From an Industry Association POV (Part 1)

CHICAGO — Collaboration is often key to success for industrial and institutional laundries on a macro level.

However, for individual companies, it can be a challenge to find ways to work together.

That’s where industry associations come into play.

Associations offer central locations for operators and suppliers to collaborate and lift the industry and their own businesses. And because associations work with multiple entities, they see a broader picture of the industry.

Those viewpoints can provide much-needed information to operators and suppliers.

American Laundry News met with the heads of three key laundry industry associations to discuss concerns, positive movement in the industry, and future goals for associations, their members, and the laundry industry as a whole.

Sarah Brobeck is president and CEO of ALM, the Association for Linen Management in Richmond, Kentucky, which supports professionals working in laundry operations and linen management across healthcare, hospitality, and institutional settings.

Lucy Pettys brings the supplier perspective as executive director of TCATA, the Textile Care Allied Trades Association, based in Indian Trail, North Carolina.

And Joseph Ricci is president and CEO of TRSA in Arlington, Virginia, which promotes the linen, uniform, and facilities services industry.

(You can listen to the complete conversation through our podcast on AmericanLaundryNews.com/podcasts.)

What are you seeing as the most pressing/important/concerning issue in the industry?

BROBECK: It’s staffing. It’s labor. It’s training. It’s retention. All things that are related to people and how you deal with that in the future. Things are looking a lot different. We’ve got a lot of robotics and AI and other advancements in the technology side that you try to weigh out against: does this help decrease the labor issues that we have, or the labor cost?

Also, really doubling down on trying to create ways that people, even on the front line of the laundries, can actually see a career path because that’s what today’s employees want. They really want an employer that’s invested in them. They want to have all of the training and the resources necessary to perform their functions but also see a career path forward.

I think our industry is starting to realize that they’re going to have to really focus on that in order to keep the talent that they have and keep them engaged and keep them growing inside their organization or at least inside the industry. I’m seeing a lot of major focus on that.

We’re trying to look for ways that we can engage our members in different ways than we have before so that we can be a partner with them to not only recruit this talent, but everything through the pipeline, from onboarding all the way up through their career so that we can keep this talent in here and engaged and continue to help them to grow. It’s still a challenge, nonetheless.

RICCI: I can tag on to what Sarah’s talking about. The workforce skills gap is particularly evident with technicians and maintenance and engineers because all this new technology is coming into place. And they’re hard to find. As I like to say, I travel around a lot, and I go to a lot of laundries, and I rarely see young, up-and-coming technicians. I generally see aging technicians. We’re talking a lot about building your bench strength.

We’re an industry that prides itself on the fact that people have been with the company for 20, 30 years. We sit around a room and talk about how long we’ve been there. The problem with that is when you have people who are coming up through your company, they don’t necessarily see those opportunities, especially if you’re a smaller company or an independent operator and you’ve got somebody who’s ambitious and wants to grow but your management team’s not going anywhere. It really becomes an issue, particularly with bench strength and technology.

And to echo what Sarah said, one of the reasons is that I’ve been in this industry and stayed in this industry as long as I have is the career path. We’re an industry that gives people, regardless of their education level, their initial skill sets, their backgrounds, whatever, they can come into this industry sometimes at the lowest levels doing soil sort and work their way up to become a general manager. I’ve seen it myself.

When you can bring individuals like that into an industry where, through hard work, showing up on time, (and) doing what needs to get done on a daily basis, they can move up and build a career and lifestyle and support their families through our industry. I think that’s a tremendous selling point for us as an industry that we probably don’t talk as much about as we should.

PETTYS: Not to beat the same drum, but a lot of the same. That’s exactly why TCATA created a trade scholarship, because we really feel like we need to help the workforce bring in some reliable help, and help them get there to that point where they can work as quickly as they can.

The other thing is uncertainty, just in general. Economic uncertainty, tariff and trade policies, interest rates, labor costs — there are concerns, I think, across the board.

Check back Thursday to read about more industry issues plus positive developments.