Intro: The Shop Struggle

• DTF is booming and more businesses are jumping in.
  • DTF is much easier than older methods like screen printing.
  • Barrier to entry is lower with 'production friendly' equipment under $15k.
  • Full-Digital Apparel that looks, feels and washes great is 'easy' to make.
• If you're feeling squeezed on price, overwhelmed by competition, or stuck on how to grow this episode is for you.

Why It Feels Crowded

• Custom t-shirt businesses are more common than even just a decade ago.
• People have a 'friend' or 'cousin' with a cricut.
• Customer expectations are all over the place a "Why is this shirt $30 when the guy down the street sells it for $15?".
• Social media makes everyone look busy, even if they aren't making money.

The Good News

• Just because everyone's cousin makes shirts, doesnt mean they are good at it.
• Most 'side-hustlers' give up or cannot deliver.
• The business isnt 'easy' so YOU putting in the work will be around when others won't.
• The barrier to entry to be profitable is still high enough that its not for everyone.
• You can still produce a high-quality custom logo apparel for the same price or cheaper than stores sell blank apparel.

Avoid Common Traps

• Racing to the bottom on price.
  • You will NEVER be the cheapest. "There is hardly anything in this world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper."
• Undercharging because they don't know how to break down costs and margins.
  • Know your numbers!
  • Consider other costs – website, accounting software, credit card fees.
• No Systems in place to make sure your business runs well
  • No workflows
  • No pricing structure
  • No Schedules
  • No delegation
  • No CRM
• Trying to do it all: artwork, printing, packaging, selling – without delegation or efficiency.

Competing the Smart Way

• Find Your Differentiator: Custom designs? Rush jobs? Better garments? Customer service? Find 1-3 core differentiators and talk about them all the time.
• Find Your Niche What is your ideal customer or product? Push towards that and spend less time trying to compete beyond.
• Charge What You're Worth: Because of the above, you can (and should) charge more than others.
• Tighten Production: Tips to streamline (pre-press setups, batching jobs, designated work zones).
  • Less mistakes
  • Faster delivery
  • Less waste
• Customer Experience
  • Personal delivery
  • Handwritten thank yous
  • Reorder reminders
  • Birthday / Anniversary

Growing in a Crowded Space

• Don't be Amazon / Walmart You can't beat the lowest price, but you can offer the best experience / quality.
  • People will want to buy from YOU / Your Business… because you are not the big business.
• Get Referrals Working
  • Script for asking for referrals
  • Remind people again
  • Give/Get program
• Leverage What You Already Have
  • Upsells / bundled product
• Be the best on the block
  • You would be surprised on how many people havent truly mastered their craft, be a master. Experiment, practice, play, learn.
• Invest in an Efficiency (repeat): Set goals for single efficiencies you can invest in (even if it's small.)
  • Additional heat presses
  • Accounting software
  • CRM
  • Ecom Store

Final Thoughts: There's Still Room!

• You don't need to be the best at everything, just the most dialed-in for your customers.
• Think efficient and excellent, not big and chaotic.
  • You don't need to be the master of an entire catalog of products, just be fantastic at a handful.
• If you are struggling to compete with lower priced competitors, consider changing how to are getting your business or what you sell.
  • Only offer premium quality apparel
  • Look for a niche or type of customer that is going to be less price concerned.
  • Purchase apparel from the 'cheap' competition to see how you can offer a better product (and sell against that.)

Challenge: What's one thing you can fix in your pricing or workflow this week?

In this episode we’re diving deep into one of the most important decisions in DTF printing: choosing the right DTF printer. Whether you’re just starting out or scaling up a serious production setup, the gear you choose can make or break your workflow, quality, and profits. We’ll break down the different printer types and talk about the real-world usage of each.

We’re also sharing insider tips on what to avoid, and what else you’ll need beyond just the printer to actually succeed with DTF.

At the end of the episode we have specific advice tailored for beginners looking to start smart, and pros aiming to optimize or expand.

Understanding Printer Types and Key Features Print Width Options

• Letter / A3 Sheet (12-13")
  • Small format sheets for basic transfers
• 12"
  • Ideal entry into roll-to-roll printing
• 24 – 30"
  • Faster production for professional setups

Ink Systems

• Bulk Ink Systems
  • Lower ink costs
  • Requires maintenance knowledge
• Cartridge Systems
  • More reliable for light to medium use
  • Higher cost per print
• White Ink Circulation
  • Prevents settling and clogging in pro setups

Integrated vs. Modular Setups

• All-in-One Printers
  • Includes printer, shaker, oven in one unit
• Separate Components
  • Greater flexibility for upgrades and maintenance

Budget Considerations Entry-Level Setups

• Desktop Printer + Manual Shaker
  • Pros: Low upfront cost, real DTF transfers possible
  • Cons: 10+ minutes per transfer, inconsistent quality, no white ink circulation

Verdict: Not recommended for production-focused businesses.

Mid-Tier Options

• A3 Size Sheet Printers
  • Pros: Compact size, low cost
  • Cons: Slow production, not automated
• Compact Roll-to-Roll Systems
  • Pros: Automated, less manual labor, better consistency
  • Cons: Higher investment, learning curve

Verdict: Roll-to-roll is generally the winner at this tier.

Pro-Grade Options

• 24"+ Wide Format Printers
  • Pros: White ink circulation, fully automated, designed for production and ROI
  • Cons: Highest investment, requires significant space and power

Verdict: Bigger and faster is almost always better for serious DTF operations.

Essential Additional Equipment

• Heat press(es)
• Powder extractor or filtration system
• Emergency kit for clogs and maintenance
• Startup consumables and supplies

Reliability and Maintenance Daily Upkeep

• Follow manufacturer guidelines
• Maintain temperature: 60°F – 80°F
• Maintain humidity: 50% – 70%
• Keep a dust-free environment

Common Failure Points

• Printheads: Especially with white ink; discuss preventative maintenance with your vendor
• Powder Adhesive Curing: Adjust time and temp based on weather and material

Where to Buy and What to Avoid Choosing Vendors

• Trusted brands with proven track records
• Who supports you post-purchase?

Key Questions to Ask

• How long have you been in business?
• What is the warranty?
• How many printers/customers do you have?
• Can I see a sample print?
• Can we do a live or virtual demo?

Evaluating Test Prints

• Feel and stretch tests
• Wash tests
• Feedback from existing customers or focus groups

For Beginners

• Look for simplicity, strong support, and learning resources
• Avoid shiny object syndrome; focus on reliability
• Starter kits and bundles can help but verify quality
• Remember: It’s better to over-invest in equipment than under-invest.

For Pros

• Buy based on current production plus growth goals
• Don’t expect to abandon other print technologies immediately
• Set client expectations if changing print methods
• Educate clients on color differences between spot and process printing
• Upsell expanded color options to lock in clients
• Train staff thoroughly for day-to-day operational changes

Choosing the right DTF printer setup comes down to understanding your production goals, budget, and willingness to maintain the equipment properly. Whether you’re starting with an entry-level setup to learn the process or investing in a full pro-grade system to drive your business forward, focus on reliability, vendor support, and scalability. The right choice will save you time, reduce frustration, and allow you to confidently produce high-quality transfers for your customers. Be sure to check out ColDesi.com and learn more about how Direct to Film printing can help your business thrive.

In this episode of the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast, host Marc Vila is joined by Michael Palme and Austin Gordon from Taylor to discuss how direct mail can be a game-changer for custom apparel, sign, and promotional product businesses. While digital marketing gets a lot of attention, direct mail remains a powerful and underutilized tool for targeting new customers, retaining existing clients, and cutting through the clutter of online ads.

Michael and Austin break down how direct mail works, how to effectively use data to reach the right audience, and how you can integrate it with digital advertising for even greater results. Whether you’re a startup looking to establish your brand or an established business aiming for the next level, this episode will give you practical strategies to expand your reach and increase sales.

Topics Covered in This Episode:

✅ Why direct mail still works in a digital world
✅ How to use data to target the perfect audience for your business
✅ The cost of direct mail—how much should you budget?
✅ How to track results and measure ROI
✅ The best types of mail pieces for apparel and sign businesses
✅ Combining direct mail with digital ads for maximum impact
✅ How to start a direct mail campaign—step-by-step guide
✅ Common mistakes to avoid when using direct mail marketing

Listen now and learn how to use direct mail to take your business to the next level!

✉ Have questions or want to connect? email us at marketing@coldesi.com.

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello and welcome to the CAS Podcast, the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. And my name is Marc Vila, and welcome to our show today.

Just as we’re starting off 2025 and this is our first podcast of the year, so we’re trying to adjust the format a little bit and really get to a higher level of business. So previously we were the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast, CAS, and I’ve been saying CAS a little bit more because we’re trying to move not just for the startups, but actually moving and growing into folks who are really trying to grow their business and potentially have an established business, too, that are really trying to take it to the next level.

So with that in mind, if you are a startup or you’ve been in business for 10 years, this episode is going to be amazing for you because we’re going to have some great education from two fantastic gentlemen from Taylor. So today, we’re going to be talking about growing your business with direct mail, and we’ve got Michael Palme and Austin Gordon from Taylor. So why don’t you guys say hello and tell us a little bit about Taylor.

Michael Palme:
Yeah, so I’ll kick us off. Like Marc was saying, I’m Michael Palme. I’ve been with Taylor for about five and a half years. Really, Taylor in the business unit that I’m part of, we specialize in direct mail packaging and commercial print. But just a little bit more about Taylor. I think the easiest way to describe who Taylor is and what we can do is if you think about anything you could put a brand or logo on, whether it be promo items, any sort of printed collateral, any sort of marketing pieces, we can do that here at Taylor. So thanks for having us on, Marc, and look forward to a great conversation.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, Austin. And awesome. Awesome, and then Austin. Austin, why don’t you tell us a little bit about just what you do over there and what it’s like doing some direct mail business with Taylor?

Austin Gordon:
Yeah, definitely. Like Marc said, I’m Austin Gordon, and today is my first day on the proverbial mic so I’m excited to be joining a podcast. What I do at Taylor here is that I’m an account executive and I work with our customers to make sure that we’re optimizing their direct mail campaigns, whether that’s incorporating digital sides to a direct mail campaign, getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and just really making sure that the dollar on direct mail spend is most efficiently spent.

Marc Vila:
Okay, excellent, excellent. Well, so one thing that I’m going to mention here is we’re recording this and a new feature of the software is this AI transcription. And it just wanted to show it on the side of the screen the whole time. So as I’m trying to introduce and talk just, for anyone who saw me fumble for a minute there, there’s this AI bot just… And I’m like, “How do I get rid of this thing?” It’s the first time I’ve seen it. So new feature that’ll hopefully take the transcription and put it online to make it easier for folks to digest if they prefer to read. But man, that was driving me nuts. Problem solved though. Let’s get right into a little bit about direct mail.

