March 2014
| Business World Magazine | 135
more than 900 million pounds of clean linen
annually.
HLS alone handles more than 50 million
pounds each year, Romeo says, with approxi-
mately 90 percent of that work coming from
healthcare and long-term care clients, while
the other 10 percent is mainly taken up by
companies in the hospitality industry.
“It’s a very broad amount of business,” he
says. “There’s a lot of potential, too, for exam-
ple, in the mat services business. Geographi-
cally, we set up a depot down in the Toronto
area that will allow us to service that market
a lot better. That provides us with a strategic
ability to deal with that market in a different
manner than we had in the past.”
The recent purchase of two double-deck-
er trailers will allow HLS to achieve greater
efficiency on the transportation side of the
business, and Romeo says the company has
saved more than 25 percent in costs since it
moved seven years ago into a state-of-the-art
185,000-square-foot facility, which houses a
four-kilometer monorail system that moves
all the linen that’s being serviced in the build-
ing.
Also key to the mandate for doing things
efficiently: quality interactions with business
partners.
“We’re always looking for improvements,”
