Investment analyst Robert W. Baird & Co. (Milwaukee) is an unmatched authority on publicly traded uniform rental companies, following them for clients and forecasting their performance. At the same time, the firm has kept close tabs on industrywide trends, conducting a quarterly survey of private companies to verify public company perceptions of market conditions and laundries’ productivity-building capabilities.
 
Public-company statements and private-company survey responses are usually consistent. Throughout the years, executives in both camps are generally comparable in their outlooks on industry growth, and they describe the same pressures on profitability of their operations. Fitting this template ...