was really eye opening to hear the numbers and what they're getting out of using RFID. And there's many, many other instances of RFID really improving the industry and lots of other technology as well. It's not just RFID route telemetrics that helps optimize routes, helping driver safety. We're seeing a big push towards cameras and both dash cams and cameras that are facing within the truck itself to improve safety and to minimize liability issues from a risk management standpoint. So I think technology will continue to be a big factor. In Europe, they call it the digitalization of the industry.
And I think it's coming, it's going to continue to come. And I think it's all about use of the information. And I think that's where we've made a lot of advancements over the last decade, is how people are using that information to make business decisions in real time. Business decisions about customer service and improvement and productivity.
[00:28:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything you said. And I think that it's fair to point out that this industry is probably lack in some technological areas has lagged behind from RFID specifically. I mean, some of those challenges have to do with the, what the product is subjected to on the wash side. But that technology has caught up. And one of the things that really drove that point home have a customer that's fully embraced RFID. They have, I think 98% of their product is RFID running through their plant right now. And they told me a while back, they said, you know, what really hit home for them was they went to educate themselves. They were visiting other companies, other industries, and they were visiting a produce distributor, which is pretty low tech. This is moving produce from a to b. And they saw that there was a case of iceberg lettuce, which I think only has like twelve heads of lettuce. And each case of iceberg lettuce was being tracked with RF chip. And that's a disposable product, probably worth about two or $3. And we've got hundreds of times the value in products in our industry sitting, sitting in hotels, sitting in hospitals with no one knows where, they can't put their hands on it if they had to.
That technology is really caught up and people are starting to take advantage of it at this point.
[00:30:30] Speaker B: Yeah. There was a Murray Simpson who used to run the textile Services association of the UK.
I used to go hear him speak. He came here, I went to go hear him speak. And he used to say, we're the only industry that sends out millions of dollars worth of textiles every day and hope that most of it comes back. And having RFID helps improve the opportunity for it to come back. I think you're right about technology. We had what was telling Eric earlier today, before we started, that we don't get a lot of visitors at TRSA. We'd love to have people come to the office. So if you're a TRSA member and you're out there, you want to come visit us, please do. But Tingu, was it David Tingue and his senior management team today. And we're sitting talking with them and one of the questions they asked us was, you know, hey, there's a company out there made, made super cylons made the old super cylons, they went out of business 50 years ago. He said, what do you think their market share is? Because they track. Because of what they do, they track all the ironers in the country. And, you know, kind of wonder. And I had a little insight, not because I knew the facts, but I did a little math on who has ironers and who doesn't. And I said, I bet it's 40%. And he said, well, it's 41%. So 41% of the ironers out there were manufactured more than 50 years ago. So when you say we're slow to adapt to new technologies, I think that's one piece of it, right? That's one piece of, hey, we've done other things, but, hey, we like the way this works. And it kind of works the same way it's always worked, and it continues to operate. And so a company that's been out of business for 50 years, and it was leading market share in iron, you know, in North America, that we track. So that was just fascinating.
[00:32:04] Speaker A: I think that we saw a super Cylon at a plant we toured in Milwaukee last year.
[00:32:09] Speaker B: It was an Oscar plant. I guarantee you that it was.
[00:32:11] Speaker A: And it was. They were using it to fold, to roll continuous roll tiles, which is, you don't see everywhere any longer. But that was. That was a very, very interesting to see, and one of the smoothest operating pieces of equipment in that facility.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: So that just. It fascinates. I mean. I mean, how would you like a business that's marked that you've been out of business for 50 years, but your market's here 40%.
That tells you a little bit, right?
[00:32:38] Speaker A: Yeah, that's incredible. Well, speaking of plant tours, I do. I told you earlier, I love going on plant tours. And, you know, it's no secret. Most of the plant tours, they focus. You know, people are focused on the large equipment, the rail systems, wash aisles and tunnels and automated shuttles, incredible finishing equipment, sort systems. But a lot of times I end up falling kind of back because I'm interested in some, you know, system that you can't see, like, what's happening with all the, like all the RFID data, or how does. How does a garment sort system know, you know, to kick out some garments to a mending rail to be repaired, and the other entire group of suppliers that are handling that data, we're one of them. All the route accounting providers in our industry are the same. And someone had recently asked me on a tour that they would love to see when we go on TRSA tours or other industry tours that they'd love to have an information systems tour stop station along the way. I'm going to go ahead and pitch that idea to you right now as input.
