Five Corners Cleaners Presses Forward With 50-Year Business

Armed with a keen business sense and out of the box thinking, the late Herb Menke established a solid foundation when he created Five Corners Cleaners, 818 N. Main Street in Glen Ellyn.

Lee Turley, Menke’s grandson and the store’s owner, is continuing a family tradition that has taken the cleaners into 52 successful years of existence. The store dry cleans items from everyday clothing to rugs and purses and offers tailoring.

This wasn’t Menke's first enterprise. Always an active Glen Ellyn entrepreneur with ideas, Menke created a dog kennel servicing wealthy clients and later a pet service where he visited his customers’ homes to provide walks, food and grooming.

He also founded a local realty firm and became a Realtor for several years. In the late 1950s, Menke saw an opportunity to capitalize on another venture when he saw a piece of empty property on a Five Corners intersection.

“What he would do was to sit in his buddy’s front call office window and count cars that came to the intersection,” Turley said. “He knew that if there was busyness to the intersection that would bring business to the corner. This was when he didn’t know what he wanted to do with the property. He had a restaurant or a flower shop in mind.”

In 1959, Menke finally purchased the property and built a store still not knowing what it would become, Turley added. It was a fast-talking salesman who persuaded Menke to enter the dry cleaning business by buying a franchise.

“My grandfather had no idea about dry cleaning,” Turley said. “He said, ‘What the heck. I’ll buy it.’ I don’t know why he bought it. I think it was the entrepreneur in him who thought he could make it work and it worked.”

Growing the business

Menke took classes to learn more about this fairly young industry and had his children, Turley’s mom Jean, his aunt Louanne and his uncle Jim, who all work at the store.

“Keep in mind that there were us and another dry cleaner in town,” Turley said. “There were two dry cleaners. Probably that was another reason that he went into the business. He thought that there’s not that much competition here and there’s a demand for dry cleaning because we’re in a white-collar neighborhood. People go downtown and dress in suits. He thought that this has to be a good idea.”

Envisioning a way for quick convenience, he designed his store with a drive-through window, which, Turley said, was uncommon at the time.

“No matter what business it was, my grandfather kept in mind convenience for his customers,” he said. “He was always thinking outside of the box, about the future and new things. Back in 1959, a drive-through window was like state-of-the-art technology. He was a risk taker.”

Turley said the store prospered throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. In conjunction with overseeing the store, Menke built and opened a family-friendly dining establishment called The Big Banjo on Roosevelt Road in 1963. It is currently the site of Alfie’s Inn. Menke, a banjo player, wanted a place for families and live music. The restaurant was sold in 1967.

While operating two businesses, he hired management to help his store. Unfortunately, Turley said, those employees “ran the business into the ground.”  In the early 1970s,  Jean, an elementary school teacher, took charge of the store. In 1975, she and her husband Tom Turley bought the business from Menke. Living in West Chicago at the time, the store became a second home to Lee and his sister Jill.

“It was great for my sister and me because we came to the office as kids,” he said. “My parents would put our playpen in the office. We grew up there. From 1975 on, it was a great business for my parents.”

As teenagers, both siblings worked at the store. After attending college, he took more of an interest his family’s enterprise while his sister moved to Florida. From 2002 to 2006 years, his parents taught him the machinery maintenance, customer service etiquette and the ordering of supplies. When they retired in the late 2000s, Turley purchased the business from them while they owned the property. He saw new ways to streamline some of the work.

"This size of this business, which is not that big and not that small, is really a one-man show because of computers,” he said. “Mainly, computers took away the positions of two people__ my dad and mom. I would do payroll and accounting on the computer. My dad would have shelves of papers and files and now it’s all on the computer.”

Finding longevity

Turley says the secret to staying in business so long is providing a personal touch.

“It’s a combination of things,” he said. “It’s me showing my face to customers and greeting customers. It boils down to customer service. It boils down to dealing with customers’ problems, making them happy, making them want to come back and making them smile when they come through the door. It’s also very important these days to market.”

Today, with many dry cleaning competitors, Turley has to distinguish his business. That includes providing discounts on cleaning services, using a biodegradable and environmentally-friendly cleaning solvent and adding a free pickup and delivery service to customers’ homes in many DuPage suburbs.

When asked if fluctuating gas prices would affect this service, he simply cuts his margins.

“Are you making as much money on it?” he said. “No, you’re not, but you are making money and it’s a convenience. You are getting new customers. If you don’t get that customer, someone else will. You need to make sure that you have the market.”

Turley also specializes in cleaning wedding dresses. He works with two boutiques in Wheaton and Naperville and a seamstress. The bride buys the dress, has the seamstress tailor it and then it goes to his store for steaming and pressing.

In a downturn economy, Turley said that business “has been better than I thought it was going to be in the last couple of years. Our sales have maintained. That’s very rare to say because a typical dry cleaner is down 30 to 40 percent of revenue.”

Turley doesn’t rely on luck to keep him open but having a good operational plan.

“If you think about it, dry cleaning is very easy to cut out of your budget just like going out to restaurants and bars and paying for $3 cups of coffee,” he said. “We’ve taken a hit there. We’ve also taken a hit because people are losing their jobs which means they don’t dress up. They’re dressing in t-shirts and shorts. We’ve taken measures to overcome that by having a free pickup and delivery service, doing offers and keeping competitive pricing.”

Glen Ellyn resident Ally Deibert has been a customer for about 15 years and is very happy with the store’s attention to customer service. Deibert is the founder and chief executive officer of Kiara, a company which provides character-based recruitment, management, sales and marketing, leadership and personal coaching services. She looks at retail stores such as Five Corners with a different angle.

“I walk into a dry cleaners like Lee’s at Five Corners with the eye towards seeing excellence, seeing high performance, getting the job done, doing it right the first time and being treated very well,” Deibert said. “That’s what Five Corners is all about. Because of my business, I really know a good service provider when I see one.”

Deibert added other reasons that keep her a repeat customer.

“They have hardly any turnover so you’re dealing with the same people all the time,” she said. “They’re friendly, have a sense of humor and hardly every make an error. It’s always fun to go there. Before going to Five Corners, I had a lot of difficulty getting my collars ironed well on my blouses. The cleaners that I went to did not do the collars well. I’m a professional and I need to look good. Five Corners do the little things quite right. They don’t lose clothes, they’re on time and you get your clothing back in great shape."