Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Against the tide: Rug man cleans up in tough economy
Drew Lucas is defying the recession with a business that helps customers maintain something they already have. His strategy? Market aggressively.
Photos by Kyle Green The Roanoke Times
Mark Casey, an employee with Certified Carpet Cleaners, gets to work in a house in Southwest Roanoke on Thursday morning. Certified Carpet Cleaners, owned by Drew Lucas, has seen 20 percent more business this year since January, and cleaners nationwide are experiencing similar trends. As sales of new carpeting have dropped off, demand for cleaning has been on the upswing.
Michael Yopp, an employee with Certified Carpet Cleaners, uses a camera to inspect the air return duct of an HVAC unit at a house in Southwest Roanoke on Thursday morning.
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To scare up business, one Roanoke County carpet cleaner uses the screaming pig approach.
"You're walking through the jungles, and there's a herd of pigs," said Drew Lucas, the owner of Certified Carpet Cleaners, describing a scene from a wildlife TV show. "If you run from them or stand still, they'll attack you.
"But if you run straight at them screaming loud, they'll scatter and run."
That's his advertising strategy -- to run screaming toward his customers, though in this case he hopes they'll call for help rather than run for cover. For the first time in his 19 years of business, he's blasted about 105,000 households in the Roanoke Valley with direct-mail fliers eight times since September 2008, at a cost of $1,400.
The tactic has worked. Certified has seen 20 percent more business this year since January, he said.
Despite the national recession, business has been so strong that the company moved to a larger office this month, bought cleaning equipment and a washer and dryer, is hiring two full-time employees, added two vans to the fleet and outfitted employees in new uniforms.
Lucas' business surge isn't a fluke. Carpet cleaners across the country are seeing 25 percent to 30 percent more business than usual in the past two years, according to Larry Cooper, the executive director of Denver-based Professional Carpet & Upholstery Cleaners Association, which aids cleaners in 10 Western and Midwest region states.
"People are willing to spend some money to maintain what they currently have so it lasts longer," Cooper said. "As the economy has gone into bad times, sales of carpets go down exponentially."
Video: The view from carpet level
Video by Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times
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In fact, carpet sales have fallen 45 percent since late 2006, when the industry first noticed a downturn in residential home investments, said Werner Braun, president of the Carpet and Rug Institute in Dalton, Ga.
Manufacturers like Stainmaster carpet recommend professional cleaning about once a year. Most people hire the service every 18 months to two years, if they clean their carpets at all, Cooper said.
(Carpet cleaners don't suffer when homeowners switch to hardwood floors. People like softness beneath their feet, he said, so they get area rugs, which also need to be cleaned regularly.)
Lucas, 54, who started cleaning carpets 20 years ago after managing a restaurant on North Carolina's Outer Banks, said he predicts business will stay strong through the end of the year.
Earlier this month, Lucas' new office didn't have a desk yet, so he sat on the couch in the entryway that Cloverdale Custom Painting shares with Certified Carpet Cleaners in a Brambleton Avenue building. The phone service people hadn't connected the lines.
The office, with a fresh coat of paint and gleaming hardwood floors (Lucas plans to partially cover them with a "nice-enough" area rug instead of carpeting), runs him $425 more per month than he paid to rent a space about a half mile away.
The investment will allow him to add services and cut monthly expenses, he said.
With the extra office space and a $4,000 spinning vacuum-hose, the firm will add an area rug-cleaning service and clean more dryer ducts.
The $1,100 in-house laundry machines will take the place of the $400 Lucas spent a month cleaning his equipment at the laundromat.
Even with about $24,000 in capital expenses, Lucas hasn't dipped into the business' savings accounts, he said.
"I'm in a good niche because we've done good work," he said. "If we did just average work and were dependent on new people, I would be in trouble. Or if I was new, this was my first two or three years, I'd be in trouble."
Lucas and his five employees work about six to eight jobs a week, including cleaning upholstery, carpets, rugs and ductwork, and repairing carpets for homeowners and rental companies.
Sixty percent of his business comes from repeat customers, he said. Lucas started his carpet-cleaning business as a "garage guy," running the service out of his garage, then expanded it into Discount Carpet Cleaners in 1991. He changed the name to Certified Carpet Cleaners 10 years ago when he decided to change his business strategy to offer higher quality service rather than lower prices. The business has certification from the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration, an internationally recognized standards agency.
"If you provide a quality service at a fair price, people will put a value on keeping their home or business clean," said Dan Taylor, past president of the Mid-South Professional Cleaners Association and owner of Kidd's Cleaning and Restoration in Lynchburg and Roanoke.
"I thought the recession was going to be more of a downer for people in our industry, but what it actually did was weed out the people who are not properly licensed, insured and don't put customer service at a premium."