[00:33:45] Speaker B: I think it's a great idea. Once in a while we'll have spindle will show up for a plant tour. But that's really not what we're talking about here. We're talking about kind of the, everything from routes to managing what's going on in the plan and all the things that are kind of the back end of the business as well. And just doesn't, it doesn't seem as appealing to people, I guess, because it's not a process, but I think it's maybe one of the more important things in the facilities just to learn more about how they're doing that. So I will take that as a challenge. Eric, we'll try to figure out how we do that when we look at these plants that we're going to.
We'll look at, see how we can integrate some of those things into those tours. Like you said, it is interesting. I always get some out of a planned tour.
When I talk with our international colleagues, we're all basically using the same textiles and the same machinery and washing the same stuff on it globally. It's how we do it and the technology we use and how we apply that technology and manage people. And I think a lot of the software and things that we're seeing now can improve that and differentiate it and give you a competitive advantage. And I think we really need to continue to look at that and maybe make a bigger deal.
[00:34:50] Speaker A: Cool. All right, let me shift gears real quick. I want to talk a little bit about using online tools for your customers and your customers customers. I know the TRSA website. That's now how I register for any of my events, TRSA that I go to. It wasn't always that way. I do remember a time where I'd fill out a form and fax it in, but, you know, for the younger generation, they just expect you to be able to do everything online. You know, this is the Uber Eats generation.
I've done some informal studies with that generation being my two. My two daughters are 17 and 19, so that's where I get all of my information from. But I, you know, from your perspective, how significant do you think the shift is towards the use of online portals, self service tools in improving service delivery for customers of textile rental operators?
[00:35:47] Speaker B: Yeah, it's evolution, right? I mean, I hate to say I started almost 40 years ago working, and I didn't have a computer. I had a site provider on my desk. So it was a long time ago, and fax machines were, you know, amazing abfax machine. But right now, I think what our members are realizing is that you're not competing with the next linen uniform and facility services company. You're competing with what Amazon's doing, what other people are doing about real time information at your fingertips, whether it's on your phone or desktop or laptop, whatever you're working on. They want to know where the order is, when it's coming up. They want to make change orders. They want to order extra materials. They want to see all the things that you're doing. They want transparency in their billing and invoicing. They expect immediate response. Matt, that's the big thing when you see with texting and technology now, is that the old days, I would come back to my office and I'd have a little pink slip that said, somebody called me. Then I'd try to call them, and maybe within two weeks, we talked to each other.
Then you had voicemail, which helped you have the message through. Then you had email, but email. People would respond to email. It might be a day or two that become instantaneously, and now it's texting. I mean, I can't tell. I get a lot more texts every day that are work related than I used to. And people expect you to immediately respond, and that's not easy to do because you're trying to do other things as well. But it's that direct interaction, that complete transparency, its ability to work when they want to get it done. So if I want to check my order for, you know, napkins at midnight when I'm awake, I want to be able to do that and change my order and have you guys deliver it properly in the morning. So with all the technology that's taking place, we're seeing big advancement is certainly on the routes of people with handhelds who can track orders, track inventory, send back change orders, make sure things get done as seamlessly as possible and as error free as possible. Nothing's more expensive than not fulfilling an order and having to send another truck out or a car out than to go drop off ten more napkins or 100 more napkins because you didn't include them in the order, even though they changed the order in the middle or they left a message, whatever it might be. So you're not competing with other companies, you're competing with other technologies and how people are using technology, and that's going to continue to evolve very rapidly. So if you're not responding to Twitter messages with your customer service or text messages or online messaging or have people to pick up the phone or at least some kind of chat bot that answers basic questions, then you're going to be behind very, very quickly.
[00:38:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
All right, going to take a little left turn here. Talk a little bit more about TRSA.
Tell me about a few of the initiatives that TRSA currently is prioritizing to support the industry's growth and sustainability.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Sure. I think that the big key things, as we talked about, was advocacy. So the big items that we're talking about now are not going to be a shock to anybody listening to this up there in the industry. PFAs, big issue. How do we handle PFAs and our water discharge?
What does that mean to the industry?