So I run marketing here at ColDesi. What’s the hot topics and the fancy and shiny thing nowadays is should I do influencer marketing? Should I be advertising on Instagram? Is TikTok a good place? What about LinkedIn? All these digital online places and even Google Ads, this is the hot stuff that’s talked about over and over again. And it is a great way to reach audiences and it is an important way to do advertising, but we forget that there are tried and true methods that are still great and one of them potentially could be direct mail. And we wanted to talk about how to get started with that if you’re currently not, what potential impacts that could have on your business, and how it could be a different way to reach out to your customers, especially if you have a large existing customer database that you want to get repeat business from, or you’re trying to reach a new niche group of people that you can get your branding and your image and your message in front of their face in a different way, especially with the digital space being incredibly crowded.

So what I’ll do is I have a series of questions that I put together. So we’ll do a little Q&A style. And I think a good format would be I’ll just back and forth or if I feel one of you can answer it better, I’ll start with one of you and then if the second person has somebody to add, this way we’re not talking over each other. So I’ll do like Michael and then Austin and Michael and Austin. And then once you’re done with what you have to say, finish and I’ll give a brief moment for the other one to jump in if they want to add something. And then if I have any comments, I’ll add it at the end. So that’ll be the format today, and let’s just get right into business.

The first thing that I wanted to talk about, and Michael, we’ll start with you as I mentioned, why would direct mail work for a sign or a t-shirt shop?

Michael Palme:
So a couple of things that come to mind as it relates to t-shirt shops specifically doing direct mail, I think the first thing that comes to mind, Marc, is the highly visual appeal. Signs and t-shirt shops are graphic-based and a printed piece can really highlight the design, the colors, any sort of past work. And also I think the physical side of it too, when you’re sending out that direct mail piece and it’s a physical thing that your audience might be receiving, typically we see t-shirt shops and more of the manufacturing side. Those physical pieces tend to do a lot better than some of the other categories. So those are the couple of things that come to mind as to why a t-shirt shop should be doing direct mail.

Austin Gordon:
And Marc, a few points I’d like to add is you touched on the digital space, and we’re not here by any means to bash the digital space. We actually think it’s a very powerful tool, and where direct mail can be very powerful is when it works in tangent with digital ads. I’m not sure how many printers are working to make sure that you are marrying the two together. I know that for example, that’s something that Taylor does is, okay, we know we’re sending a physical piece of direct mail to this address. How can we match that with an IP address to make sure that people in that household or in that business are also getting targeted with Facebook ads, with Instagram ads? They’re on espn.com, how can we marry the two together? So also I’d add that there’s probably less competition in the mailbox. You’re not fighting for real estate on Instagram. So in that sense, it can be a powerful tool to use too.

Secondly, what I think it does well for a sign shop or a t-shirt shop is it does really good at local targeting. In my eyes, I see sign shops and t-shirt shops probably operating in a specific area, and direct mail allows for precise geographical targeting.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, so that’s fantastic. And I have a couple pieces of comment that actually are really just both of you had said.

So when we survey out our customers and we do interviews on folks that are in this t-shirt space or sign space and other promotional goods, as you said, most of them are working within a targeted area. So within a city or within a state are going to be the two most popular, or they may specifically be working with schools, so therefore they’re working within a certain school board or whatever it might be. Government, they may be working with local government agencies. And the way to expand that is typically just to either spread out that map or get deeper into that map that you work in. And the first one is within the area that I work with, are there more customers? And you can really target well as you mentioned in a less crowded space.

And we get… Everyone will joke how much junk mail you get or don’t get, right? But when you talk about your mobile device or YouTube, we’re almost more trained to skip those ads because what are you doing? You’re flipping through Instagram. You’re there to have fun. And then the fifth thing you get is somebody telling you to do your taxes and just get out of here. And direct mail though is mail is business. That’s how I think about it. Mail is business. It’s not fun. So when you open your mail, you’re saying, “What’s a bill? What’s an important letter? What’s an invitation to do something? Is there something of value in here for me?” So there’s actually you’re actually searching for value where on social media or YouTube, you may be searching for value. You may just be literally rotting your brain in the bathroom. And there’s a reality.

So it’s something that I think is very cool about doing direct mail that if you operate in Orlando, Florida and you work with a particular niche business, you can identify all of those businesses through a company like Taylor. You’ll identify all those potential businesses and you can send them something physical, which is, Michael, you had said that’s great. That actually is designs with your physical product. If you’re selling promotional goods or t-shirts or signs, you’re handing them a physical good. It’s not a piece of software. It’s not a digital download. So you have the opportunity to show, like you said, show past work, show something that’s vibrant and eye-catching. And if you’re trying to sell signs or t-shirts that are vibrant and eye-catching to businesses, what better way to do it than to impress them immediately with something vibrant and eye-catching in their hands. So there’s a bit of subconscious, I think, to it as well.

Austin Gordon:
Absolutely.

Michael Palme:
Sure.

Marc Vila:
Great. Well, so that actually bounces into another question that I had here. And Austin, let’s start with you then. So if you do only operate in a small area or a very local business or even in an area where the population is not incredibly large, how can you handle direct mail? Will it even work at that point in time? Or maybe in other words, how big does your audience have to be for you to be able to mail them?

Austin Gordon:
Yeah, I would say for the sake of a company that’s just operating in a local area or trying to sell t-shirts for a local sports team, direct mail in a local area for sure is a viable tool and you’re going to want to just target that specific area. You’re not going to want to sell t-shirts if you’re operating in Orlando to people that live in Lake Mary. You don’t want the Orlando schools… I’m using Florida cities. Not totally familiar with the surrounding area, but just for the sake of you, Marc, being in the Florida area. But you’d want to target people that’s getting the piece and it’s relevant to them. And knowing who your audience is is important to what piece you’re going to be sending them.

So for the sake of can you operate in a local area, the answer to that is yes. And for how big or small it can be is we can do a mailing as small as 500 people if that’s what your budget calls and that’s what your data is telling you. But we can also do as large as a million, just throwing out numbers there just to give background for how big or small we can do.

Michael Palme:
Yeah. So one thing to add to that, Marc, and Austin, I think, hit the nail on the head, but when it comes to if the question can direct mail be effective in a local area, I think we need to go all the way back to the data piece and who exactly your target audience is, who you’re going to be marketing to. Because if there’s enough of those individuals in the local area, absolutely. Direct mail can crush it. So when you can hone in and figure out, okay, this is I’ll use the example of an ice cream shop. If there’s data out there, and maybe you’re in Fort Myers Beach and you can find people who often vacation to Fort Myers Beach and then you can market to them in advance. In Florida, everyone wants ice cream on a hot sunny day, so maybe you can market to them in advance with a specific offer that next time they vacation down to Fort Myers Beach, 50% off your ice cream.

I’m just making that up. But I do think that the data portion of that, especially in a local area, is so critical to having success with direct mail.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, data is probably the most important thing for all marketing. If you’re going to advertise on Instagram or Facebook or Google, you want to make sure you’re sending that… It’s rare that you want to send the message to everybody. We’re not Coca-Cola. Coke wants to advertise to literally everybody because everybody drinks liquids. Everyone needs hydration. They want to advertise to everybody. But if you are a sign shop and you specifically work in, say, doing yard signs and graduation season is coming up so you’d love to print a bunch of pictures of some graduates and their faces and 2025 graduates, all that stuff, you’re probably going to be dealing with a local area and understanding, “Well, all right, how am I going to get to the folks in this area? Well, can I get an audience of people who have children that are estimated to be between 16 and 19 years old? Am I able to get that data?”

If you’re able to get that data for your local area, which potentially you could, now you potentially have a mailing list of a certain size. Well, at this point in time, the size, it might be huge. You’re like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t think I want to send to that many people.” So now you want to tighten it down. “Well, I just want to do certain zip codes. I really just want to focus on these three high schools.” And there’s something about doing print advertising that can be brought directly to the high school, but there’s also something about potentially getting a database of people that would be of a certain age, more than likely to have children that are in within these certain zip codes, which are within those high schools. And you could direct mail out to those. And these campaigns can really be done beautifully if you have the right data. And like you said, the data has to be of a certain size. It has to be of certain accuracy.

And then the last little bit of it is on the commercial side of direct mail, you mentioned 500, a thousand or a million. Well, you may find that you want to do something with local dentist offices. Maybe that’s a niche thing you want to jump into, but there’s only 40 in your area. Well, this is not as big for Taylor, but it’s a toe dip into it. If you have printing equipment because a lot of folks here do, and you want to print 40 things, you can print 40 signs and just mail them directly to those 40 dentists. So direct mail can start on your own, especially being in our industry. You can start by printing 40 t-shirts and mailing them to 40 dentists.

But this is a way to really expand and grow the business, and that’s what the conversation is about today. So how do you grow from that small niche of 40? What is a larger niche that you can get into where previously you had one salesperson that would take 40 t-shirts or 40 signs and they would drive around town and drop them off and hand off a business card. And that’s great as you get started, but if you’re trying to scale and you’re trying to move up to another level, well, now I’m not interested in advertising to 40 people. I’m interested in advertising to 4,000 people, like potential parents of graduates. And that’s what we’re talking about is scaling the business. So data is a really great way to do it. And if you talk to folks like the people at Taylor, they can really dive into that data with you.

So another thing I wanted to cover is just cost. Everyone wants to know how much everything costs. We sell printers. Everyone wants to know what does it cost to print, how fast can it print and all that. So what does it cost to mail something? I know, Austin, you had mentioned that you had done a little bit of math on that, so could you just give us some bookend numbers? Let’s say that you wanted to mail a thousand postcards in Orlando. What’s something like that going to cost about?

Austin Gordon:
Yeah, and there’s a lot that plays into it, something like size or the stock of paper. But for example, for the sake of giving an example, I got a 6 x 9 postcard here. This is on a 10 point piece of paper and you’d probably be looking anywhere from 50 cents to 60 cents with an addition of 40 cents for your postage. So you’re looking at about a dollar per piece to get it to a mailbox. Obviously, USPS needs to get… They need to get paid too. So we print the piece and then we give it to them too to deliver the piece so that you got two people getting paid on executing a direct mail order. So a thousand postcards to the Orlando area, you’re probably looking at about a thousand dollars. And where Taylor tries to live is the larger run. So you maybe could get a more competitive price if you’re going to a local printer that specializes in those smaller runs.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. No, and that’s a great summary for that. So a really just nice simple summary is if you want to do real simple math, just napkin math, you could just say, “I want to send a nice postcard.” You didn’t show a little guy. You showed a nice large size postcard. If you want to send color printed both sides and you want to mail this, you could say a buck, right? A buck for each one you want to mail. So if you start looking at data and you say, “Okay, well, I’ve got 5,000 potential customers in this area. Okay, my napkin math, I’m going to say 5,000.” And that just gets you started, and then that’s when you’ll have conversations with Michael or Austin and really get into those numbers because chances are that napkin math is going to be even a little exaggerated. It’s probably going to be cheaper for you than that. What about scaling up to something larger pieces, something folded or a brochure or something a little bit larger than just a postcard?

