Charlie Tuzzi is the owner of Cameo by Copeland Cleaners and Winzer Cleaners.
Looking back on my life, I can say for certain that success was in no way a foregone conclusion. My childhood was difficult: When I was four, my dad died. An electrician with NYC Transit, he was killed in an explosion while attending to an electrical problem on the tracks. My mom, a strong and independent woman, raised me. Despite her best efforts, I got in trouble during my teenage years. I was out of the house by 17, and by 20, I was in prison doing a three-and-a-half-year sentence.
While I was in prison, my mom died of cancer. I got out for a last rites visit, and to attend her funeral—both events in cuffs and shackles. It was one of the lowest points of my life. But it was also a turning point because I decided I couldn’t continue on the same path.
Change wasn’t easy, and success didn’t come overnight. But over the next 30 years, I built a hugely successful dry cleaning business, and I now have a comfortable and happy life. Bumps, hurdles and potholes lined my road to success. I’ve navigated that road by finding and learning the lessons in each of the many obstacles that I have faced.
1. Work hard.
When I got out of prison, I started working in construction and saving money. I saved, I saved, I saved…and when I had enough money, the first business I purchased was a laundromat. That was my first big investment. (And, I kept working in construction when I wasn’t at the laundromat.)
2. Make opportunities.
Pretty quickly, I saw an opportunity for expansion: I wanted my laundry business to also offer dry cleaning. How to start? I looked for a dry cleaning business to work with. I walked into one shop and said, “I want to offer this service. Can we do something together?” He ended up selling me half of his business. Then he taught me the whole business. I spent a few years there, learning everything I could from him. Those first few years of learning proved invaluable later on—and left me forever grateful to that partner, who still works with me today.
3. Be willing to cut your losses.
At one point I was running a dry cleaning service that did pick-up and drop-off at doorman buildings in Manhattan. For a while, this worked very well; the doormen of these luxury buildings referred customers, and they’d receive a small commission. But ultimately, other dry cleaning companies caught on to this method and started doing the same thing. Also, the doorman building culture changed as doormen took on bigger and better-paying jobs for individual tenants (such as regular dog-walking gigs), which made the small dry cleaning commission far less appealing. The business model ultimately became unsuccessful. Rather than wasting more time and money on a system that no longer worked, we sold the business.
4. Know what the market can bear—and find the right market.
Eventually, I got into corporate dry cleaning: My partners and I bought a business that worked with a bunch of offices on Long Island. We noted that this business was not charging a lot, and we saw an opportunity to raise the pricing while improving the range and quality of its services. Unfortunately, when we raised the price, it turned out these particular corporate clients could legitimately not afford our services. It was a lesson in realizing that (a) we had to better calibrate our understanding of the market, and (b) we needed to find clients who could afford—and in fact, would demand—the quality and services that we provided.
5. Become an expert deal-maker.
Over these intervening years, I made a lot of deals to buy different kinds of dry-cleaning businesses. Usually, even when working with partners, I was the one who structured the deals. I had to become very good at leveraging whatever assets we had. The key was to find out exactly what was important to the seller, and then figure out the best structure to accomplish that. Was the seller willing to take their money a little bit differently—say, less up front? Were they willing to have an incentive program? Were they willing to take a percentage of something? Were they willing to take a longer buyout? If the seller had flexibility on structure, then there was almost always a deal to be made.
6. Leverage economies of scale.
To that end: Whenever I come across a valuable asset that I think can be improved upon, I look at what we can bring in and how we can push the cost down. When you’re constantly growing, if you’re doing it correctly, you’re also pushing down your operating, production and delivery costs. It’s an economy of scale: You already have the infrastructure (warehouses, factories, industrial dry-cleaning facilities, etc.) in place to do all behind-the-scenes work, often at a cheaper price point than that of the person you’re buying the business from. Pushing down your costs means you can give the seller what they want and still make money in the long term.
In truth, the biggest thing that’s helped me succeed as a businessman, especially after an admittedly rough start, is that I’ve always worked incredibly hard…and with a smile. It never mattered to me if I had to work harder than everyone else because I believed that everybody around me could feed off of my energy and positivity, and then we would all do well. I have always had to be the energy, the locomotive, the driving force in every business with which I’ve been involved—but that driving force is what has been singularly responsible for my success.
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