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.

The live music at the Vice Media party on Friday shook the room. Shane Smith, Vice’s chief executive, was standing near the stage — with a drink in his hand, pants sagging, tattoos showing — watching the rapper-cum-chef Action Bronson make pizzas.

The event was an after-party, a happy-hour bacchanal for the hundreds of guests who had come for Vice’s annual presentation to advertisers and agencies that afternoon, part of the annual frenzy for ad dollars called the Digital Content NewFronts. Mr. Smith had spoken there for all of five minutes before running a slam-bang highlight reel of the company’s shows that had titles like “Weediquette” and “Gaycation.”

In the last year, Vice has secured $500 million in financing and signed deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with established media companies like HBO that are eager to engage the young viewers Vice attracts. Vice said it was now worth at least $4 billion, with nearly $1 billion in projected revenue for 2015. It is a long way from Vice’s humble start as a free magazine in 1994.

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But even as cash flows freely in Vice’s direction, the company is trying to keep its brash, insurgent image. At the party on Friday, it plied guests with beers and cocktails. Its apparently unrehearsed presentation to advertisers was peppered with expletives. At one point, the director Spike Jonze, a longtime Vice collaborator, asked on stage if Mr. Smith had been drinking.

“My assistant tried to cut me off,” Mr. Smith replied. “I’m on buzz control.”

Now, Vice is on the verge of getting its own cable channel, which would give the company a traditional outlet for its slate of non-news programming. If all goes as planned, A&E Networks, the television group owned by Hearst and Disney, will turn over its History Channel spinoff, H2, to Vice.

The deal’s announcement was expected last week, but not all of A&E’s distribution partners — the cable and satellite TV companies that carry the network’s channels — have signed off on the change, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks were private.

A cable channel would be a further step in a transformation for Vice, from bad-boy digital upstart to mainstream media company.

Keen for the core audience of young men who come to Vice, media giants like 21st Century Fox, Time Warner and Disney all showed interest in the company last year. Vice ultimately secured $500 million in financing from A&E Networks and Technology Crossover Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has invested in Facebook and Netflix.

Those investments valued Vice at more than $2.5 billion. (In 2013, Fox bought a 5 percent stake for $70 million.)

Then in March, HBO announced that it had signed a multiyear deal to broadcast a daily half-hour Vice newscast. Vice already produces a weekly newsmagazine show, called “Vice,” for the network. That show will extend its run through 2018, with an increase to 35 episodes a year, from 14.

Michael Lombardo, HBO’s president for programming, said when the deal was announced that it was “certainly one of our biggest investments with hours on the air.”

Vice, based in Brooklyn, also recently signed a multiyear $100 million deal with Rogers Communications, a Canadian media conglomerate, to produce original content for TV, smartphone and desktop viewers.

Vice’s finances are private, but according to an internal document reviewed by The New York Times and verified by a person familiar with the company’s financials, the company is on track to make about $915 million in revenue this year.

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It brought in $545 million in a strong first quarter, which included portions of the new HBO deal and the Rogers deal, according to the document. More of its revenue now comes from these types of content partnerships, compared with the branded content deals that made up much of its revenue a year ago, the company said.

Mr. Smith said the company was worth at least $4 billion. If the valuation gets much higher, he said he would consider taking the company public.

“I don’t care about money; we have plenty of money,” Mr. Smith, who is Vice’s biggest shareholder, said in an interview after the presentation on Friday. “I care about strategic deals.”

In the United States, Vice Media had 35.2 million unique visitors across its sites in March, according to comScore.

The third season of Vice’s weekly HBO show has averaged 1.8 million viewers per episode, including reruns, through April 12, according to Brad Adgate, the director of research at Horizon Media. (Vice said the show attracted three million weekly viewers when repeat broadcasts, online and on-demand viewings were included.)

For years, Mr. Smith has criticized traditional TV, calling it slow and unable to draw younger viewers. But if all the deals Vice has struck are to work out, Mr. Smith may have to play more by the rules of traditional media. James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son and a member of Vice’s board, was at the company’s presentation on Friday, as were other top media executives.

“They know they need people like me to help them, but they can’t get out of their own way,” Mr. Smith said in the interview Friday. “My only real frustration is we’re used to being incredibly dynamic, and they’re not incredibly dynamic.”

With its own television channel in the United States, Vice would have something it has long coveted even as traditional media companies are looking beyond TV. Last year, Vice’s deal with Time Warner failed in part because the two companies could not agree on how much control Vice would have over a 24-hour television network.

Vice said it intended to fill its new channel with non-news programming. The company plans to have sports shows, fashion shows, food shows and the “Gaycation” travel show with the actress Ellen Page. It is also in talks with Kanye West about a show.

It remains to be seen whether Vice’s audience will watch a traditional cable channel. Still, Vice has effectively presold all of the ad spots to two of the biggest advertising agencies for the first three years, Mr. Smith said.

In the meantime, Mr. Smith is enjoying Vice’s newfound role as a potential savior of traditional media companies.

“I’m a C.E.O. of a content company,” Mr. Smith said before he caught a flight to Las Vegas for the boxing match on Saturday between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. “If it stops being fun, then why are you doing it?”