Austin Gordon:
Yeah, I pulled another example. And for the sake of targeting, let’s say the whole state of Florida and you want to send out 10,000 brochures, we’ll just give an example of a tri-folded brochure, you’re probably looking at anywhere from 16 cents to 30, 40 cents per piece. And again, that’s going to mail as a letter. So you’re looking again at that 40 cent per piece for your postage. All in all, you’re probably looking at anywhere from 60 cents to 80 cents all in-

Marc Vila:
Right, so…

Austin Gordon:
… for those brochures.

Marc Vila:
So if we say, I’m just going to bring out my little math here, so if we said 60 cents on the low end of that times 10,000, you could get for… So $6,000, you can get a physical piece in the hands of a very targeted group of people. We talked about the data is important. You’re not just mailing to an entire zip code. You’re mailing to people of this age who potentially own this type of business in this demographic. You could really tighten that down to almost anything. We didn’t talk about this ahead of time, but Michael, can you talk a little bit about how granular can the data get if you really want to target a certain audience?

Michael Palme:
So to answer your question, Marc, very targeted. And to the point where if you want to go after a certain age group, maybe between the ages of 20 to 35, that has been looking at, I don’t know, what do age 20 and 35-year-olds care about? We will use video games as the example, I guess. We can figure out, okay, here’s how many of those individuals in that age group have been shopping for a new Xbox 360, or I shouldn’t say new Xbox 3… Xbox One or whatever-

Marc Vila:
Xbox One.

Michael Palme:
… the new Xbox is. Is it One S?

Marc Vila:
PS 5, maybe.

Michael Palme:
Yeah, PS 5. Okay. But anyways, yeah, there’s a lot. You can really drill down deep into the data. Now, as the deeper you get, the cost, right, because some of that data is just a little harder to generate and I’ll say mine, but it’s out there. And what we would typically recommend and what we’ve seen is the more in depth you go with the data, going back to what we were talking about earlier, the more effective your piece is going to be, the higher the ROI. So it really works out. And again, I think the more that you can go down and just really find who those individuals are, the more success you’ll have when doing direct mail.

Marc Vila:
We live in a creative space, so almost everybody listening to this is a creative-minded person. So they’re a graphic artist or they know what something… If they’re not graphic artists, they know what good art looks like. They know how to capture attention. They know how to decorate something and make it pop. That’s what they do for a living. And so since you’re a creative person, the gold in this conversation, I think, comes right here. If you can put together a niche product that you sell and find that niche audience and you can advertise that to them in a physical piece in direct mail and back it up digitally, you can open up a really cool market that potentially there’s almost no competition in your area for.

And I’ll give… I had an extreme example come to my head, but if you want to operate in the state of Florida and the niche you have is you do Latino style, anime manga style art that’s in Spanish, you could go through and you could potentially buy an audience of people who are Spanish speaking, interested in anime, manga and other types of animation like that. And you could potentially buy that target audience, people who are 25 to 45 years old, males, Spanish-speaking, that’s an audience you could potentially purchase. Then you could put together a digital and a direct mail piece selling the t-shirts that you sell that are very specific to that audience. Who else is advertising that product? Minimal.

So the gold is really in do you have a niche that you work in? Do you have something that you’re passionate about? The audience is obtainable. And then once you have that audience, how do you get to them? And getting a physical piece in their hand is one of the closest ways you can get outside of literally shaking their hand or having a phone call. It’s the next level down on physical touch to be able to actually capture that audience.

Michael Palme:
Yeah, for sure. And I know we’ve been spending a lot of time in this whole data topic, but I would just say, it’s pretty mind-blowing the amount of companies that I feel like aren’t really leveraging data in their marketing today and their marketing efforts they’re doing today. So I would just say if you never really use data or maybe you use data but not to the extent you should be using it, there’s just so much information out there to your point, Marc. And it can really improve your campaign, so take advantage of it.

Marc Vila:
Now, that data is something that your company and others sell. Or is it that you lease the data, you can use it for a certain period of time, or how does that work?

Michael Palme:
So Taylor, we have our own internal data analytics team and it’s really our own, I’ll call it data engine that we have. So we do in fact sell that data and we sell it it could be a one-time use or if you sell it to a customer and they want to pay the price, it’s theirs to use however they would like to use it. So there’s a couple of different, I guess, options there.

Marc Vila:
Okay. And the cost on that is it can vary widely too, right?

Michael Palme:
Depending on-

Marc Vila:
I imagine from hundreds to tens of thousands if it’s a giant pool of data.

Michael Palme:
Yeah, I would say you’re typically, these are rough numbers of course, but anywhere maybe between a hundred dollars per thousand up to… Per thousand records, that is. And then on the high end, 3 to 400 per thousand records. So it just all depends.

Marc Vila:
So a nice simple list. If I said I wanted to get 10,000 doctor’s offices in Florida with a certain niche, that might be on the low end of that because a pretty simple piece of data, right?

Michael Palme:
Exactly, exactly.

Marc Vila:
You could almost just Google search all those. Now, if I wanted to find more specific Spanish-speaking male doctors interested in sports, that one might go on the higher end of it because there’s a lot more data behind it. But either way, affordable. You figure your first mailer, you could spend 500, a thousand dollars on data and then a thousand dollars to mail it. Theoretically, if you had a nice small one, for a couple of thousand dollars, you can get started. And that’s on the low end. If you’re doing on the high end, you may be spending 2 or $3,000 in the data and you may be spending $5,000, $8,000 on the mail. It really just depends on the size, but it’s scalable.

Michael Palme:
Yep, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Well, great. Now, there’s a couple other things I wanted to cover before we wrap this up. For one is just we’ve talked about money and a little bit of what it costs to send out a piece of mail, but what about an overall marketing budget for this? What do you think is a minimum number, let’s just say for a year or six months, something like that, that you would want to spend on this?

And the reason why I bring this up is all the time I have folks come up to me and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about advertising on Facebook. I had a few hundred bucks. I was just going to drop it in on an ad.” And I would just say, “Just spend the few hundred dollars on something else. Print samples and just mail them to people or just print samples and drive in your car around town and drop them off, because a few hundred dollars is not necessarily going to be that impactful on something like Instagram or Facebook.” And I’d find direct mail is probably the same thing. Just dropping one 4 x 6 postcard in your area is not necessarily going to make you a million dollars. So what do you think is a starting budget for a six or 12-month period that you should have in your mind before you want to go down this journey?

Michael Palme:
Yeah, for sure. So I’ll start and then Austin, you can feel free to chime in. But typically, Marc, I would say if you don’t have budgeted at least a thousand or $2,000 a month to spend on direct mail, I would say it’s not really worth it.

And one of the things also that I would highlight just as it relates to direct mail, it’s typically, it can be a long game in that depending on what your call to action is and the piece and ultimately who you’re targeting, what your product or service is. It could take a while. So if you’re able to pair that direct mail with an omnichannel type approach, including direct mail marketing ads and email, all of that going to that one person, we typically see the fastest conversion rates with those. So again, yeah, it’s got to be more than a couple grand a month to make it effective.

Austin Gordon:
Yeah. And adding to what Michael said, a lot of times when a customer is new to using direct mail as a marketing tool is what we’ll do is a three-month campaign and do three drops, one each month, and just see how that performs. But even then, that’s not a full timeline for them to really interact with the piece. We’ve seen good ROI’s on three-month campaigns, but it can take a year of monthly mailings for them to see that ROI.

I think, Marc, we were talking earlier, when you’re targeting people on Instagram or Facebook, it’s not you’re sending ads to 500 people and one of them’s going to buy. It’s you sending 500 ads to 500 people or an ad to 500 people five times hoping that one of them is going to buy from that multiple touch points. So yeah, like Michael said, I think it’s a long game with direct mail and you want to have multiple touch points with the customer to see the ROI in the end.

Marc Vila:
Right, right. There’s a couple mindsets on this. There’s the longer one would be if you print signs and you print all different size and styles of signs, the great contract you would love to have is somebody who has five retail candle shops and every season they are changing window signage and signs that are out front and internal signage in the store. That’s a nice gold account to have, that every season they’re consistently changing too. Well, if they already have an existing provider because they have five stores in your local area, so they’re already doing this. Why would they switch to you?

That’s a long tail one for you. You have to continuously show them value that you provide this and then just wait for the right opportunity. Maybe you have a specific holiday offer that they’re interested in. Maybe you have a new idea they haven’t done before. Their previous provider dropped the ball too many times and now they decided, “You know what? It’s time to change.” And you’re the one that they recognize next. All right, so that’s a long tail.

Now, that’s going to be expensive to get that client. It may take eight months worth of direct mail and digital advertising and such to get that client. However, now you’ve got five stores doing seasonal advertising changing in their signage every 30, 60 days or less. It’s a serious big money account for you. So it could have cost you $2,000 in regards to how much it costs to actually get that client to place their first order, but they’d maybe worth a hundred thousand dollars a year. And that’s a great long tail game where you’re saying, “I’m going to invest in direct mail to this specific niche, these retail stores in my area because that’s what I want to go after.” The chances of one of those retail stores just coincidentally at the day they got the mail is when their current vendor just failed and they’re just like, “I’m…” And they just hate call you. They’re so mad at their other vendor, they just call you. That happens, and that type of luck happens in direct mail or email advertising, but most of the time it’s a long tail.

Now, there is a short tail side of this too. If you wanted to try to experiment with something a little shorter, like a 90-day plan where you can look for some activity. That needs to be a tight offer that’s an easy decision to make immediately. So you have one product potentially you’re trying to sell. If we just go down the sign route, maybe you have a particular style of sign you’re going to sell. It’s a particular idea. You’re going to have a very low price for it. Where a business owner may get that thing and say, “You know what? I’m going to order one of these and try it out.” Or if it’s a t-shirt offer, it’s got to be maybe a very aggressive deal to get that first conversion, potentially not a moneymaker if you want to try to convert fast.

So convert fast is going to be, “You can get 20 shirts at this price, get 10 hats for free.” And then someone’s like, “Oh my gosh, that’s freaking… I’m going to lose the money on that.” Well, but you’re trying to get a quick conversion. You’re trying to immediately get into those shops in a short period of time. You’ve got to have something aggressive to go after.

