Our priority as we have grown has remained identifying and training more team members to meet the attention to detail embodied by our most experienced team members.  And, we still also do commit to a second day (third if overlapping with a Sunday) return, or faster if special arrangements have been made in advance.

Over the next few weeks, there may be some returns that exceed our normal second day return time.

Business customers will be returned on time.  And, if you have a special need or priority to assure that your clothes are returned on the second day, please communicate with us via phone or email (at the number and email on the bottom of our website’s home page) or chat on our website when available.  

If you let us know, we will make a note in your profile for our team and assure that you are prioritized over customers who have more flexibility.

This will be temporary.  It is in part the effect of choosing to prioritize quality by removing some people from our team that we felt might not reliably live up to our standards.  We have also been seeking new people to meet increased demand for our service.  But, we have been attempting to be selective in who we allow to join our team.  

Thank you for your patience with us now.  It will allow us to better serve you over time in the long run.

Sincerely,

The Marin Wash and Fold Team

As most of our customers may have concluded by watching the news, most all of our costs have been increasing significantly.  Among other things, this includes fuel, parts for maintaining machines and vans, soap, plastic bags and hangers, and even CPI increases on facility rent.  We also remain committed to paying our team members better than they may earn in alternative lines of work so they will feel they are paid well for providing our customers with the service we provide.  Our service is intended to enable people to trade their time doing the chore of laundry for quality free time or productive time generating additional revenue or income.

We will be raising our by-request customer price from $2.24 to $2.35 per pound (slightly less than a five percent increase).  Some of our per item charges may also be increased slightly.

However, our weekly and regularly scheduled biweekly customer price will remain the same at $1.99 per pound.

Some of our earliest customers have continued through the years set at our initial prices.  We are grateful to those who helped us launch this business over three years ago.  Our infrequent, by-request, early customers will be shifted to our current pricing.  We are deciding whether to increase our weekly customers who have been with us regularly for nearly three years to our $1.99 price as we review the list of those customers, how long they have been with us, and the amount of laundry they send in each week.

Thank you for your understanding, and for your continued referrals.  As we believe all our customers know, a $20 credit is placed on the account of any existing customer who refers a new recurring customer.

Sincerely,

The Marin Wash and Fold Team

Probably through the end of the year, we ask our customers with Saturday pickups or deliveries to be prepared for some adjustments to our normal schedule and routine.

This is the result of our attempt to maintain loyalty to one of our driving team members as he recovers from a shoulder injury (which was not work related, by the way).  This particular driving team member was the second person to join our driving team when we launched about three years ago.  Many customers have paid him high compliments.  And, we believe that we can best serve our customers and community in the long-term by being the type of business that looks out for its people to the best of our ability.  That comes with some flexibility and adaptability on the part of our team as a whole.  And, we ask our Saturday customers to be patient and work with us in this objective.

Only two of our five driving team members are available on the weekends.  With  one on leave for the aforementioned recovery from his shoulder injury, we only have one person available on Saturdays.  (And we believe seeking and training someone on a temporary basis will not lead to the type of commitment to our customers and customer service we expect from our team members). 

As a result, for the next several months, some pickups and deliveries on Saturdays may spill over into the late evening, potentially even after the 9:00 p.m. hour, when we have historically deferred stops until the next day to avoid disturbing customers.  (We have generally always had stops competed by 9:00 p.m., with the exception of when unusual challenges arise, such as being short staffed, dealing with a flat tire, or dealing with unusual traffic patterns.)

If necessary or appropriate for safety, over the next several months, some Saturday pickups or drop offs may be carried over into Sunday. 

Importantly, we will not call you to update you if things are running late based on the specific and short term situation we are explaining in this notification, as we believe calling at this hour is not appropriate.  Those who have specified text or email notifications will receive those upon pickup or drop off, though.

Based on the flow we have seen, we anticipate that our Somoma County Saturday customers will continue to notice this temporary change more than our Marin County Saturday customers.

