The best little laundry in the Midwest

Healthcare Purchasing News, Sept, 2007 by Fred W. Crans

Last year the Sunday paper in the Quad Cities (the Quad cities are Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa and Moline and Rock Island in Illinois) ran a feature article on a remarkable man named Rick Kislia. I met Rick shortly after I moved to the Quad Cities in 2000. He is the manager of Crescent Laundry in Davenport.

Crescent was the laundry that we used at the healthcare system where I worked. His operation runs out of an old chocolate/ candy factory. Located only a few blocks from the Mississippi River in an old warehouse area, it is not the most glamorous of locations. Quite to the contrary--it is one of the more dilapidated sections of town. For years I wanted the system to lease the other half of the old chocolate factory and use it as a distribution center/print shop. It was a brilliant idea--made all the better by the fact that the space was available for a paltry $1.25 per square foot. I would have a ready-made distribution fleet in Rick's trucks, which I could use to deliver supplies at hours when the laundry was closed. If I were to have opened the place, I could have reduced the inventories across the system by over half a million dollars, improved service, freed up over 9,000 square feet of space in acute care settings, and lowered delivered costs.

Unfortunately, neither the concept, nor the site stirred a fire within the loins of the system's CEO, so I never got to work in the same building with Rick. Part of the push back came from staff members who thought the location was too dangerous. Had I waited a few years until the time when the system's chief competitor in the state opened a similar distribution center of its own (at a much higher cost), my plan might have prevailed.

But it didn't. Alas, timing is everything!

Laundries are not places of high visibility for aspiring young executives. They are generally old and hot and smelly. There is seldom anyone of note close by to impress. They do not represent a fast track up the leadership ladder. But Rick is not your average executive. He's a lifer in the laundry business. He knows how things work and how to work things himself. He knows he's in a dirty, cutthroat business where you can have the best price and the best quality and still lose business for no better reason than regional politics.

Still, he hangs in there--overseeing 67 employees and washing 50,000 pounds of hospital linens daily. On any given day his employees might discover false teeth, external pacemakers, money or hidden, sharp, infected needles while they sort through the piles coming in from the 15 hospitals the laundry serves. On any given day the likelihood of receiving praise for a job well done is significantly smaller than the likelihood of taking grief from a customer for a perceived shortcoming in service.

The talent for keeping 67 people employed at one of the most physically challenging jobs you could think of (and cajoling them to come back every day) is quite remarkable. But Rick does it and does it well. He respects the people that work for him. He knows how hard their jobs are, he has done them all himself.

Rick knows more about the laundry business than anyone I have ever met. When I first met him we got into a discussion about productivity. I suggested that perhaps more work could be done if he were to put on a second shift. Within 20 minutes I was presented with information documenting without a miniscule drop of doubt that productivity declined when a second shift was added.

That was enough for me. We never went that direction again in our discussions.

Rick's laundry always did a wonderful job--so wonderful, in fact, that it was hired by one of the affiliates at the largest system in the state to do its laundry. Rick assumed the responsibility with his customary attention to detail and highest regard for customer service. He even gave them better pricing than we got--and we owned the laundry!

When I discovered that our "competition" was getting a better deal than we were, I went berserk. I couldn't believe it. But Rick explained to me the reasons for the pricing--they were bigger than our flagship hospital and could demand a lower cost. He never once showed that he was upset with me, even though I hurled more than a few well-chosen expletives in his general direction.

After the "discussion" we went back to being friends.

Over the years Rick became a trusted resource to me. He is greatly respected in the industry and has held positions of leadership in many professional organizations. He has helped me learn where to look when I need information on benchmarking and cost comparisons among the various options available for getting the wash done.

Shortly after the article appeared in the Sunday Quad City Times, a large system in the Midwest decided to build a centralized laundry. Someone at the system asked me to take a look at the pro forma that the system's supply chain leaders had done. He doubted the veracity of the numbers. I used my access to databases I had learned about from my acquaintance with Rick to compare the pro forma to benchmarks provided from a national laundry and linen consulting group. The results were frighteningly disparate, and did not support the decision to go forward. I channeled my findings to some key leaders within the health system, but the decision was made to go ahead and build the central laundry.