So there’s some short and long-term. The short one also might be the example of the graduation science, the Coroplast signs that people put in their yard. That’s going to be something that somebody is going to make a decision to buy that probably within the month that they’re graduating. So if you’re hitting them with direct mail pieces in April, May, June, or whatever those three-month period is, that’s when you’re going to make those sales. And then that campaign’s over because chances are somebody is not going to hold on to that flyer, that brochure, or that email until two years from now when their other kid graduates. They’re going to already have forgotten who you are. So those are short-term things where you’re trying to sell a product now at a very particular opportunity, and you look for results then too.

Michael Palme:
And Marc, one thing you just were talking through as it related to the perhaps timing that direct mail piece. So just so everyone is aware, typically after the printing portion of the piece is done and it’s sent off to USPS, it’s about two to three weeks potentially before that piece actually gets into the mail stream. So just from a marketing perspective and trying to time your message correctly, that’s just something to, I guess, keep in mind.

Marc Vila:
Earlier and planning is important on this. You can schedule an email the morning of to go out, but if you’re dealing… And by the way, everybody in this industry probably gets this immediately because they all have a customer who contacts them and says, “Hey, can you make me 500 shirts?” “Of course, yeah. When do you want them by?” “I think you can get them by Thursday.” And they’re like, “Do you have the art? Do you have this? “I don’t know. You’re going to have to pay a rush fee. So everybody in this industry gets it.

The additional piece that everyone listening needs to get is that you also have to deal with the post office. So you have to deal with the government to get them to help you finish this last leg of it. So it’s important that if you’re thinking about doing advertising for the holiday season, if you’re thinking about doing Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, that type of stuff, I would start having those conversations now. At least open the book now and have the conversation now because you’re going to want to have all the pieces in your timing just right, because if you start to have the conversation in October about sending something out for Christmas or New Year’s, we’re not saying that can’t happen but you’ve got a tough road of everything’s got to line up. So it’s just important. Planning is really important for this more than anything else.

And if you’re used to doing digital advertising or cold calling or selling, which are all things I’m used to doing, we can execute that stuff immediately. So my team and how we handle any type of print type of stuff. We recently put together a magazine as you can see right there if you’re looking on camera, and that took months of building out the content, getting it approved, printing it. All that took months to do and that’s not something we normally were doing. So for us, it was a learning experience. And I think as we go into more print type of things, like additional copies of that Customize Now magazine, we’re still learning lessons. So no matter how dedicated our team is and experienced our team is, when you move into a new media, it’s going to take you some time to learn. And we’re still learning doing print. Just a small pitch on that.

If you are in the direct-to-film business or screen printing business, if you’re thinking about direct-to-film printing and you’re still in that decision-making phase, be sure to go to coldesi.com and you could just live chat or fill out a form and let them know that you’d like us to mail you a copy of that Customize Now DTF edition, and we’ve got a bunch of articles and a bunch of great information that’s in there. It’s completely free. So just a little pitch for that.

Okay, there’s one other thing I’d like to ask and then we can wrap it up today. So maybe Austin, if you would kick this one off, what are the steps to getting started? So let’s just use somebody wants to start sending direct mail out for the summer, something going on the summer camp type of stuff, and how do they get started today? What are just some of the steps to they’re going to be able to get their first piece in somebody’s hands?

Austin Gordon:
Yeah. I would say the first step is defining who your audience is. This is a step that someone like Taylor could help with in brainstorming, but truly no one’s going to know your ideal customer better than you yourself. You know who your customers typically are, and defining that is a first and most important step.

Secondly, after you know who that audience is, let’s work to collect the data to see how many people are out there. Once we figure that out, we’ll determine, all right, now what’s the budget that we can work with to how many pieces we can mail out and target to that specific audience.

After that, it’s designing the mail piece and coming up with a call to action. We work hard to deliver to the right people at the right time using the data, but it’s almost most important to have the right message, that call to action that’s going to say, “I actually should do this.” Marc, you touched on it earlier, is that call to action, if you want those instant results or those quick wins, it’s probably the most important piece.

And then after you have your audience and your design and your call to action figured out, then it’s as simple as getting an artwork to a printer, getting the mailing list to a printer. If you weren’t working with them before that for the designing piece and the data, getting that to a printer and getting it to a press. It’s a lot simpler than you think once you get the planning done on who’s going to be receiving the piece.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Yeah, that’s great. So essentially it’s data, the message design, and then print and mail is a simple steps on that. And then I’d like to add in just a little bit of just general marketing for this type of advertising. This really goes for everything else. If you just want to advertise that you’re a new business in town, let’s just say that you’ve had your sign shop, you’ve had your t-shirt shop for six months and you just want to let everybody in the area know. Maybe you do want to do a little bit of a blast to every small business within three zip codes. That’s great. And you can put out your website and your logo and your name and some samples and your phone number and all this. The problem with that type of messages as it sits right there is how do you know it worked?

Now, you could say, “Well, I got busy,” and that is one indicator, but also were you doing anything else that could have gotten you busy? Were you making cold calls and knocking on doors and going to… you join the local chamber of commerce or something like that? So how do you directly do that? And one of the things you could do is you can… Just a couple little tips and tricks. Whoever does your phone service, you could probably get a secondary phone number. And everything’s digital now, so you could put a different phone number on that postcard. And then when somebody dials that phone number, they’re dialing the specific phone number, which just goes to you anyway.

Your business size, it may even still ring cell phones of a couple of people if you’re doing forwarding like that, but you could probably get a report from that phone company on how many times that phone number rang. So you put that phone number on mailers. You put that on for a year, then at the end of the year, you could physically say how many times did people call the phone number on that mail? And that gives you a nice piece of data.

You can also do it with a specific website. You can literally just, you can… And this is if you don’t know how to do this, whoever handles your website can do this. You have a different web address. It’s a name of your business, may be shorter or slightly different. And then whoever handles your web property can set up that URL. And then every time somebody typed that in somewhere, that you can get a report on how many people typed that in.

Also, very specific offers are important too, a very specific coupon, a very specific deal that people will mention. And I recommend doing two or three or four of these very specific things because you want to add them all up together because not everybody’s going to call. Not everybody’s going to use the coupon. It’s a surprising piece of data on how many coupons go out that people end up doing business with the company and do not use the coupon that they got. It’s less than 50% of people. So if you send out a coupon and you got five people who used it, chances are you had 10 people who actually bought from you because of that piece of advertising, but only half of them use the coupon.

So it’s important to stack these things together, a specific website, a specific QR code, a specific video you tell them to watch, a specific phone number or a specific action. So being very specific, so it’s trackable is really important. So that’s an important part of that center sliver there, Gordon, on where you mentioned. Like when you’re picking your plan and your message, make sure you stick in their ways to be able to track that.

And then just going back a bit to what Michael talked about earlier with data, you are more likely to get business if you say, “Okay, I want to expand to my area.” So I’m actually going to break it down into medical field, restaurants, finance, mortgage, investment type of firms. Maybe you break it down into five categories. And when you buy the data or you rent the data, you’re going to say, “All right, I want all these five different types of businesses in these five different areas. Okay, it’s a thousand a piece.” Now, I want to do the mailing for the signs for dental or medical. It’s going to be all medical themed. You’re going to have doctors stethoscope, the sign is going to say, “Free vaccines here,” stuff like that.

And then the thing for the finance people, you’re going to show people in suits, shaking hands, computers with charts with arrows going up, whatever. So when that person gets that message, it directly relates to them versus the doctor getting a message of a chart with an arrow going up. That doesn’t mean anything to them. But to the finance person, they really see that as impactful. So naturally that’s all possible, right, if somebody wanted to do that?

Austin Gordon:
100%. And that’s the space that printing in general is moving into is that highly personalized piece, that customizable piece that allows you to do those targeted mailings.

One example I want to give, Marc, when you were talking about tracking and how different ways that people that we’ve worked with have tracked is I was walking around one of our facility floors with a general manager of one of our facilities, and there was this cool piece of direct mail and he’s like, “Hey.” But nobody can take their phones out and take a picture of that because they have these QR codes that are specific to the person that receives it. So when someone takes out their phone and scans the mail piece that they get, the company that was doing this campaign would get notified saying, “Hey, Marc scanned the QR code on this mail piece. They’re interested in XYZ. You should email them. You should hit them with a digital ad.” It’s really cool what customization and personalization can do in the direct mail space that can really give you a lot of answers and really track how well campaign is performing and how are people interacting with the piece.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s actually, that’s awesome. It’s really just so cool how tight you can go into everything. But yeah, the bare minimum is you work with some folks who know what they’re doing. You figure out a niche. You go through the processes. You work early in advance. And you plan on having a reasonable size budget of this over time. Don’t just say, “I just want to spend 500 bucks and send something out once.” That’s not going to get you anywhere.

And honestly, if you talk to a company like Taylor, they may even just say, “You should probably just do that on your own.” It’s not worth it for all the trouble. But if you’re going to go into, “I want to try out a 90-day campaign or I want an annual budget. I really want to dive into this,” then you want to work with people who will help to guide you in the right direction, give you some good advice, have a little bit of strategy phone call, and ultimately send out a piece that you’re going to be proud to have sent out that hopefully works. That’s the ultimate goal, is that it works.

Well, we covered a good amount of stuff today. I think it’s probably time to wrap up this episode. But do either of you have anything else you wanted to add or anything that we missed in regards to direct mail and growing your business?

Michael Palme:
The last thing that I was going to say, Marc, going back to the topic we were just on, is I think when starting off a direct mail piece, it’s really about how are you going to measure your campaign that you’re doing and then ultimately defining what success looks like for you as an organization. And those are absolutely conversations you should be having with your partner who you’re going to be doing the direct mail with. So is it going to be an acquisition type campaign? Are you going to be cross-selling a certain product or service? Those are all things that should happen at the beginning so that we all know as a group and who you’re partnering with, what we’re trying to accomplish. So yeah, but that was the last thing, I guess, that I had as it relates to direct mail. And I think those are two very important things to think about when you’re discussing doing a direct mail campaign.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Excellent. Well, I greatly appreciate you guys coming on here and educating some people for free on a topic like this that’s not necessarily, it’s not as flashy as because somebody… Everyone out there is, again, we talked about should I be doing influencer marketing? How do I reach influencers and get into that? And the problem with some of the new and hot things is they get to be really crowded spaces, and there’s a ton of question marks on what works and how it works, and everybody has a magic formula that they say works and nobody really knows that they do. But if you go to these methods that have been around for, I have no idea when direct mail started, this Pony Express, I don’t even know. I don’t even know, right?