Once our team member’s shoulder has recovered or if we find someone on a temporary basis who we believe will adhere to our high standards, things will go back to normal.

If anyone accustomed to a Saturday pickup or return has flexibility, please feel free to adjust your regular schedule to a Tuesday pickup.  You can do this by logging into your account, emailing us at [email protected], or calling our Customer Satisfaction Team Members by dialing (415) 858-9274 and pressing extension two.  (If they do not answer while on another call and you leave a voicemail, feel free to just leave your name, address, and the direction to switch the day of the week of your pickup to Tuesday on the voicemail).

For our business customers who have Saturday returns, we know who you and we will be adapting our route to assure you receive your items in time to meet your customers’ needs.

We would also like to update everyone on information in two previous notifications, which you can reference on the notifications page on our website that preceded this message.

We had announced the addition of an additional, supplemental, member of our Customer Satisfaction Team who would be working internally to expedite follow-ups and responses.  That message also explained in detail the reasoning behind how we developed our Customer Satisfaction Team approach, and the processes for training its members.  Unfortunately, the person we hired proved to be unable to commit fully to the time involved.  We are temporarily without someone in that specific, supplemental role.  But, this week we will be advertising again and selecting and training someone as soon as possible.

Also, we had announced a plan to test an evolution of our software that would allow for more refined, dynamic text and email notifications of estimated arrival times.  We can now confirm that the use of this advanced feature will not be useable for our customers who live anywhere south or west of San Rafael for the foreseeable future (based on software nuances that are far beyond the scope of this message).  Meanwhile, we are asking our driving team members to begin using and testing this system for all our other customers. 

Thank you for being a customer, and thank you for your referrals.

Sincerely,
The Marin Wash and Fold Team

To provide the best possible customer support availability and responsiveness in the type of business that does not at our current stage of growth and development have the profit margins to support a full-time, in-house customer support representative, we established from the start and still maintain a customer support partnership. Some of the FAQs on our website address this in more detail.

Our Customer Satisfaction Team Members are available 12 hours per day (6:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.) weekdays and four hours per day on each of Saturday and Sunday. Importantly, they are based in the United States, their team members only work with and serve laundry services businesses like us, they know and are trained in the software we use, and their team members are given guidance on the specifics of how we want to treat and respond to our customers.

Whether they answer the phone when you call, chat with you through our website, or receive either your voicemail or email, they are empowered on the front line to resolve issues. Very importantly, they are the fastest way to get a message to multiple people on our team without delay. Upon receiving a communication from a customer that requires a response from us, they enter information where multiple people on our team can see it. The person who needs to respond can then see it on the next shift when they are working.

We believe this is a far better system for long-term care of our customers than relying on one person.

However, there is room for improvement. Our General Manager and Operations Manager are focused (as they should be) on delivering quality and training more team members to be able to deliver quality.

We are therefore training and adding to our team a new member of our Customer Satisfaction Team. She will be responsible for monitoring all special requests and any issues that arise and coordinating members of our team to get questions answered and issues resolved faster, so we can respond to you faster.

This will not be perfect. There will still be times when she needs to follow up with either you as the customer or with a member of our team who might not be immediately available before we can resolve something to the best of our ability to your hopefully complete satisfaction.

Yet, it will improve our response time and our ability to serve you better.

As a final note, we have one small request to help us serve you better.  Unless a member of our team (including our new internal Customer Satisfaction Team member) asks you to respond to the phone from which they dialed you to get a question answered from you, or unless you are responding to a member of our driving team who just tried to reach you at your location, we ask that you please continue to use our main number (415) 858-9274 extension two or main email [email protected] to reach us with new matters or other follow-ups. Calling or emailing the members of our team whose role is to be there and respond is the most reliable way to help us collectively respond to you as a team faster.

Thank you for being a customer, and thank you for your referrals.

