Inside a Bohaus Sprint: A Dry Cleaner

The situation

The client is an owner-led dry cleaner with a plant and a few drop stores, plus a pickup and delivery service for homes and offices. Counter staff at each store, a plant manager, two drivers, and an owner who splits time between the plant and the front counter. SPOT or Cents handles tickets and the point of sale. Delivery routes live in a notebook and a group text.

Pickup and delivery is the growth engine. Route customers are loyal and spend more. But the service runs on memory. Drivers call ahead from their own phones. Customers forget to leave bags out. Orders go out to the wrong address. Counter staff field calls asking when the van is coming.

The owner has already been through an open-ended software project with a vendor. It produced a lot of meetings, a long proposal and nothing running. Trust in outside help is low.

What the sprint finds

The structure is the first finding. A fixed engagement forces a choice.

In Discover, we map the cleaner's recurring workflows: counter intake, tagging and assembly at the plant, alterations, pickup and delivery, and customer billing for route accounts. We ride along on a route and sit at a counter on a busy morning.

Pickup and delivery stands out. Route customers sign up by phone or in store. Their schedules and addresses are written in the notebook, not in the point of sale. Drivers build the day from the notebook and the bags that came off the conveyor. Missed pickups get rescheduled by text. Route account billing is reconciled by hand at month end.

In Diagnose, pickup and delivery ranks first. It is where growth is, and every gap costs a customer. Counter intake and alterations tracking go on the roadmap.

Six weeks means one system. That is the point. The owner decides in days what an open project might debate for months.

What it builds

In Build, we create pickup and delivery inside the existing point-of-sale system.

Route customers, addresses, standing schedules and preferences move out of the notebook and into SPOT or Cents. Each morning, drivers get a route sheet on their phone built from scheduled pickups and the orders that are ready. Customers get a text the evening before a pickup reminding them to leave garments out, and a text when their order is on the way. Missed pickups are rescheduled by the customer from a link. Route account charges post to the customer's account automatically.

Counter staff can see where any route order is without calling a driver.

Hand over

In Hand over, the plant manager and one counter lead learn the system in depth. Drivers get a short session on the route sheet and marking stops complete. A playbook covers signing up a route customer, handling a missed pickup, and who owns the system.

The owner gets a dashboard of route customers, pickups completed and missed, and a roadmap that lays out what a second cycle could tackle, such as alterations tracking, and what the team could take on itself.

What changes

Drivers stop building the day from a notebook. Customers know when to expect the van. Missed pickups drop, and the ones that happen get rescheduled without a phone call. Counter staff stop answering where's-my-order calls. Month-end billing for route accounts stops being a project.

And the owner sees what a defined engagement produces: a working system at a known cost on a known date.

What this means for your business

Open-ended work drifts. A fixed scope, a fixed timeline and a fixed fee force prioritization and protect the budget.

A dry cleaner's first system might be pickup and delivery. A pest control company's might be renewals. A plumber's, after-hours intake. In each case, six weeks is enough to build one well-chosen system properly.

That is a Bohaus Sprint: six weeks, a fixed fee, four defined phases, one live system, and a team trained to run it. No retainer required to start.