But it’s been around so long that it’s a challenge for somebody to come and feed you a bunch of lies that you can’t verify like it is with brand new stuff like influencer marketing. You could be fed a bunch of information with nothing to back it up or a bunch of information that’s not tried and true. But when it comes to pieces like print and direct mail, this is stuff that the data has been there for decades. Not only has direct mail been happening for hundreds of years or however long, but good data has been around for, I don’t know, 50 years probably of when people really started marketing and collecting data. So there’s really good data on this, meaning what works, what doesn’t work, how to do it, bringing the cost down. There’s a lot of great, solid good information that you can get. So it’s a good tried and true piece of marketing that can help grow your business.

So if it sounds right for you, of course you can feel free to reach out to the folks over at Taylor. Gracious that they came on here. So if you wanted to chat with any of them, we’ll make sure that you’re able to reach them in the podcast notes. So if you go to customapparelstartups.com or just ColDesi and just reach out to anybody on the team, you can also send an email to marketing at coldesi.com. That’s going to go to our marketing team. And people do this all the time, but literally just write an email and say, “Hey, Marc, I listened to the episode about direct mail. Can you help get me an introduction?” And I’ll just pass it along. It’s really no big deal at all. The fact that we got some of this education to help you guys out is really important to me, and I know it is to the folks over at Taylor. So thanks for joining us, and thanks everybody listening, and have a good business.

Austin Gordon:
Thanks, Marc.

Marc Vila:
Thank you.

Michael Palme:
Thanks, Marc.

 

 

 

 

 

In this episode, we dive into the exciting world of entrepreneurial spirit with a focus on launching a custom t-shirt business. We’ll explore a practical, step-by-step guide designed for beginners eager to make a mark in the t-shirt industry, even with little to no prior experience. Whether you’ve dabbled in t-shirt sales or are just curious about this creative venture, this episode is your gateway to starting a successful side hustle immediately.

We’ll dissect a downloadable document that outlines six actionable strategies that have proven successful for startups across the country. From leveraging your personal network to making smart use of social media and local community engagement, we cover all the bases to ensure you’re well-equipped to start generating business right away.

Join us as we reveal the secrets to turning referrals into sales, using everyday interactions as promotional opportunities, and why something as simple as a well-timed text message or a social media post can be incredibly effective. If you’re ready to start making money by selling custom t-shirts, this episode will provide you with the knowledge and inspiration to hit the ground running. Tune in to transform these insights into action and start achieving your dreams today!

Transcript

Marc Vila:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the CAS podcast. For those of you who have listened before, this is the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. And a little inside information, a little behind the scenes, I’m thinking about adjusting the name to CAS Customize Adapt and Scale podcast because the roots of the podcast was starting up custom apparel businesses, and that’s what a lot of the topics have been. But we’ve also been evolving the content to include other types of customization businesses, and also not just startups, but taking your existing business and growing it. So behind the scenes, we may never talk about that again, or it might become the new name. I guess we’ll see, but you could feel free to add any input if you’d like. You can email marketing@coldesi.com and tell us what you think about that name or any other names.

But anyway, since we’re talking about changing the podcast or changing the name of it, we’re actually going to do an episode today. I’m going to do an episode on the roots of the podcast, and the roots of the podcast is starting a custom apparel business, and that’s what this episode is about. It’s the secret to selling T-shirts right away. And this is a topic that’s been really important because we’ve been speaking to a lot of folks who are getting into the transfer business or just getting into the T-shirt business, and they get so wrapped up in so many little things that they miss the picture of just the point is to make some money right away, get successful, make the payment on something you may have financed or start putting some money on that business bank account so you can actually grow the business. Maybe you don’t have a piece of equipment yet and you’re hoping to buy a machine. Maybe you just bought something small and you’re hoping one day to grow to something larger. Whatever it is, this episode is for you.

And there is an accompanying document that you can download and we’ll connect it to the podcast episode on customapparelstartups.com. You can download this so you can keep this yourself, print it out, share it with somebody. We’ll first go ahead and say who this episode specifically is for. Then I’ll put an asterisk at the end of that. If you’ve got little no experience selling shirts, definitely for you if you’ve sold some other products, but maybe you haven’t sold custom T-shirts yet, this is definitely for you as well. Or if you’ve dabbled in the T-shirt business, but you haven’t gotten far, maybe you just have a hobby type of a machine, like a cricut, or maybe you’ve sold some transfers here and there to random customers, but you’ve never tried to really sell or market the business. So those are really the top three that I wrote all this for.

But the asterisks that I’m going to put at the end is anybody who’s selling any product, most of what I’m going to say today is very, very useful to you. Also, if you’ve been in business for a long time, these are the little things that you forget about. You get so caught in the weeds of all of these complicated ways to generate business. Maybe you’ve got ads running in a website, an SEO and a sales team and all these things, you forget about the simplest way to make money right away.

So here we go. Let’s dive into the secret to selling T-shirts right away. And we’re going to go one, two, three. And I’m going to start off by saying some of this stuff is so simple that you’re going to say, “Oh, come on. I was hoping to get a real secret.” This actually is the secret, and let me tell you why it’s the secret. It’s a secret because when we’ve talked to business after business after business, startup after startup, and we ask them, “How did you get your first customers? How did you get enough money to make your payment? How’d you get yourself to the point where you bought a second machine?” these are the things that everyone says over and over again. These are almost always the success stories. No matter how big a business gets, these methods are a part of their success story, almost 100% of the time in the customization industry.

Now, further from that, there are so many people who start selling T-shirts, they start a business, they actually don’t do any of these things and they fail. And so these are the simple things that you do. And we’ll compare it to some other things in life real quick. I love to talk, that’s why I have a podcast, but let me explain why I really want to hammer this point in.

How do you lose some weight? If you go to the doctor, the doctor says, “Gosh, you need to lose 20 pounds. It’s going to be better for your heart.” So I got to lose 20 pounds. How are you going to do it? Right? You can jump on, you can jump on the internet, and you can buy a pill and you can buy some juice to do a cleanse, and you can start the paleo diet or you can start the Atkins diet. There’s 40 different ways to do it. You can buy injections. All of these ways will probably get you to lose that 20 pounds in one way or another. However, the simplest way, generally speaking, when you talk to fitness experts is you eat less, exercise more, right? You burn more calories than you put in. And everyone says, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I get that. That’s so simple,” but that really is when you talk to a lot of experts, they say, “Well, that’s the first place. All these other tools are things you could do to break through further, but the easiest thing to do is you just eat less calories and work out.”

And I think that’s what this comes down to. How do you do that for your selling T-shirt business? So let’s dive into the three. The first three to start, and the first one is I say take out your phone, right? That’s what I call this one. You take out your phone, you go to your contacts, and you have a text message that you’ve written ahead of time, that you can copy and paste or you can rewrite it each time and you do say something like this, and it’s in the document that I have available for download. “Hi,” name. “I’ve started a custom T-shirt business. If you know anyone who needs custom T-shirts, please send them my way. It’d be a huge help to kick things off. Of course, if you need anything yourself, just let me know,” and that’s it.

And you send that to everybody who you think is reasonable in your contacts to send that to. So generally speaking, that’s going to be all your family members, parents, siblings, cousins, anybody like that. They should know this. These are going to be… Generally speaking, your family is your biggest advocates in your life. Next is going to be your best friends. So all your close friends, make sure that they know. And just part of the formula of this is, let them know that you’re reaching out to them. Let them know what it’s about. Let them know that you want a referral. Let them know it would be a big help to you.

That’s the formula in that. So you can rewrite this how you want, but it needs to include those things, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. Ask for the help. Let them know that the help will help you a lot because it will. It’s 100% honest. It’s the most honest message you can send. Please help me get business because it’ll be a huge help to me. And these people who are your advocates, your best friends, your family, previous business associates, these are all people that are going to say, wow, that’s awesome.

And I will say, if you do this, if you wake up at nine a.m and you do this throughout the day and you send it to 20, 30, 40 people, whatever the number is, just a text message, you’re probably going to get a referral that day. Somebody is going to say, “Oh yeah, my cousin so-and-so. Oh yeah, so-and-so just started a business. I was getting ready to order some new shirts. The person who makes my shirts right now actually does a bad job. Maybe you can do them.” So there you go, just take out your phone, send a text message, write a template, make sure it goes well.

If you want to get fancy, write two templates and split them. So if you’re going to send it to 20 people or 40 people, send 10 or 20 half of them, 10 or 20, the other half, and you’ve just created a little A, B test and see which one of those responses gets more. So that’s just a little sidebar thing you can do to help test your messages.

Again, this is so simple, it’s almost ridiculous, but it’s just a fact. This works. Go to social media. Now, I mean your personal one, right? This is your Facebook, your Instagram, your TikTok, X, whatever you use a lot. Hopefully you have friends and family and folks that follow you, that you interact with. If you have a bunch of generic strangers following an account, this is not probably going to work as well. Also, if you just started a business account that five people are following, this isn’t going to work as well too. This is the place where your grandma’s at or your cousin or your best friend or your grandkid, wherever they are. The people who are going to advocate for you, they need to be here.

Here’s what you say, “Hey, everybody just launched a custom T-shirt business. I’m super excited. If you or anyone needs a professional or a personalized tee, I had love to help you create something unique, please consider supporting me. Please pass my name on to others. Thanks a ton. You all are going to help me succeed.” Same formula as before. This is what I’m doing. This is what I’m asking you to do for me. I want you to do it because you’re my friend, family, etc. It’s going to be a huge help. Thank you. Simple formula. Let them know what you want, what to do, and then let them know why they should do it, and it’s because they’re going to help you. They’re advocates. Again, this is another one. If you post this on Facebook and you have a decent amount of friends and family on there that you’ve gathered over the years or Instagram, whatever, you will get a message or a response on that within moments, more than likely, “Oh yeah, I know somebody. I’m going to message you right now,” right? So this works.

The next one’s a little bit different. Again, simple and these work. So the next one, I called it cards and wear your product. So if you’ve printed some business cards, great. If not, that’s fine. You can make a flyer if you wanted to, but keep it simple, right? You have a business card, you have some information with your name and contact on it and what you do.

And then wear your product. So by wearing your product, which I just realized through this video, I’m not wearing my product. I brought a ColDesi shirt. I did not wear it today, so don’t follow my lead apparently. But anyway, wear your product. So what do I mean by that is make a polo shirt, make a T-shirt, make a hat that says your business name. Maybe it says what you do. So-and-so’s business custom T-shirts, whatever it might be. Wear that, wear that thing around for one. If you go out to breakfast, if you go to a bagel shop, if you go to local coffee shops, local diners, local little league games, anything you do where you’re going, places where you’re going to know and potentially interact with people, whether it’s managers of businesses, workers and businesses, parents, teachers, students, etc. You should wear what you have. You should also have some business cards with you. They’re super cheap to get nowadays and keep your business card simple at first. What you do, email, phone number, name, simple. And you just go around and you just tell people what you do.

