LAUREL, Md. — None of the systems Ricardo Torres has built work, he says, if the owner can’t stomach watching someone else do the job differently.
Torres, owner of Tiffany Couture Cleaners in Las Vegas, presented his ideas during a Drycleaning & Laundry Institute (DLI) webinar titled “Position Your Team So You Can Step Out of the Day-to-Day Running of Your Business.” In Part 1 of this series, he laid out the three KPIs he expects his managers to track, and in Part 2, we explored how he reads his own cash flow and the growth levers he leans on once the operation is stable. Today, we’ll conclude this series by examining what Torres says he still owns as the owner, and the 90-day plan he uses to hand the rest away.
The Owner’s Strategic Stack
Even with a strong team in place, Torres says a short list of things should never leave the owner’s desk: strategy and vision, capital allocation, leadership development and market intelligence.
Of the four, he lingers longest on leadership development. “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime,” Torres says. He backs that up with job descriptions and monthly one-on-ones with his management team, he says, “so that way you can curate and cultivate the best form of culture and management that you can get out of them.”
The 90-Day Freedom Challenge
Torres gives other owners a simple, sequenced way to start in 90 days, and it doesn’t require hiring a consultant.
Days 1 through 30 are about installing the dashboard. Assign each of the three KPIs to a named manager, set up a weekly reporting schedule, even if it’s just a shared spreadsheet, and calculate the business’s cash runway. “And then figure out one thing that you’ll stop doing this month,” Torres says. “One thing.”
Days 31 through 60 are about building the habit. “Hold a 30-minute weekly KPI review with your managers,” he says. “It should be structured. Start on time. There should be data associated with it. There’s no firefighting.”
He also has owners pick one revenue-intelligence project, a price-per-piece audit, a zip-code analysis or a cross-selling push, and block five hours a week to work on it. “No negotiation,” he says. “Hands down, I’m doing it for five hours. Hold yourself accountable.”
Days 61 through 90 are about deciding and acting on 60 days of real data. “Make your bullish or bearish call,” Torres says. “If it’s bearish, then get back after some of those initiatives. If it’s bullish, commit to one growth initiative.” He calls the whole arc “Systemize, Stabilize, Scale and Lead.”
Let Them Make Mistakes
When one webinar attendee described struggling to hand tasks off after years of doing everything himself, Torres said the habit only breaks once an owner accepts that mistakes are part of the deal.
“You got to get over that concept and delegate it,” Torres says. “I always say, ‘Do it, delegate it or delete it.’ Just make the decision and move on. Expect that they’re going to make mistakes. If it’s a non-client-facing mistake, easy all day, we can handle that. If it’s a client-facing mistake, use the consequences of that to impress upon that employee how the mistake impacts the client and how we need to change that going forward.”
He points to Jeff Bezos’s three pillars of a successful business: product quality, obsessive customer service and consistency. “If you fail in one of those categories, but you’re good in the other two, clients are going to understand and recognize that,” Torres says. “A company is best improved by going through failures and mistakes and learning from them, as opposed to preserving themselves for so long in this constrained, inefficient manner.”
Buying Back Time
Torres also leans on artificial intelligence to protect the hours he’s clawed back. He records his weekly team meetings on an AI device called Plaud, then feeds the transcript into ChatGPT.
“I’ll say, ‘Give me a synopsis of the phone call with key takeaways for the players who were involved and who require additional action to take,’” Torres says. He turns that synopsis into a one-page starter for the next meeting. “This has saved me so many hours in my week just by capturing the data and then using it for the next available meeting that you have.”
His advice to anyone still doing every job themselves is the same advice that got him here.
“Start recording your calls, whether they’re Zoom, Teams or something like that, and keep yourself more organized,” Torres says. “You’ll buy back your time, and your business will prosper because of it.”
For Part 1 of this series, click HERE. For Part 2, click HERE.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Dave Davis at [email protected].