Sincerely,
The Marin Wash and Fold Team

We are pleased to let you know that we are rolling out an improvement In our system for notifications of estimated arrival times. In the long run, this will help give more precise information to our customers. In the interim as our driving team members get accustomed to using it, it may create some unexpected notifications or not give perfectly accurate times. We will be phasing this in and testing it over the next six weeks.

Currently, we manually estimate the distance between stops and base the notifications on that estimate. As things evolve during the day, there is no way to send a second, updated estimate.

The enhancement in our software will automatically track progress as our driving team members mark stops as having been completed. When the system estimates that a customer’s stop is likely to be reached within an hour, it will automatically send an updated, estimated time of arrival.

The notifications for when a pickup has been completed, when a delivery has been completed, or when we attempted a pickup and found no laundry left for pickup and no response to our attempts to reach a customer while on site, will all continue to be sent by the system based on when our driving team member manually marks what happened when on site. (Generally our team members do this immediately at each stop, but some of our drivers prefer to make these entries every several stops, generally based on parking or traffic considerations).

Some customers on our Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule may not immediately receive the benefit of this improvement. This is because we currently have two vans operating on these days. The logic the software uses will be able to track the progress of one van, while the stops being made by the second van will continue to have to be estimated manually at the start or the day. We hope a future revision will allow the improvement to work for multiple vehicles concurrently.

Please bear in mind that for pickups we still request that customers leave their laundry out for pickup at 900 a.m. so it is ready and waiting for our driving team members (unless special arrangements have been discussed and made with us, and are noted in your pickup and delivery instructions). Part of how we provide free pickup and delivery and still pay our driving team members well so we can attract good team members is to maximize the efficiency of our routes. If customers overly rely on the precision of a precise arrival time to place their laundry out, it increases the chance of laundry not being outside and ready. Even if our drivers call upon arrival when laundry is not ready, it is possible that a customer may not hear the phone or the doorbell, leading to a missed pickup fee.

Thank you for being a customer and for your referrals.
Sincerely,

The Marin Wash and Fold Team

This message serves to further update our customers on recent events within our team resulting from the concurrent absence of two of our shift supervisors (one on sudden and extended leave due to a heart issue and another on a pre-planned short term absence).

More importantly, this message explains the steps we are taking to be able to better serve our customers as we grow. It follows from the May 1st and May 23rd emails and notifications.

First, though, I want to firmly and unequivocally apologize to any customer who has had less than a positive experience with us during the past month … either In not meeting our high standards or in not meeting reasonable basic expectations (that either you would have for us or that I have for us).

Related to this, customers may have noticed that invoices literally have not been processed for about three weeks (the pre-authorization estimates would have appeared on cards, but should have faded off within a few days). We will be processing these this week to catch up. If there was an issue for anything more substantive than the late returns we proactively disclosed May 1st would be happening and we do not zero out or apply a credit to the invoice, please contact our customer satisfaction team and they will apply a credit to your account or alert me of the request for a refund for the charge. The charge will have been the result of an error in communication, not an intention on my part.

Please allow me to digress into something personal for a moment. On April 27th, during my first colonoscopy at age 52 and the father of three children ages nearly ten to just turning 13, I learned I had seven polyps removed from my colon. After a nearly two week wait, I fortunately learned that none were cancerous. However, one was what they call high grade dysplasia, meaning it was the type that may have been close to becoming cancer.

I share this for two reasons. First, this is my opportunity to advise our large and growing customer base to be proactive in your medical checkups to catch things early. Second, while the buck stops with my wife and I as the business owners, we have been managing our personal and family issues concurrent with our staffing issues.

We started Marin Wash and Fold approaching three years ago, based on the mission statement for our community stated at the bottom of our website’s home page, with a commitment to differentiating ourselves from any who might follow us based on our attention to detail. We immediately brought in a handful of people (including a General Manager) who had been handling peoples’ laundry with trust, care, and attention to detail for what was then over a decade.

