Layanan jasa cuci pakaian mungkin sudah sangat biasa terdengar di telinga kita, namun jika kita mendengar jasa layanan cuci sofa atau spring bed pastinya masih asing.
Bisnis ini mungkin juga bisa menjadi peluang usaha bagi Anda yang ingin memulai awal karier di dunia wirausaha. Pasalnya, keuntungan dari layanan jasa cuci sofa dan spring bed ini bisa beromset hingga puluhan juta rupiah per bulannya.
Sugianto salah satu pengembang bisnis layanan cuci sofa dan spring bed, sejak tahun 2008 lalu . Saat itu Sugianto telah terinspirasi dari temannya yang telah memiliki bisnis di bidang laundry pakaian. Demi untuk mewujudkan impian bisnisnya, Sugianto pun keluar dari pekerjaannya di salah satu perusahaan swasta.
"Saya tanya-tanya, belajar dan sampai sekarang ini dan manajemen juga saya atur sendiri ngatur jadwal doang. Nah buka mulai jam delapan setiap hari sampai selesainya saja," ujar Sugianto di Jakarta.
Untuk dapat membangun bisnis jasa cuci sofa dan spring bed, dia memulainya dengan modal awal yang berkisar Rp10 juta. Saat itu, usahanya tersebut hanya bermodalkan mesin vacum pengering sofa dan spring bed yang berjumlah satu saja . Sedangkan mesin tersebut telah dibelinya seharga Rp8 jutaan dan sisa modalnya dipergunakan untuk dapat melengkapi keperluan yang dibutuhkan untuk mencuci sofa dan spring bed.
"Sejak tahun 2008 setelah Lebaran ya, modal awal saya itu sekitar Rp10 juta-Rp15 juta. Dengan modal yang segitu waktu bulan pertama itu omzet saya itu masih sangat kecil, ya namanya juga masih awal merintis. Sebulan pertama itu saya itu telah mendapat omzet sekira cuma Rp2,5 juta, memang kecil inikan butuh proses," jelas dia.
Namun, saat ini, dia juga mengaku, selama lima tahun memperjuangkan bisnisnya agar tetap jalan, hingga kini dirinya sudah bisa meraih omzet hingga Rp20 juta per bulan. Yang dahulu hanya memiliki satu pegawai dan satu mesin vacum, sekarang dia sudah memiliki empat karyawan untuk bekerja sebagai pencuci sofa dan spring bed dan juga sudah memiliki mesin pengering yakni vacum sebanyak empat mesin.
Akan tetapi untuk bisa menjadi seperti ini, dirinya tidak semudah membalikkan telapak tangannya. Sugianto beberapa kali mengalami kesulitan mempromosikan usahanya. Dia juga mengatakan, untuk dapat memperkenalkan usahanya, Sugianto setiap hari menempelkan stiker yang bertuliskan 'terima jasa cuci sofa dan spring bed' di setiap tiang listrik yang dilewatinya. Tak hanya itu, bermodalkan sebuah tripleks, Sugianto menempelkan informasi yang sama seperti pada stikernya.
"Dari segi pemasaran waktu itukan kita belum ada konsumen sama sekali, jadi waktu itu harus promosi terus ke sana kemari,” tukas Sugianto.
Setelah memasuki tahun kedua, dia mencoba dengan cara promosi yang beda yakni membuka website dan sampai saat usahanya pun terus berkembang ini terlihat dari segi omzet per bulannya yang sudah mencapai di kisaran Rp20 jutaan bahkan lebih.
Sementar pada Lebaran tahun 2013 ini, dirinya juga mengaku akan ada sedikit penurunan pada omzetnya bila dibandingkan dengan tahun sebelumnya.
"Kalau tahun lalu itu bisa sekitar Rp15-Rp20 jutaan, tapi kalau Lebaran ini tidak sampai segitu, mungkin di bawah itu sedikit. Inikan karena sudah banyak saingan di bisnis ini," paparnya.
Sugianto juga menjelaskan, cara mencuci sofa dan spring bed tersebut telah menggunakan chemical atau cairan khusus yakni pembersih sofa. Di mana setelah dilakukan pencucian dengan menggunakan cairan khusus tersebut barulah dilakukan proses pengeringan dengan menggunakan mesin vacum yang lebih kuat dari vacum-vacum yang biasanya dipakai sehari-hari.
"Vacum berdaya 1.300 watt itu telah memiliki daya sedot hingga mililiter per detik. Yang jelas kekuatan lebih kuat dari vacum yang sehari-hari," ucap Sugianto.
Berbeda dengan jasa lainnya, Sugiarto melakukan jemput bola di tempat si pemilik sofa atau spring bed. Lama pengerjaan pun relatif singkat hanya satu hingga dua jam. “Pengerjaannya dilakukan oleh dua orang, dan proses pengeringannya harus benar-benar kering sekali dan baru bisa diduduki kembali," jelas dia.
Perlakuan yang sama juga diterapkan untuk dapat membersihkan spring bed. Namun, untuk proses pengeringannya memakan waktu hingga delapan jam. “Karena spring bed itu luas. Pengeringannya tidak memakai pemanas. Jadi harus ditunggu hingga benar-benar kering, baru bisa dipakai," tutup Sugianto.
PENGUSAHA JASA CUCI SOFA RAUP OMZET RP20 JUTA
Late in April, after Native American actors walked off in disgust from the set of Adam Sandler’s latest film, a western sendup that its distributor, Netflix, has defended as being equally offensive to all, a glow of pride spread through several Native American communities.
