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
UNITED NATIONS — Wearing pinstripes and a pince-nez, Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations envoy for Syria, arrived at the Security Council one Tuesday afternoon in February and announced that President Bashar al-Assad had agreed to halt airstrikes over Aleppo. Would the rebels, Mr. de Mistura suggested, agree to halt their shelling?
What he did not announce, but everyone knew by then, was that the Assad government had begun a military offensive to encircle opposition-held enclaves in Aleppo and that fierce fighting was underway. It would take only a few days for rebel leaders, having pushed back Syrian government forces, to outright reject Mr. de Mistura’s proposed freeze in the fighting, dooming the latest diplomatic overture on Syria.
Diplomacy is often about appearing to be doing something until the time is ripe for a deal to be done.
Now, with Mr. Assad’s forces having suffered a string of losses on the battlefield and the United States reaching at least a partial rapprochement with Mr. Assad’s main backer, Iran, Mr. de Mistura is changing course. Starting Monday, he is set to hold a series of closed talks in Geneva with the warring sides and their main supporters. Iran will be among them.
In an interview at United Nations headquarters last week, Mr. de Mistura hinted that the changing circumstances, both military and diplomatic, may have prompted various backers of the war to question how much longer the bloodshed could go on.
“Will that have an impact in accelerating the willingness for a political solution? We need to test it,” he said. “The Geneva consultations may be a good umbrella for testing that. It’s an occasion for asking everyone, including the government, if there is any new way that they are looking at a political solution, as they too claim they want.”
He said he would have a better assessment at the end of June, when he expects to wrap up his consultations. That coincides with the deadline for a final agreement in the Iran nuclear talks.
Whether a nuclear deal with Iran will pave the way for a new opening on peace talks in Syria remains to be seen. Increasingly, though, world leaders are explicitly linking the two, with the European Union’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, suggesting last week that a nuclear agreement could spur Tehran to play “a major but positive role in Syria.”
It could hardly come soon enough. Now in its fifth year, the Syrian war has claimed 220,000 lives, prompted an exodus of more than three million refugees and unleashed jihadist groups across the region. “This conflict is producing a question mark in many — where is it leading and whether this can be sustained,” Mr. de Mistura said.
Part Italian, part Swedish, Mr. de Mistura has worked with the United Nations for more than 40 years, but he is more widely known for his dapper style than for any diplomatic coups. Syria is by far the toughest assignment of his career — indeed, two of the organization’s most seasoned diplomats, Lakhdar Brahimi and Kofi Annan, tried to do the job and gave up — and critics have wondered aloud whether Mr. de Mistura is up to the task.
He served as a United Nations envoy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and before that in Lebanon, where a former minister recalled, with some scorn, that he spent many hours sunbathing at a private club in the hills above Beirut. Those who know him say he has a taste for fine suits and can sometimes speak too soon and too much, just as they point to his diplomatic missteps and hyperbole.
They cite, for instance, a news conference in October, when he raised the specter of Srebrenica, where thousands of Muslims were massacred in 1995 during the Balkans war, in warning that the Syrian border town of Kobani could fall to the Islamic State. In February, he was photographed at a party in Damascus, the Syrian capital, celebrating the anniversary of the Iranian revolution just as Syrian forces, aided by Iran, were pummeling rebel-held suburbs of Damascus; critics seized on that as evidence of his coziness with the government.
Mouin Rabbani, who served briefly as the head of Mr. de Mistura’s political affairs unit and has since emerged as one of his most outspoken critics, said Mr. de Mistura did not have the background necessary for the job. “This isn’t someone well known for his political vision or political imagination, and his closest confidants lack the requisite knowledge and experience,” Mr. Rabbani said.
As a deputy foreign minister in the Italian government, Mr. de Mistura was tasked in 2012 with freeing two Italian marines detained in India for shooting at Indian fishermen. He made 19 trips to India, to little effect. One marine was allowed to return to Italy for medical reasons; the other remains in India.
He said he initially turned down the Syria job when the United Nations secretary general approached him last August, only to change his mind the next day, after a sleepless, guilt-ridden night.
Mr. de Mistura compared his role in Syria to that of a doctor faced with a terminally ill patient. His goal in brokering a freeze in the fighting, he said, was to alleviate suffering. He settled on Aleppo as the location for its “fame,” he said, a decision that some questioned, considering that Aleppo was far trickier than the many other lesser-known towns where activists had negotiated temporary local cease-fires.
“Everybody, at least in Europe, are very familiar with the value of Aleppo,” Mr. de Mistura said. “So I was using that as an icebreaker.”
The cease-fire negotiations, to which he had devoted six months, fell apart quickly because of the government’s military offensive in Aleppo the very day of his announcement at the Security Council. Privately, United Nations diplomats said Mr. de Mistura had been manipulated. To this, Mr. de Mistura said only that he was “disappointed and concerned.”
Tarek Fares, a former rebel fighter, said after a recent visit to Aleppo that no Syrian would admit publicly to supporting Mr. de Mistura’s cease-fire proposal. “If anyone said they went to a de Mistura meeting in Gaziantep, they would be arrested,” is how he put it, referring to the Turkish city where negotiations between the two sides were held.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon remains staunchly behind Mr. de Mistura’s efforts. His defenders point out that he is at the center of one of the world’s toughest diplomatic problems, charged with mediating a conflict in which two of the world’s most powerful nations — Russia, which supports Mr. Assad, and the United States, which has called for his ouster — remain deadlocked.
R. Nicholas Burns, a former State Department official who now teaches at Harvard, credited Mr. de Mistura for trying to negotiate a cease-fire even when the chances of success were exceedingly small — and the chances of a political deal even smaller. For his efforts to work, Professor Burns argued, the world powers will first have to come to an agreement of their own.
“He needs the help of outside powers,” he said. “It starts with backers of Assad. That’s Russia and Iran. De Mistura is there, waiting.”
With Iran Talks, a Tangled Path to Ending Syria’s War