It's really evident in the way we look at it. It's an issue that we struggle with because it's a federal issue, but it's being pushed down to the state and local municipality. So I think there's 60,000 water authorities and every water authority can handle this differently because of the way the rules are coming down. Every state can handle it differently. So very difficult to track. So it's water discharge could be microplastics or microfibers in the water, air discharge. We're looking at micro particles now, which is different. An old air discharge to conclude. So it's kind of environmental things, missions, free vehicles, that we're working those things and make sure that the rules, we don't disagree with the rules, but they got to be, you got to have the time to comply. So we're working with certain states on those types of things. I think our big proactive thing in which we try to really focus as much on being proactive as possible, is we're working on circulating inventory of reusable healthcare, PPE, personal protective equipment. And that's not only at the state level where we have a bill in New York, and we're looking to introduce that bill in other states. It would require, you know, a 50% threshold of a circulating inventory of PPE. So really, arkens back to, during the pandemic, a lot of people saw nurses, doctors. They had pictures of them in plastic bags and dishwashing gloves. It's an image Kevin puts on the back of his screen when we're doing calls.
That was because we were a disposable economy. Everybody was throwing away their PPE, and you couldn't make it fast enough. And it was being made in China. So one of the big factors is, from a supply chain standpoint, you need reusables in this market. People have to be using them for somebody to manufacture them. So you have to have some threshold for that. And ultimately it's more sustainable. We have a lot of lifecycle assessments that say those are more better for the environment. Use it 70 times instead of once. It's just as clean. So not only we're doing that at the state level, we were also working with the Department of Health and human services and the CDC on getting them to recognize more reusable textiles in the space. And particularly, again, healthcare. Reusable healthcare PPE. We're expecting the next couple of weeks, some recommendations that come out of HHS and CDC on that. We expect it to be a positive story. We'll wait and see. Government always surprises you. We think it's going to be a positive story, but we think that's just the tip of the iceberg. We think certainly the things that we do, and we consider ourselves to be the original recycler.
A lot of our businesses started 150 years ago. Walking by a factory, saw a bunch of rags that were being thrown out, and they laundered and brought them back and charged them nickel a piece. Where the original reuse. We're really good at repurposing textiles, where maybe we dye an african black that used to be white color, repair it, put it back out in the field. We recycle. Sometimes we don't directly recycle textiles. I think that's going to be a big play in the future, is how do you take an old textile at end of life and bring it back as something else, breaking it back down to its threads and using something to create more textiles? I think that's going to be a big technology innovation here. I think we're going to see something in the near future on that that will be really an industry changer.
[00:41:56] Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting. In fact, you mentioned David Tingu was at your office. I think he recently had a conversation with him, and he was telling me about some new technology that he had seen along those lines. But I can't recall it exactly, but.
[00:42:13] Speaker B: It'S coming from Europe. I mean, we like to say a lot of these things. Europe is ahead of us on sustainability issues. They've got a carbon tax. They do a lot of things that we don't do. I wouldn't say we agree with everything that goes on over there, but we know that it works its way here, such as things like the EPR. So it's making people responsible for plastics and textiles and what they do with the recycling process and how they get reused.
Those things are going to make their way here. So from Europe, we're seeing two things. One is we're going to see more sustainable innovation along the recycling of textiles, and two, we're going to see some energy, I think some energy efficiency driven through Europe.
I was over there talking to them about the presidential election and war in Ukraine. And honestly, here, the war in Ukraine, really, does it impact us directly? Indirectly, it certainly does more policy than it is anywhere else but in Europe, it's impacting their energy supply. So they're very much working on how do they reduce energy consumption and what they can do to improve on energy consumption and what types of energy they use. And I think that will help us here in North America, as those things make, as those products, whether it's Jensen or canna keys or lavatek or whoever's over there innovating and bringing those things over here, I think you'll see an improvement in energy consumption and water consumption. I think that's really important.
[00:43:33] Speaker A: That's great.
Yeah. So one of the things, based on what you've seen, what is some advice?
You don't see tons of new operators, some high barrier to entry, or there can be. But you do see these smaller companies start up. There's some great success stories where maybe someone was route service rep for a national chain and they start their own business. And so those successes do happen. But what advice would you give to someone who's new to this market? They're trying to grow their business, trying to use technology to do it. Any input from you?