One of the recommendations for this specifically, if you want to get some business to business type of stuff, go to the places where you normally patron. So if there’s a breakfast place, a coffee shop, a bagel shop, anywhere where you normally go, hardware store where you know people that work there, try to talk to the manager. I’m going to recommend you do this probably mid-afternoon. That’s usually a good time to solicit these types of folks. I say solicit, but you’re going to interrupt their day and ask them for business in one way or another. So you’re kind of doing that. And you say something like this, “Hey, manager, I’ve been coming here a lot. I’ve been inspired on how well this business does or how well you run your business.” I would recommend complimenting them. “I’ve been inspired by how well your business does. This led me to create my own business more. I make custom T-shirts, hats, and more. If you happen to have a need or know anyone who does, please let me know. Here’s my card. I make stuff like this,” and you’re wearing a shirt, whether it’s a polo, a hat, a T-shirt, or more than one of them.

So I recommend talking to the people that work at these places, business owners, just, again, you’re not saying, can I make you shirts now? Or you don’t have to be a hardcore salesperson to do this. All you have to do is just let them know.

Similarly, with the cards and wear your product, which I didn’t write in this example in the document we have available, but it’s very similar. If you go to little league or your kids play soccer or your friend’s kids are in cheerleading, whatever it might be. If you’re attending events like this and you’re sitting next to parents and small talk comes up, if you’re wearing your apparel, you’re going to have people just say it to you. You’re going to forget you have your shirt on and someone’s going to say, “Wait, you do custom T-shirts.” So that’s a cool part about that. Second is you’re just going to have small talk with somebody, “Oh, yeah. Oh wow, your kid. That’s your kid. Oh, wow, look at that. Great hit. Oh, fast runner,” whatever they’re going to say. You’re making small talk.

And then just sometimes during that small talk, it doesn’t have to be a long conversation, you just say, “Oh, what do you do? What do you do for a living?” “Oh, I’m a plumber,” whatever it is. “Oh, okay, cool. Actually, as you can see, probably from my T-shirt, I do custom T-shirts.” “Okay, cool.” And you can leave it like that for a bit when you go to say goodbye, or maybe just right then and there, whenever it works, hand them a card and say, “Hey, great to meet you. By the way, if you ever need any shirts or anybody, thank you.” And also I would say, “I’m trying to grow this business, by the way. It’d be a huge help.” Everyone’s going to love the honesty on that.

These three things right here are going to make you money on T-shirts immediately. And I know that they seem so simple and they seem so obvious. But I will say in my experience and experience of plenty of the folks that work here, folks who try to skip this stuff and get really, really fancy in the beginning, they get down these frustrated rabbit holes when there is somebody literally a text message away who needs a dozen T-shirts made next week.

So we’ve gone through the first three, and then we’ll move on to just the note about this, because all of these do have something in common. They mention referrals. If you need some or you know anybody, right? You happen to know anyone else, let me know. Pass my name on please. So referrals are huge. All of these are potentially the person you’re messaging will need something, but also they’re about the referral. The referral is huge.

When we survey customers, I’ve been surveying custom apparel businesses and customization businesses for over a decade now, and almost every time I do small group surveys or individual conversations, I say, “How do you get your business?” 70, 80, 100% sometimes of these folks businesses, they say referrals. And I was like, “Well, what do you mean by that?” “I just tell people what I do. They send me business. I do a good job for somebody. Next thing you know, a friend or a colleague of theirs called me up and said, ‘Hey, you did a great job for so-and-so would you do the same type of deal for me?” So if you’re selling within your local community, which by the way is a great way to kickstart. Somebody who’s listening to me right now is thinking to themself, “Yeah, but I’m trying to start an apparel brand,” or, “I’m trying to start a funny T-shirt business online,” or, “I want to sell rock band shirts to concerts.” All that’s awesome. I love every single one of those businesses. They are great ways to make money. They’re great ways to make a lot of money. The challenge is getting started in that stuff is a bit harder.

So what’s the story that is typical when you watch a movie and there is a starting actor or actress in Hollywood? The story is they’re always like a bartender or a server. That’s just always what they are in a movie, and in real life, that’s common too. And the reason is they actually have to make money while they’re trying to get big. These little gigs that they get here and there and while they’re kicking off are not going to pay the bills. And that’s how it is. If you have a really grand or awesome idea about selling funny T-shirts online, it may be a challenge to kick that off.

So while you’re doing that, you can make custom stuff for friends, family, associates, local businesses. That might not be the dream. It’s not the dream for the actor to be tending bar. That’s not their dream, but that’s part of getting to it. So part of getting to it, if you have an awesome idea for a website or whatever it is, the way you can actually do it is put some money in your pocket to help fund that dream through referrals and through asking for the business.

So great. We’ve gotten the first three out. These are what you do. All right, next… I’ve got Windows notifications popping up if you’re hearing noises, apparently. So there you go. Real life, right? This is real life, just a podcast. So next we’re going to talk about maximizing referrals. And this is some of my favorite stuff to do. It’s the next three, it’s four, five, and six on this list, and I can’t express how easy this is and how much of this actually works too, and another thing that a lot of folks will skip over, not think about it or just assume referrals come. And they do, but here’s a few ways to get the most out of them.

And I would like to start by saying you’ve got a customer. So you’ve had one customer, you’ve done a good job. That’s where I think we are at this point in time. This is what you’re going to do once you’ve done something well for somebody and they’ve given you money, you’ve exchanged some shirts for some money. One is just ask them for referrals, just like you did up before in the previous things I mentioned, just, “Hey, if you know anybody who can use my services, send them my way. Hey, I am glad that you really like the shirts that I made. Please let other people know that I do this. I did a great job for you. I appreciate it. That’s so awesome. Thanks for leaving me a review on Google,” anything like that, but be sure to ask them to refer you to folks. It’s so easy and it works. So many people are just going to do it just because you simply asked.

The next is what I call promises, and this is a little bit of a level up on the ask, okay? So what you’re going to say to this person is, “I’m glad you like the shirts. Hey, the biggest way you can thank me would be to refer me to others. Would you be willing to share my name with a couple of your associates, a couple of your coworkers, friends, colleagues?” And at this point in time, you’ve got somebody who’s going to say, “Yeah, I will be glad to do that.” They’ve made you a promise essentially at this point in time. It’s not just you saying, if you know anybody, please tell them. It’s saying, will you do this for me? This is a level up from that because we’re taking it from a declarative statement of just saying, “Hey, if you don’t mind, do this for me too.” I’m asking you to do this, will you? The person is saying yes, right? So if somebody enjoys keeping their word, which almost everybody does, then they’re going to want to do this for you.

And a little pro-tip on this, when they agree, reach out your hand and shake on it at that moment. So, “Hey, I’m glad you liked the shirts. The biggest way to thank me is to refer me to others. I’m trying to grow my business. Would you be willing to share my name with a couple other folks that that might need this” “Yeah, of course, I’d be happy to let other folks that I know let you know.” “Great, thank you,” put your hand out, shake on it. At this point in time, it’s almost like they’ve made a next level up agreement with you because they said they would refer and then they shook on that, right? I know it’s a simple little psychological thing, but it’s true. You are trying to grow that business. You did work hard to get them a good product. They were happy with that product, and all you’re asking for is if they run into a situation where they can recommend you, you’d like for them to do that, and that’s a great way to further thank you for the good job you did from them. I love that one.

And the last one is a little more complicated, but it’s very effective and easy. It’s called give and get. It’s another way to encourage referrals and it’s going to… Well, I’ll just say an example. “Hey, if you refer somebody to me, I’ll give them 10% off their order, plus I’ll give you 10% off the next order you make, or, “I’ll give you a free hat,” or whatever the exchange might be. It doesn’t matter, but I like the give and the get. For one, people really like to be able to say, “Oh, you need custom. I know somebody, here you go. Here’s their information. Mention my name. They’re going to give you 20 bucks off their order. Mention my name. They’ll take 10% off the retail price.” People will love the opportunity to be able to help save their friend’s money, and it’s legit. It should be a legitimate savings from the retail price you would’ve charged.

And then, as a thank you, give them something back. So if they are going to frequently order and they spend a hundred dollars every time, well, they’ve referred somebody, maybe that next order you take 20 bucks off or you take 10% off. You’re going to have to play around with some of those. It really depends on what you sell, what your average order value is. It needs to be reasonably exciting. So if you sell $20 T-shirts as an example, and you say, “Hey, I’ll give you 10% off if you refer somebody. Two bucks? Who cares about that, right? Nobody’s going to care about saving two bucks. It’s not going to be exciting enough for them to want to make the effort to tell anybody. They may do it for the previous two reasons, just because you asked or because they said they would, but that two bucks is not going to be exciting. So you need to make it reasonably exciting.

You also need to consider that maybe that order, that one referral order might not be hugely profitable, but the goal is is now you have another customer who’s going to refer you other people and another one, and it spreads. It’s like roots in the ground. One turns to two, turns to four, four turns to eight, and then that’s how you grow the business. So if you’re doing reasonable size orders, like you get a restaurant and it turns out to be a $350 order, 10% off might be cool with that, 30 something bucks. That’s a reasonable savings. If you’re doing single order, you could potentially just maybe just offer at half price. Now, you don’t really make any money, maybe at that half price, but you’ve expanded the business. It’s about experimenting and seeing what that’s like. If all your referrals, you’re not making any money on, then that’s too aggressive. You got to be a little less aggressive, but you’ll figure out the formula for that. But give and get. It’s a great little way to give a thanks to the people who have referred you business and give them another reason to do it.

The next thing we’re going to talk about are traps, right? So you’ve got some great ideas and you’re about to implement them, and then you get caught in one of these three traps. The reason I know that folks get caught in these traps is because I see it almost 100% of the time, the folks who do the above six things I mentioned or have told me they did the above six things, they all fell into one or all three of these traps, and they could’ve done better faster, but instead they got trapped here. So we want to avoid these traps when we’re getting started.

For one, counterintuitive, and I may have disagreed with my previous self in saying this, but this is a reasonable statement, don’t waste your time and money on a website. Okay? So what do I mean by that? What’s going to happen is this is the story, and this is why I’m going to say don’t do this, and I’ll add yet at the end, yet. Start a website later.

But this is what’s going to happen is you’re going to start T-shirt business. You’re going to get things going. You’re going to start asking for referrals. And then while this is happening, you’re going to say, “I’m going to start a Wix website. I heard I could do it for free or cheap,” and you go down that path. So now you’re one, two hours into figuring out how it works, right? Then you’re one to two hours with messing and looking at templates and plugging in things and realizing what you don’t or like then you’re in one or two hours and looking at stock photos and picking ones. That one doesn’t work. That doesn’t fit. I don’t like that person. And now you’re one to two hours and taking photos yourselves. Now you’re writing content. It doesn’t look right. So now you spend an hour or two on Reddit or Googling how to do things right, or tech support. Next thing you know, you’ve literally have 10, 20 hours in this website that doesn’t really look good and not a single person is going to.