Tantoo Cardinal, a Canadian indigenous actress who played Black Shawl in “Dances With Wolves,” recalled thinking to herself, “It’s come.” Larry Sellers, who starred as Cloud Dancing in the 1990s television show “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” thought, “It’s about time.” Jesse Wente, who is Ojibwe and directs film programming at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, found himself encouraged and surprised. There are so few film roles for indigenous actors, he said, that walking off the set of a major production showed real mettle.
But what didn’t surprise Mr. Wente was the content of the script. According to the actors who walked off the set, the film, titled “The Ridiculous Six,” included a Native American woman who passes out and is revived after white men douse her with alcohol, and another woman squatting to urinate while lighting a peace pipe. “There’s enough history at this point to have set some expectations around these sort of Hollywood depictions,” Mr. Wente said.
The walkout prompted a rhetorical “What do you expect from an Adam Sandler film?,” and a Netflix spokesman said that in the movie, blacks, Mexicans and whites were lampooned as well. But Native American actors and critics said a broader issue was at stake. While mainstream portrayals of native peoples have, Mr. Wente said, become “incrementally better” over the decades, he and others say, they remain far from accurate and reflect a lack of opportunities for Native American performers. What’s more, as Native Americans hunger for representation on screen, critics say the absence of three-dimensional portrayals has very real off-screen consequences.
“Our people are still healing from historical trauma,” said Loren Anthony, one of the actors who walked out. “Our youth are still trying to figure out who they are, where they fit in this society. Kids are killing themselves. They’re not proud of who they are.” They also don’t, he added, see themselves on prime time television or the big screen. Netflix noted while about five people walked off the “The Ridiculous Six” set, 100 or so Native American actors and extras stayed.
But in interviews, nearly a dozen Native American actors and film industry experts said that Mr. Sandler’s humor perpetuated decades-old negative stereotypes. Mr. Anthony said such depictions helped feed the despondency many Native Americans feel, with deadly results: Native Americans have the highest suicide rate out of all the country’s ethnicities.
The on-screen problem is twofold, Mr. Anthony and others said: There’s a paucity of roles for Native Americans — according to the Screen Actors Guild in 2008 they accounted for 0.3 percent of all on-screen parts (those figures have yet to be updated), compared to about 2 percent of the general population — and Native American actors are often perceived in a narrow way.
In his Peabody Award-winning documentary “Reel Injun,” the Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond explored Hollywood depictions of Native Americans over the years, and found they fell into a few stereotypical categories: the Noble Savage, the Drunk Indian, the Mystic, the Indian Princess, the backward tribal people futilely fighting John Wayne and manifest destiny. While the 1990 film “Dances With Wolves” won praise for depicting Native Americans as fully fleshed out human beings, not all indigenous people embraced it. It was still told, critics said, from the colonialists’ point of view. In an interview, John Trudell, a Santee Sioux writer, actor (“Thunderheart”) and the former chairman of the American Indian Movement, described the film as “a story of two white people.”
“God bless ‘Dances with Wolves,’ ” Michael Horse, who played Deputy Hawk in “Twin Peaks,” said sarcastically. “Even ‘Avatar.’ Someone’s got to come save the tribal people.”
Dan Spilo, a partner at Industry Entertainment who represents Adam Beach, one of today’s most prominent Native American actors, said while typecasting dogs many minorities, it is especially intractable when it comes to Native Americans. Casting directors, he said, rarely cast them as police officers, doctors or lawyers. “There’s the belief that the Native American character should be on reservations or riding a horse,” he said.
“We don’t see ourselves,” Mr. Horse said. “We’re still an antiquated culture to them, and to the rest of the world.”
Ms. Cardinal said she was once turned down for the role of the wife of a child-abusing cop because the filmmakers felt that casting her would somehow be “too political.”
Another sore point is the long run of white actors playing American Indians, among them Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, Audrey Hepburn and, more recently, Johnny Depp, whose depiction of Tonto in the 2013 film “Lone Ranger,” was viewed as racist by detractors. There are, of course, exceptions. The former A&E series “Longmire,” which, as it happens, will now be on Netflix, was roundly praised for its depiction of life on a Northern Cheyenne reservation, with Lou Diamond Phillips, who is of Cherokee descent, playing a Northern Cheyenne man.
Others also point to the success of Mr. Beach, who played a Mohawk detective in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and landed a starring role in the forthcoming D C Comics picture “Suicide Squad.” Mr. Beach said he had come across insulting scripts backed by people who don’t see anything wrong with them.
“I’d rather starve than do something that is offensive to my ancestral roots,” Mr. Beach said. “But I think there will always be attempts to drawn on the weakness of native people’s struggles. The savage Indian will always be the savage Indian. The white man will always be smarter and more cunning. The cavalry will always win.”
The solution, Mr. Wente, Mr. Trudell and others said, lies in getting more stories written by and starring Native Americans. But Mr. Wente noted that while independent indigenous film has blossomed in the last two decades, mainstream depictions have yet to catch up. “You have to stop expecting for Hollywood to correct it, because there seems to be no ability or desire to correct it,” Mr. Wente said.
There have been calls to boycott Netflix but, writing for Indian Country Today Media Network, which first broke news of the walk off, the filmmaker Brian Young noted that the distributor also offered a number of films by or about Native Americans.
The furor around “The Ridiculous Six” may drive more people to see it. Then one of the questions that Mr. Trudell, echoing others, had about the film will be answered: “Who the hell laughs at this stuff?”
Native American Actors Work to Overcome a Long-Documented Bias