Working towards perfection

2 April 2001



Insisting on perfection could be a frustrating and costly policy but John Cushing shows that cutting corners is not the only route to profitability. Bill Evett reports.


It would seem logical that laundry managers, promoting themselves as cleaning professionals, should work in clean, neat environments. Logical but not prevalent in the textile rental industry. However, cleanliness and order prevail at Fakenham Laundry Services to the point of becoming an industry legend.

Privately-owned this medium-sized laundry located in the small Norfolk market-town of Fakenham, serves a region that includes vast acres of rich farmland and numerous holiday resorts. The bulk of its customer base is garment rental for the food processing industries and flatwork for the hotel and leisure sector.

Different guidelines

Fakenham’s managers work under a different set of guidelines to most. Efficiency and profitability are still the goals but not at the expense of quality, cleanliness or order. The laundry lies slightly back from the main road and if it was not for the signage one could easily pass by the modern glass-fronted building thinking it was a software engineers’ or architects’ office.

Reception doubles as a retail drycleaners and has all the text book requirements, friendly, helpful and knowledgeable staff dressed immaculately in the company’s careerwear greet the visitor. The decor is more first-class lounge than factory. And that is probably the secret of Fakenham’s success. The building, the plant and its staff are all advertisements for the business.

Passion for cleanliness and order starts at the top and permeates down through the entire workforce. Owner and md, John Cushing, is a perfectionist. If you work at Fakenham you have a choice, work to his standards or find something else to do.

A peek inside the cleaners’ cupboard reveals a dozen dust-pans and brushes, all numbered and hung up on the appropriate hooks, pipework throughout the plant is colour-coded, the van drivers clean their vehicles inside and out regularly with recovered rain water, and the boiler house is a gleaming copper-and-brass monument to engineering pride. “We are keen that our customers visit the plant” says John Cushing. “For when they do, they can go anywhere they wish. I know that the standards we have set will be maintained throughout the building.

“It is neither easy nor cheap to run the business this way. Sometimes blood has to be spilt to maintain such standards but then we are able to say to our customers ‘What you see is what you will get’ and the proof of the quality of our service is there for them to see.”

Two sections

The laundry is divided into two sections, high care and low care. The low care section accounts for 25 percent of the throughput. It’s called low care but is, of course, clean, orderly and runs like clockwork.

Located in the low care area is the soiled work reception with 11 sorting stations and a Milnor tunnel washer that discharges washed garments through a barrier wall in to the high care clean room. Staff working in the high care side, dry, sort, fold and pack white food industry garments.

The high care area is entered through a disinfecting changing room. Both staff and visitors in this section are required to wear protective coats and hair covering to maintain the cleanliness of the work. The room itself is pressurised so that no outside dust or lint can enter.

The food processing industries are under pressure to raise health and hygiene standards and are passing on the stringent requirements to their suppliers.

In charge of the factory and its production is Mel Catton. He says that for many years Fakenham has been working to higher hygiene standards than many of the food processors and that when the food companies send in their teams of inspectors and hygiene auditors, which they do with increasing regularity, the laundry never has a problem meeting their recommendations.

The laundry processes nearly 100,000 garments for a five day week.

“Of that the high care section accounts for around 76,000 garments per week.. We do not use a bar coding or electronic tagging system but make up our own labels and manually sort everything that goes in and out on a 24-hour turn around.” explains Mr Catton. “Today, 75 percent of the work is garment rental, the remaining 25 percent is split between flatwork, domestic laundry, dustmats and retail drycleaning.”

Ten hour shifts

Fakenham employs around 250, many working ten hour shifts over a four day week. The first shift starts at 3.30 am, other shifts are staggered throughout the day to suit the flow of work.

“People seem to like the arrangement. They get home early and every so often it gives them a four-day weekend. We have a regime that they either love or hate. People stay with us 20 years or 20 minutes.” says Mel Catton. An unusually large percentage of men work at Fakenham with male workers making up more than 40 percent of the workforce. “We have a lot of input from the shopfloor” explains Mr Catton. “There is a regular monthly meeting with the chargehands who have come up with some useful ideas on running and maintaining the plant. The van drivers have a similar session. We are lucky to have the staff that we employ here. When we need them to pull out a bit extra they never let us down.”

The company has formal training programmes with internal and external training courses available. New starters are put alongside the fastest workers to give them an idea of the standards that are expected.

The Milnor tunnel washer was specially designed for garment washing and when Fakenham’s engineers went to Milnor the company recommended a nine compartment machine but the production engineers thought that would be an uneconomical size with too much water being dumped.

Milnor was asked to take another look at the design and the resulting 14 compartment batch washer was one of the first to be built specifically to process garments.

Spencer washers

Equipment on the low care side includes two 30 year-old Spencer washer-extractors and 25 year old Baker Perkin Jaxon ironers, all running smoothly and gleaming as when they were new. There are long-term plans to extend the plant but the immediate project is to upgrade the low care section to give additional volumes “How much does this drive for perfection cost?” is not a useful question to ask as John Cushing could no more run a cheap and nasty business than Rolls-Royce could produce three-wheel vans.

“The biggest costs are wages and energy. We have been conscious of energy efficient schemes long before they became fashionable and are still on the look out to improve our energy savings” says John Cushing. “You will find no steam leaks, broken lagging or wasted heat anywhere in the plant.

“As for wages, well the minimum wage is going up to £4.10 an hour which may give other employers a problem but it won’t effect us. I believe everyone should earn at least £200 a week.

“I know the UK rental industry is price driven” he says. “It always has been and there really is no answer to it. The major renters are always talking about raising the prices but it never happens. The mergers and acquisitions will continue. Who knows, one day there may be only one or two national laundries left in the business”.

Despite the current market with price cutting and poaching rampant, Fakenham has a high customer retention rate.

“We have lost one or two customers to the big nationals. They have come in and offered 20 percent discounts on our prices. It is difficult to see how they do it.” says John Cushing. “I have seen their operations and they have no magic formula. We could not compete at those prices and still do a satisfactory job. And why 20 percent?, that’s what amazed me. Five percent would have been sufficient to take the contract.”

“My insistence on quality has worked well for us. Our customer retention is better than most and we get recommended for new business by our customers. People may leave us for a cheaper deal but they eventually come back.

Projects on the go

John‘s father, George Cushing bought the laundry in 1944, just a small building that serviced the local American airbase but as the markets changed so did the laundry. John has been in the business for 44 years and says:

“In that time I have bought six neighbouring properties, knocked down four houses and demolished four other business on the site. You know, unless you have at least one major project on the go and perhaps half a dozen smaller ones each year, your business is not going forward. I have completed 36 building projects in all.

“I could have been like some other owners and milked the business for all it was worth, probably have a yacht or two parked in the Med by now, but I am not made like that. I actually enjoy looking around my factory. I have visited other laundries where the manager will be driving a sparkling new Jaguar yet his factory is a dump. I could not do that.”



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