I did years ago it was a PITA and my experience was that people that take rugs to dry cleaners
usually have crappy rugs. By crappy I mean poor quality hard to clean de-laminating tufted rugs,
inked rugs....stuff you spend more time but make much less money than retail rugs. every once in a while something
decent would pass through.
It's a 3rd party transaction so dry cleaning staff apathy, turnover is an issue to effectively communicate issues to the customer
is a constant battle. You find yourself on the phone allot more trying to piece together WTF non rug people are talking about.
I'm not saying it's impossible particularly for larger companies with more mouths to feed if you are small there are better ways to make money.
-Give them a invoice template and spend some time with the staff to go over basic check in & inventory procedures
-When possible on pick up roll the rugs out and go over them with the staff which often doesn't happen
as they are usually taking care of customers when there or you're already running late to the next job or the rug is too big to roll out in their store...
which then leads to the question how did they get the size ...'the customer told us" which is usually dead on accurate,..so you'll want to double check
their measurements and check in.
-Pick one day of the week for pick up/drop offs or they will call you every other day to pick up the 3x5 for cleaning
-Net 30 and charge 5% late fee after 60 days hold rugs until payment then go COD