So I think I need to say that again in a different way. You’ve never built a website before. The chances of it looking amazing within 10 hours of work are not high, right? People who make websites for a living struggle with making websites look great, okay? So that’s one thing.

And then two is, how is anybody going there? If you are not spending any money driving any traffic, your website’s brand new, it’s not going to get a bunch of SEO right away. You’re not going to all of a sudden just get hundreds of views as soon as you click live. It’s not like it’s just going to be ding, ding, ding, ding, people visiting. That’s not going to happen, right? It’s going to be dead. If you’re looking at analytics, you’re going to have one viewer who was on there for eight seconds because they accidentally got there the wrong way. They made a typo.

I would just say that that doesn’t need to be how you start. Alternatively, you can Google search, Google My Business. You can make a Google page that can have a ton of information, relatively easy and free, significantly simple. You don’t have to put in a credit card. You can also just make a Facebook page. You can just do an Instagram page. These are all things you can do in the beginning that are perfectly fine for getting business from folks in the beginning, especially if you explain your startup, “Hey, I’m a startup. I’m still working on my website, but I have an Instagram account with a ton of work that I’ve done before,” or, “I’ve got a Facebook page I’ve been working on. You can see reviews that some of my customers have left on there,” or, “Just want my website?” you just send them to the Google page. And some of the Google things almost look like websites themselves. They kind of are.

So that is just a super simple way to do it. It’s free. I’m telling you, if you go to Go Daddy or Wicks, you are going to spend 10, 20, 30 hours being lost in there. Every second of the way, they’re going to nickel and dime you for another five bucks a month, another three bucks a month. Oh, you want to do that? Another $8 a month. Next thing you know, you’ve spent like $400 and nobody’s going to it. It doesn’t look that great and it’s not making you any money. Do you think that the folks at Wix and GoDaddy aren’t experts at getting people to come there and spend money on websites? That’s what they’re experts in. They’re experts in people wanting to start a website, spending some money, and they know a bunch of them are going to disappear. That’s not their goal. Their goal is not to make you money. The goal of this podcast is to help make you money. And I’m telling you that you could just skip that for now. Once you’ve got some money rolling in and you’ve got some steady income coming, hopefully you can afford to pay somebody to help you along with building a website, then I would start one. Okay?

The next one is, don’t spend money on advertising. Again, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram, all of these places are going to give you an opportunity. Just click this one button and you can start advertising. And it’s so easy to do, and it will probably not make you any money. And why? It’s because you’re a brand new business. You’re not established, and you are putting money into a marketplace that folks like myself and a ton of my associates and people in the marketing world are experts in.

So you have folks who all day every day advertise on Facebook and Google and Microsoft, and there’s all of these steps to get people to buy, right? And you’ve clicked on plenty of ads yourself. So there’s all these steps. You’re going to throw $150 into that space with people who do this for a living all over it, people who work for Amazon, people who work for Best Buy, all these huge organizations, and you’re going to throw 150 bucks in there and expect it to turn into gold. It’s just probably not going to happen.

And again, another rabbit hole, you’re going to spend an hour trying to set it up, an hour trying to get ideas and two hours trying to figure out why this one thing doesn’t work. Then you’re going to realize, oh, if I’m going to run ads, I need to have a website. Now you’re back to the other one. So you’re going to spend 10 hours messing with that and then 10 hours and making a website. You’re going to put 250 bucks in there and you’re not going to make any money. So avoid that trap. Do ads later. Make some money, have some money to spend, potentially have somebody you can hire or just take this time to learn the ads. So while spend those hours watching videos to understand how ads work, so you can make yourself an expert if you choose not to hire somebody, but in the beginning, really, I would recommend avoiding that. It’s a dangerous game to go in. Unless you plan on spending thousands and thousands of dollars in ads, you probably are not going to be successful in the beginning making money.

And then the third one is don’t try to be a social influencer. Now, if you already have an audience of folks and you are listening to this now trying to make money, great, that’s awesome. If you’ve got an account where you make funny videos and you’ve got 10,000 followers, and some of these rules are going to work for you immediately because you’re going to go to those followers and you’re going to say, “Hey, sell T-shirts, here they are,” and people are going to buy them, cool. But if you’re starting with zero followers and you’re going to make a new account and you’re going to try to make your brand or your image famous, the chances are it’s going to slow roll out for you. And this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work for everybody. It does work for people. It absolutely works for people. Just like how you are scrolling through Instagram or TikTok today, and you’re going to see folks making money on Instagram today. They sell spices, they sell makeup, they sell T-shirts. You’re going to see all these folks. All of these folks have spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours to get to that point.

So if you want to get there and you want to put that time in, do it. But if we’re talking about, let’s go back to the title real quick, the secret to selling T-shirts right away. The secret to selling T-shirts right away is to not try to get yourself to go viral and be an influencer. That’s a great long-term dream, if that is your dream. Otherwise, all those hours you’re going to spend building yourself to be an influencer, for one, can go nowhere. I know folks who are in tons of different businesses from dietitians, personal trainers, T-shirt businesses, consultants for different types of industries, attorneys who have spent hours and hours. I mean, I’m talking hundreds, if not thousands of hours, making videos, posting videos, answering questions that still don’t have more than a few thousand followers.

So it’s like being a musician or an actor or even a great chef. The best guitar player in the world, we probably have not heard of. The best singer in the world, we probably haven’t heard of because there’s so many people at such a crowded space, and it’s more than just the talent.

Mike Angel who works here, he is been on a podcast before his son plays hockey, and he would like to be professional one day, I gather. He’s been doing it for many, many years. But something that Mike said that rung true to me that links right to this podcast is he said, “When the kids get that good, it’s more than just the raw talent,” and that’s what I mean about being a social influencer. You may be really funny or insightful or interesting or have a great brand. All of those may be perfect, but there’s also a little bit of luck and a little bit of who you know and a little bit of the right time, right place, and a little bit of you happen to post at the perfect time and day with the perfect time and idea that boom, all of a sudden you’ve gained a ton of followers and you’re famous.

But the funniest people out there and the funniest and most interesting memes out there, some of them just get lost in the ether. There’s a million things going on. So I would just say, I would encourage you to not try to do that if you’re trying to make money right away. If you’re not necessarily trying to make money right away, go for it.

So in short on these, yes, I think a website is a great idea, later if you’re trying to make money right away. Yes, advertising is an awesome idea and a great way to grow your business when you’re reasonably established and you’ve got some money to invest. And trying to be a social influencer or have a really great social account, if that’s for you, it’s a great idea, but understand that more than likely you are not going to post something great on the internet and make money. That’s probably not going to happen on day one or day 100. It’s going to take time to build up.

So those are three traps that are simple to avoid. If you’re going to spend time doing any of those things, instead, make sure, I hope you’ve gone through all your contacts first. I’ve hope you posted to Facebook a few times, Instagram, wherever you are, and I’ve hope you’ve gone around and spoke to local businesses.

So the last bit is just creating your success. That’s how I finished it. The above formula is just simple. And the reason why it’s so simple and it works is because, I wrote these examples down, but if you go to somebody’s house and they give you a cupcake, “Hey, here’s some cupcakes I made,” and you bite into it, and it’s amazing, “Wow, how do you make these so good?” Chances are they’ve made a thousand cupcakes before that one. You’re eating the 1,000th cupcake. You’re not eating the first one that they ever made more than likely. And I bet a bunch of those batches were flat, tasteless, dry, sticky. The icing looked terrible. It took a long time, and they got there.

If you ask somebody, “Oh, how do I get a date? I’m single. I’m trying to meet people. What do I do?” a lot of the times people will say, “You just go up to say hi to somebody.” You say hello. You go up and walk to somebody and say, hi. You don’t need any pickup line. You don’t necessarily need services. You don’t have to pay anybody. You just go up and say hi to people. And when you’re curious about how somebody is fit, as I mentioned an example before, chances are they eat super healthy and they go to the gym all the time. That’s how they’re super fit. That’s how they have big muscles and a six-pack or whatever it is. It’s because they work really hard at it.

And that’s what’s so simple about this stuff. If you want to get great at making cupcakes, practice a ton. If you want to go out and get a date or meet people, you go up and you say hi to people. That’s it. If you want to be really, really fit, you go to the gym every day and you watch what you eat really, really closely. And that’s how the experts do all these.

So if you want to make money right away, the formula is easy. You ask people for referrals, you ask your biggest advocates. You wear the T-shirt that you have. You go into local businesses and you say, “Hey, here’s my name. Here’s what I do. If you know anybody, let me know.” And you don’t trap yourselves in these things. And just like we talked about dieting or anything like that, you don’t want to trap yourselves in fad diets because they may or may not work for you. You don’t want to trap yourselves in these. What you want to do is you want to put yourself in a place that will succeed. And when we’ve talked about tons of people, these are the things they’ve done.

So that about wraps everything up. What’s the next steps for you? If you have not started your business yet, and this is brand new to you, then I’m going to recommend you go to coldesi.com, and you can live chat with one of our team. Just ask them questions if you’re trying to make next steps or figure out what you want to do. You can email us here at marketing@coldesi.com and ask us questions about this episode. Or if you’ve tried some of this stuff and it hasn’t worked, message and say why because chances are there’s maybe a little piece of the formula that’s missing and we can help out. But give us a call, take a look into things.

And that’s about it. It’s really simple, and I love this answer because oftentimes the secret to all the success is just doing the right things in a simple way. And this will work. And if you have any struggles, email us or live chat with us. Let us know how we can help you out. And visit coldesi.com to take a look at all the customization type of stuff that we have. We’ve got tons of different equipment. We have new equipment and technologies being released all the time that it might be something you’re looking to get started right away with or something you’re looking to grow with in the future, but education is the key. And thank you for listening to another episode of the CAS Podcast. My name is Marc Villa, and have a good business.

 

 

 

 

 

In this insightful episode, we sit down with Trevor and Trent Walden, the pioneering duo behind the Walden Bros., an Alaskan t-shirt shop specializing in Direct to Film (DTF) printing and embroidery. As they navigate the intricacies of the customization industry, the Walden brothers share their journey of transforming an idea to a successful family business.

Key Discussion Points:

• Taking ideas and going for it: The Walden Bros. recount their initial days, emphasizing the importance of good ideas, family and hard work.
• Taking Risks: Trevor and Trent delve into early wins and losses that helped make the business it is today.
• Building a Brand: The brothers explain their approach to creating a strong brand identity that resonates with their customers.
• Customer Engagement: They highlight strategies for engaging customers and personalizing experiences to foster loyalty and repeat business.
• Challenges and Triumphs: The conversation also covers hurdles they’ve faced, how they’ve overcome them, and the lessons learned along the way.