We knew that the process of hiring and training new people to deliver the same standardized and consistent, yet concurrently personalized to each customer, quality at a larger scale was going to be critical. Achieving this outcome while assuring that we kept people distant from each other and protecting both our customers and our most experienced people from new hires we were trying to train, who may have come into our organization without the same level of proactive Covid protection methods we had established, added a new element to our hiring and training process.

I am actually a globally recognized expert in another industry for having created a process considered by numerous experts around the world as a gold standard process in that field that helps people brand new to doing something deliver the same result as the most experienced people in that industry. And, my recent experience filming a new training video with the shift supervisor responsible within our team for training new people confirmed the depth of training we have been giving our new people.

We have established and implemented a range of processes, procedures, checklists, redundancies, technical tools, technology supplements, and backup processes that enable us to fulfill on our mission, vision, and commitment to both attention to detail and personalized service.

Where I have fallen short and failed is this: assuring that the people we hired would diligently follow the processes and procedures.

The sudden transition to giving our production team members (our term for the team members who do your laundry) the opportunity to, and responsibility of, operating unsupervised revealed a problem with a subset of our team members. I had not seem this potential problem under the surface. A number of people failed to show up for their regularly scheduled shifts, worsening our delayed returns and making it harder for our driving team members to fulfill on their role. A number of others made mistakes that are unacceptable to me as the representative of the best interest of our customers.

Further complicating things, a person who was a business owner herself who agreed to come in and fill in in the absence of trained shift supervisors substantially deviated from our procedures and attempted to accelerate our pace of operations.

Most all of our customers may not have noticed anything other than the delayed returns warned about in the May 1st email and a lag in response from our customer satisfaction team members resulting from higher call volume. A number of customers will have noticed that their laundry may not have been packaged and presented in the way it customarily is. But, a very small handful of customers have noticed either a deviation from their preferences or some wholly unacceptable mishaps and mix ups … despite all our internal procedures and safeguards.

Here is what is happening to solve for this so it does not reoccur.

First, effective today, I will be terminating the employment of six of our fourteen production team members. The aforementioned temporary person who substantially deviated from our processes is one of those six.

Second, effective as of a few days ago, all operations by our newer staff have been limited to operating when a trained shift supervisor is present. Fortunately, our shift supervisor who handles training has returned, though our other shift supervisor with the heart issue is still on leave.

Third, we have been hiring a set of new people to replace the people whose employment is being terminated. Their training shifts begin tomorrow, under the supervision of the shift supervisor responsible for training. Expectations regarding attendance and performance will be being laid out clearly, in ways we had not done with previous new hires.

Fourth, we are specifically focusing our search for new team members on people we believe have the capacity to be shift supervisors. We are using a tool called the Predictive Index designed and commonly used over its 60 year history to help identify and screen for people who are well suited to certain positions (in this case, managing a team). I am hopeful that one of the people starting to train tomorrow will be able to become a new shift supervisor.

Fifth, with the awareness that our customer service partner has also been adding new team members, their head of customer service and I have been finalizing a five page process document designed to be read by the new people they hire. This is designed so we can achieve consistency in our responsiveness, regardless of whether the person who answers the phone or responds to the voicemail, email, text, or chat when our customers contact us is brand new or more established.

Sixth, we have temporarily suspended our digital marketing to slow the flow of new customers while we train the new team members. This is challenging, because expanding our revenue to cover the new costs we have been adding is important. But, it is in the best interest of our existing customers, until we have expanded the number of our shift supervisors.

If you are wondering, we are making either being vaccinated for Covid or immediately getting vaccinated a requirement for employment with us.

I would suspect that most other laundry services around the country would not provide this level of transparency and detail to their customers. However, we want everyone to know that we are committed to addressing and solving what comes up so we can serve our customers better in the future.

I thank you for both your patience with us during this transition and your eventual continued referrals to new customers after we navigate through this period.

Very sincerely yours,

Michael Gralnick
Co-Owner
Marin Wash and Fold

For any customer who did not see or receive the May 1st email copied below, it follows below for a frame of reference to this email.