[00:44:11] Speaker B: Sure. I think you're absolutely right. I think we're seeing a lot of opportunity in hospitality because it's a cog nog business. So people don't have to buy the linens and garments, they just have to launder them. So we recently did a study on our market share, the business as a membership, as anybody does. Right. I'm sure you guys do study on your market share. And we found that we're 90% of the revenue or production are members of TRSA, but only about 52% of the. Because there's a lot of small companies out there that could or maybe should be members of TRSA but aren't. And a lot of those companies are small. They do two or three regional hotels. Maybe it's a couple hundred room hotels. They're doing it in kind of a makeshift laundry, maybe even running it out of a coin laundry. And they're getting it done, though, and they're coming to the industry. We've seen a lot of those guys grow. We've seen a couple of dry cleaners that were doing valet services for hotel now have large laundries.
There's market entry is high, but there are ways to start. And then we're also seeing a lot more money coming into our industry and whether it's private equity or other ways that people are getting financing to start these laundries because they see the stability.
Laundry is going to be there. We've heard about self cleaning clothes and all kinds of things that are coming down the road, and maybe some of those things will or some won't. We've been a tremendously resilient industry. I mean, people are worried about the pandemic, but we've been around. We have companies that are 125, 130 years old. They've been through previous pandemics. They've been through several world wars, some cases a civil war. They've been around through economic downturns and the Great Depression. And they were resilient and we bounced back. And part of that is that laundry is going to be there now, maybe different. We don't do divers anymore, but we evolve. We don't do home laundering so much anymore, but we've evolved. I think that bodes well for people who want to invest in this industry. I talk to investment folks all the time about just what a wonderful industry this can be if done right and investing their money in this and coming into this space and growing some new because we do need more companies to come out. I mean, we're glad that we have the big companies and m and A is just part of business. But you always need competition and you need new companies innovating, coming into new ideas. We've got a couple new members just over the last couple of years that have come in premier being one down in Florida that have started a laundry, came from some other business, had some money to invest, saw the beauty of the long term contracts, the cash flow, the things that come along with our business that are financially intriguing. We're not growing 20% a quarter, but consistent growth faster than GDP. We looked at growth over 50 years. We always grow a point or two faster than GDP. So even in down economy we're doing better than a lot of other folks. So people are seeing that, they're coming in, they're investing, and we encourage that. And most of those organizations want to stay in our industry and want to be a piece of and contribute. We've got several board members that companies have run through private equity. They want to see the industry grow. It benefits them. So we see it as a win win moving into the industry.
[00:47:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. And there's always going to be room for all players in this industry. I mean, there's going to be the larger firms. They certainly have their, their benefits, and then there's always a part of the consumer population that wants to work with a local operator. So I think there's enough for everyone here. But to kind of one thing to wrap up, I don't think I asked you this ahead of time, but anything that you're binging right now or that you recommend a good book or a good podcast, something that you're passionate about.
Give me, give me, give me something.
[00:47:56] Speaker B: Sure. So I'm on the elliptical every day for about 45 minutes. I bidge everything. So I'm watching Veep now. I'm coming to the last season of Veep, which has been theoretical, and it's a Washington, DC based kind of program. And unfortunately, as a DC native, very real in many ways. So I've enjoyed that.
[00:48:16] Speaker A: All right, well, pleasure has been all mine. Thanks for joining and look forward to seeing you on the road soon.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: Thanks, Eric. And really, I want to thank not only you, but your whole team and the whole lion systems team for all the support they give TRSA, whether it's showing up, which is, you know, 50% of the battle, showing up every day. Right? So you show up and you contribute both with your intellect and with your pocketbook. And we really do appreciate that as an organization. And I think as an industry, it shows your support in the industry. We really devalue that. So thank you.
[00:48:46] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. Cool. All right, have a good one. Hey, guys, thanks for joining us for today's podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. We've got a great resource that you can fill out if you're interested in learning how to streamline your routes. We've put together a ROI calculator that just takes a few pieces of information about your operation and will run the numbers and tell you how much money and time you can save every day. Click the link below if you want to go to that webpage. If you're listening, you can go to the alliancesystems.com website, click on Resources, then click on Laundry Talks podcast, and you'll find a blog recap of every podcast and a link to that calculator. Thanks.
