Adam Roberts
Managing Director
Consolidated Linen Service
A long long time ago, my father Neville said to me “why don’t you give me a hand for while in my new laundry”. I wasn’t too enthused at the time about going to Uni so he caught me at a weak moment. Some 30+ years later, I’m still stuck at CLS!
It was tough going in the early days and in many ways, remains tough going today. However, the Laundry Industry has proven infectious with life-long friends made and the variety of challenges that are regularly encountered providing a great schooling in industrial operations and life generally. My wife Lisa and Daughter Chilli (aged 7) may disagree.
Working in a family business also has pros and cons. For many years, Dad and his 3 Boys were on the floor together every day. As CLS grew, we all took on more specific roles until only relatively recently when my middle brother Luke somehow escaped Dad’s clutches and along with his wife Kylie (who was also working within CLS), pursued another venture. Tommy and I remain entrenched today and we do our best to send Dad to each other to keep him occupied.
If I had of ventured to Uni, I would have likely chosen an Economics path. So, my forte was numbers and luckily for me, a laundry has lots of them, everywhere. From almost the very beginning, we began tinkering with software and founded a company called Laundry Software Solutions. Having some software available that other laundries wanted allowed me to spread my wings and travel around the world. Every Laundry is different and I’d like to think I learned something from every plant I visited. I spent 3 weeks installing software in a UK Laundry and witnessed military grade discipline across the workforce and wondered if this would ever work in Australia! (I think we all know the answer to that)
With limited and competing resources, shared between a growing laundry and developing software, something had to give. So our family divested some stake in our software and I focused on CLS. The software today is growing rapidly under the “Bundle Laundry ” banner and CLS has continued to grow, surviving the Covid spread.
Lisa told me that she’d file for divorce if we bought another laundry. That was 2 laundries ago so I might just keep trying my luck driven by what I think are exciting times ahead. Energy efficiency, AI and robotics are the future of our industry and I’d like to think that CLS and others that we work with will be leading the charge, even if only for business self-preservation reasons.
I recently became a Director of the LAA. CLS was never a member but joined a few years ago when it became apparent to me that we needed to co-operate more where we can (pricing excluded of course) to achieve better outcomes for our industry. Its hard enough finding staff, duelling with energy companies and waiting for slow boats from China (now more the Sub-Continent) to arrive with our linen so why not find some common ground whenever we can? An update of the Australian Laundry Standard currently underway being a great example of this.
“If you’re not going forward, you’re going backwards”. Whilst I think someone famous coined that term originally, it’s been a mantra of Dad all these years and I’ve lived by it as much as I can.
Adam Roberts
MANAGING DIRECTOR
Consolidated Linen Service