Our shift leader who was hospitalized with the irregular heart beat remains on extended leave and our other shift leader who had the pre-planned absence is mostly back, but will still be missing some shifts. We ask that you both continue to let us know if you do not have the flexibility to allow for a delayed return beyond our normal second day return and assure that you adjust what you send us to assure that you leave enough reserve clothing at home in case of a delayed return. (For our business customers, we know who you are, and you do not need to let us know).

I am personally working with heavy attention to recruiting, hiring, expanding, and training more staff, including additional management. This will help both solve the delays and allow us to train more shift leaders. I am aware that some customers who are accustomed to being able to reach and get a response from me personally have not been able to do so, leaving your communications having to go through our Customer Satisfaction Team Members. They transfer information back and forth with our General Manager and Drivers (with more of a time lag than when I am accessible) before being able to respond. This has been a result of my focus on addressing the sudden staffing shortage.

I am preparing us to come out of this temporary period with several results to be able to serve our customers even better in the future: (1) a three shift rotation with more redundancy in shift leadership so we never again find ourselves at the effect of a sudden absence of shift leaders, (2) a doubling of our overall laundry staff team members to assure that we have at least three full shifts of team members able to work according to all our detailed processes and procedures (such that, if need be, we can stop operation of one entire shift and still get laundry returned according to our procedures and committed timelines), and, (3) an additional operations manager available to both come in off his or her regular work schedule to assure proper operations and be able to respond directly to customers. We have also been producing enhanced training videos so new team members start their first shift with a much higher baseline knowledge. This will allow them to absorb the information and training in their supervised training shifts faster, better, and in more depth.

The additional and important result of all of these changes will also allow us to terminate the employment of anyone who does not live up to our quality standards immediately without second chances (though we will continue to work closely to support the development of new team members who we feel have the potential to grow and develop).

Secondarily, we just purchased a third large van. This second Ford Transit Extended length van, like the other, supports our drivers with more organized and higher capacity storage than the full size Nissan NV2500 we have. This helps avoid potential partial deliveries from something inadvertently not being loaded or not being clearly visible upon delivery.

I promise you that any negative experience you have had during this temporary period in our growth will soon be a past memory and we will return to meeting and exceeding expectations. We hope that once things return to normal (probably within a month at the outside, depending on how quickly we find the right additional people), you will continue to refer other customers to us. Our higher level of staffing will then require a larger customer base so we can provide new staff with the amount of work they need to stay with us.

Very sincerely yours,

Michael Gralnick

Co-Owner
Marin Wash and Fold

May, 2021 Potential Delays This Month in Returns and Communicating Special Requirements So We Can Prioritize Customers Who Need Fester Return (A Temporary Situation)

We commit to a second day return (excluding Sundays) and can often accommodate a next day return upon request. Temporarily, we anticipate not being able to meet this for some of our customers during the month of May. Hopefully, this will only last for the first two weeks of May, not all of May.

One of our shift managers is on extended leave while doctors help diagnose the cause of a recently discovered irregular heartbeat. One of our other shift managers works a reduced schedule this month while operating her own seasonal business (a flower shop heading into Mother’s Day month).

If you absolutely need something back on the regular return day, please let us know in advance by calling our customer satisfaction team members at (415) 858-9274 (extension two) or emailing them at [email protected]. We will prioritize your service so the customers effected are the customers with more flexibility.

For our business customers, we know who you are and we will keep your orders on schedule so we can help you better serve your own customers.

Our commitment is first and foremost to attention to detail and quality. We ask for your patience in working with us and communicating specific timing needs in advance while we adjust to this temporary period of being short staffed. We are also interviewing and will be working to train additional shift managers, both as mew hires and from within our team, and ultimately adding another shift to increase our capacity.

Please rest assured that everyone washing and folding your laundry has been trained and knows our processes and procedures. While the shift leads that organize the efficiency or our process are on a reduced schedule, we feel it is best to slow the process down.

Sincerely,

The Marin Wash and Fold Team