LAUREL, Md. — Knowing your numbers is one thing. Knowing what to do with them is another.
In Part 1 of this series, Ricardo Torres, owner of Tiffany Couture Cleaners in Las Vegas, laid out the three KPIs he expects his managers to own: labor percentage, revenue per employee and customer retention. Torres shared that framework, along with how he reads cash flow and times growth, 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.”
For Torres, no number matters more than what’s left over after everything else is paid.
Cash Is King
“Cash is king,” Torres says. He works down his profit and loss statement the same way every month: revenue minus cost of goods sold, professional fees and labor to reach gross profit, which should land around 50 percent, then overhead and debt service to reach free cash flow, the number he says actually matters.
From there, he divides cash reserves by monthly burn to arrive at what he calls his runway.
“How much runway do I have ahead of me?” Torres asks. “You should know this number cold. If you can’t answer that question to yourself in 30 seconds, you’re not running the business. The business is running you.”
Torres says a healthy independent should carry three to six months of operating expenses in reserve before committing to expansion capital. He keeps his in a brokerage account tracking Treasury yields, paying 4.75 percent, that he can still tap within 48 hours.
Torres doesn’t sugarcoat what that number can look like some months.
“It’s like confronting the fact that your baby’s ugly,” Torres says. “Sometimes we just got ugly babies. We still love them. We’re not going to abandon them. The sooner you understand that your business is not that profitable right now, that’s OK. That means the sooner you can get after it.”
Bullish or Bearish
Those same numbers, layered together, tell Torres whether to expand or pull back. Six months or more of expenses saved, rising retention and growing revenue per employee are bullish signals, he says. Runway under three months, declining retention or a green team still making costly mistakes are bearish ones.
“In a bearish environment, you should be protecting cash, fixing retention and stabilizing operations before growth,” Torres says. “In the bullish environment, you should be expanding aggressively: new routes, new locations and marketing investments.”
Torres says he’s in a bullish stretch, which is why he bought an extra van and pulled his most experienced route driver off deliveries to train a replacement. The freed driver, Ben, now prospects full time across the city.
“Ben is going to prospect every day, all around Las Vegas, to capture new clients, whether that’s a chiropractic agency, a doctor’s office or a retail store,” Torres says.
Growing Without New Customers
Once the operation is steady, Torres says his focus shifts to what he calls revenue intelligence: growth that doesn’t depend on new customers.
The first lever is knowing average revenue per piece by category and shifting the mix toward higher-margin items like alterations, leather and household goods. The second is choosing where to spend marketing efforts.
“AI is so sophisticated these days,” Torres says. “You can go into ChatGPT or Claude and say, ‘In my city of Kansas City, I’m trying to target the top five zip codes that have the highest average median income.’” Price elasticity, he says, means affluent customers are less exposed to a downturn than customers in the middle or at the bottom. “You don’t want to race to the bottom. You want to race to the top.”
The third lever is cross-selling into what Torres calls an adjacent vertical. About a year and a half ago, he bought a carpet cleaning company that now feeds clients back and forth with Tiffany Couture Cleaners.
“We went to a client’s house the other day to take gum out of the carpets,” Torres says. “A famous actor had been using Stanley Steamer for quite some time. We did a phenomenal job.” The crew doing the carpets made the pitch on the spot, offering to pick up “any suits” or “any dresses” right then. The homeowner said yes. “He’s a client of ours now doing about $600 a month in revenue,” Torres says.
Torres calls it bleed-over trust. “They trust you coming into their house to deliver garments,” he says. “They’re likely going to trust you to do something else. If you have a captive audience who has given you their time and attention and money, please take care of them. Offer them more. It’s your responsibility.”
The fourth lever is route density. Adding stops to an existing route costs next to nothing compared with opening a new one, so before buying another vehicle, Torres checks whether volume is spread evenly across his drivers.
“We’re looking at zip codes and we’re looking at route management. We’re taking the top 10 percent and we’re distributing,” Torres says.
Come back Thursday for the conclusion of this series, where we’ll examine what Torres calls the owner’s strategic stack, the 90-day plan he gives other owners for stepping back and what changed once he stopped trying to do every job himself. For Part 1 of this series, click HERE.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Dave Davis at [email protected].