This episode not only provides a behind-the-scenes look at running a successful customization business but also serves as a guide for entrepreneurs eager to carve out their own niche in the competitive industry of bespoke products. Join us as Trevor and Trent Walden lay down the blueprint for aspiring customizers looking to expand their horizons.

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the CAS Podcast, and we have got a great episode today. Today, we’re going to be talking about steps towards growing a customization business, and we’re going to kind of follow through the path of some very special guests that we have on today, the Walden brothers from Walden Bros Custom Apparel.

And if you’re listening to this podcast, I would say a few folks should be listening to this. One is the very beginning. You haven’t started your business yet, or maybe you’re just crafting and you’re thinking about starting some sort of customization business, whether it’s T-shirts or whatever it might be. And more commonly, you are already in business, and you’re trying to figure out what your next steps are.

So that’s why we brought on the Walden brothers to kind of have that conversation a little bit, to talk about the steps that they’ve taken, and maybe the steps they plan on taking together in the future. So I’d like to pass the mic over to the two of you for a minute. Would you mind just introducing yourselves and tell us a little bit about what you do?

Trent Walden:
I’m Trent.

Trevor Walden:
I’m Trevor, and we own Walden Bros Customized Apparel. We make T-shirts, hoodies, anything clothing-oriented. We probably can customize it via DTF printing or embroidery. But yeah, we own Walden Bros Customized Apparel.

Marc Vila:
All right. Awesome. And where are you guys located?

Trevor Walden:
We’re located in a little town in Alaska called Soldotna. It’s about 180 miles south of Anchorage, if anybody knows where that is.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Well, I’m sure everyone’s heard of Anchorage. How many folks live in that town? Do you know?

Trevor Walden:
I don’t know.

Trent Walden:
I want to say, for the peninsula, it’s like 50,000 people. Soldotna is like 5,000 people.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Okay. And the reason why I ask that is because you’ve started and run a successful business, and folks all over the place are trying to figure out what to do, where to go, and they often think about serving everybody in America, which would be great. If you want to have a big, giant business, you serve everybody in America.

But most of the folks in our industry are semi-localized, and you don’t have to be in New York or Miami or Chicago or some big, giant, giant place to be able to run a business, sustain a family lifestyle, grow it, all that stuff. So that’s one thing that’s particularly inspiring, is that you live in a town just like tons of other people listening to this podcast, and that’s awesome.

Trevor Walden:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
So starting from the beginning, you’ve been in the business now about four years. You started in 2020, and why don’t you tell me a little bit about how you got started and what you started with? What was the first things you started to sell? How’d you make them? Et cetera.

Trevor Walden:
So in 2020, Trent came to me and was like, “Hey, we need to start selling T-shirts.” And so, I thought that he meant selling T-shirts in person to people. So we bought a printer, a DTG printer, and we didn’t really know how to use it that well, and didn’t have the environment set up properly. And we ended up wasting $20,000 on DTG printers, and then we found ColDesi and got a white toner printer, and it just kind of started to steamroll from there.

But when we started, we just sold masks. We made $10,000 on masks locally. Our mom was using a sewing machine and sewed fabric together, and then we put hair ties on for the ears. It all just kind of snowballed into what it is now.

Trent Walden:
And I was in high school still when we started this. So it was just kind of lucky that the school asked for 200 masks, one for each graduating kid in my class. And so then, we got to do that, which is pretty cool.

Marc Vila:
Really?

Trevor Walden:
But like you’re saying, just local, local stuff.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that’s one thing that’s… A couple cool things about that, for one, is when you see an opportunity, you jump on it if you can, which you did. You had an opportunity to make masks for folks, and the school wanted them, and you were able to do it, and you used the resources of your family to kind of pull together and turn it into a little business, which is super cool. And then the side on that is that you take advantage of luck and hard work, because I’m sure making those masks, I mean, how many times were you up super late nights, or whatever, taking care of those?

Trevor Walden:
Every single night. It was every night.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Every night.

Trevor Walden:
But the big part that you said that I want to highlight is the family part of it. We have so much help from our family, and that has been an integral part into us being successful, is how willing… Our grandma comes down from Anchorage. She’ll drive three hours one way to help us fix something that we didn’t know how to fix. We don’t know how to use a sewing machine. She comes down and brings her sewing machine. And, I mean, that’s the type of stuff that our family does. So it’s huge having family helping us.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Excellent. And when we talk to folks in this industry, and I think this is something that’s all too often inspirational and not considered, is how much… I would debatably say 100% of everyone I’ve talked to and being in this business for 15 years, almost 100% of them said it’s either friends or family that all help them gather around in one way or another, whether it’s helping them get sales, helping them work on machines, somebody doing art, just being an inspiration, lending them money.

I mean, there’s a million different ways. And almost always, it involves friends and family. So just hearing that again, every time I hear that and folks get kind of trapped in, “What am I going to do? How am I going to grow? How am I going to start?” It’s like, the people around you are the ones rooting for you.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Use them.

Trevor Walden:
Yup.

Marc Vila:
Well, awesome. Now, when you start first started selling with the white toner printer and doing T-shirts and stuff, how were you typically getting business at that point in time?

Trevor Walden:
So early on, whenever we got our own little… I mean, it wasn’t even a storefront. It was like a little office room. When we got the little office room and got set up in there, it was like, “Okay. Well, we need to market.” So here, being a small town, radio ads, and maybe in a bigger city, it seems crazy. But here, radio ads were a big part of marketing for us, because old people listen to the radio here, and the old people are the ones that have the money or the businesses or dah, dah, dah, dah, and then they hear that, call us, come in. And so, marketing on the radio was really our big push, I would say.

Trent Walden:
And another one at that current point in time was, we did a lot of printing on demand, and we didn’t charge anything for us to come show up. So we would just show up with no money beforehand and sit there and possibly make nothing all day, or we’d make like 500 bucks or so. But we did that for that entire first year, was a lot of printing on demand with nothing in return right away. It was just kind of sit there and hope.

Trevor Walden:
Hockey tournaments, wrestling tournaments, which made it to where people would see our face, and then they would talk to us about our business. I mean, you just had to get there. It was kind of… for us.

Marc Vila:
So that’s too funny, because… So most of the podcast episodes lately are just with myself, Marc Vila, but Mark Stephenson was the other host for probably the first 150 episodes with me of this podcast. And we would consistently have these running jokes where I would say, we would talk about advertising and marketing, and I would tell him advertise on the place mat in the diner or take out a radio ad or a park bunch, and he would just bust me all the time. He’s like, “What are you, in the 1980s?” And I said, “Yeah.”

But in America, when we’re talking about smaller towns, even medium-sized towns, the audiences for this type of stuff are actually reasonably small, and it’s not that expensive to do it. So if you’re in Tampa, where I am, and you want to advertise on the radio, that’s going out to tens of millions of people, and that’s incredibly expensive, and expecting much of a return on that.

But when you’re in a small, medium-sized town and you advertise on a radio or park bench or a sign-up at the school, or, I mean, a joke about like the diner menus, but the folks that see that will see your name and just be like, “Isn’t that so-and-so’s nephew?” Like, “Wait. That was my student in sixth grade.” Right? I’m sure that happened, right?

Trevor Walden:
Oh, yeah. We were out to dinner last night, and we saw one of our teachers that we had in middle school. And Trent brought it up, because it must be such a weird dynamic for him to be a teacher and know who we were as a kid and watch us grow, and then now he sees us out at dinner and is almost formal to us. It’s kind of weird in a way, because it’s like, “Okay. I know that you know who we are as people, but you look at us as businesspeople now,” which is, it’s cool, but it’s also a weird feeling at the same time.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It absolutely is. But there’s power behind that too, because if folks know who you are and they see your little ad or they run into in a restaurant, again, they’re going to root for you.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
And I think that’s like a real magic behind our industry and what we do, because it’s a product that essentially everybody needs. Unless you live in a nudist area, everybody needs shirts.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
So everybody needs shirts. And if you’re in a reasonable-sized community, you can actually break into this market, especially if you’re offering unique things. Like, in the beginning, you offered masks and you did the on-site events. And commenting from the on-site events, how often would you go to an event… Or let me ask it different. Would it be often that you would make more money after the event from people you met versus the amount of money you made at the event? Am I asking that in a good way?

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think I get what you’re saying. We would make a good chunk at the events, but after the fact, we would get more customers, for sure, because people, they’d see us and they know who we are. And then once they realize, “Oh, you do this type of work,” then they talk to somebody that we actually have done work for, and then they start dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and it just culminates.

Trent Walden:
To build off of that, the type of event, too, played a very big role, because hockey tournaments for us here locally, hockey tournaments, kids love buying hoodies, whereas if you’re at a wrestling tournament, and those kids don’t really care about a hoodie or a T-shirt very much. They’re focused 100% on wrestling, whereas hockey kids, as soon as they walk in, it’s like a competition between who can get the hoodie first.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Okay. Right.

Trevor Walden:
It’s like this ocean.

Marc Vila:
Right. So knowing the right events. I’m sure that was a little bit scary at first doing those first events. So maybe tell me a story about one of the first events or the first one you went to, how it went. I don’t know. Anything interesting about it is fine.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. How about the hood one?

Trent Walden:
I remember that. Oh. Oh, no. I’ll tell mine.

Trevor Walden:
Okay.

Trent Walden:
I’ll go ahead and tell mine.

Marc Vila:
All right, go ahead.

Trent Walden:
There was a wrestling tournament. One of our local wrestling organizations asked us if we would come print on demand, because one of their coaches had cancer, I think. And so, we donated all of our profits from that event to the coach that had cancer. But it was very scary. You have to walk in and carry in your big tables for your toner printer, and then you-

Trevor Walden:
The heat presses.

Trent Walden:
… had to bring in your heat presses as everybody is staring at you. And then at that point in time, because we got smarter as we went on and just kept inventory at our business, but carrying in big blue tubs filled with T-shirts and hoodies, and trying to keep it all organized.

Trevor Walden:
Ice packs. Ice packs. We had to bring those in too, because we had the white toner printer, but it was a cold peel, and we’re trying to do it fast. So you go there. You’ve got all these ice packs lined up on one table. You’re setting your shirts out, and then the ice packs are sitting on the shirts, cooling them.

Trent Walden:
Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
I had never experienced anxiety, ever. I was always just like, “Whatever.”

Trent Walden:
“Whatever.”

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
But those tournaments definitely made me feel like, “Oh.” You feel like all of your energy is just sitting right under your chin.

Marc Vila:
Mm-hmm. Yup. I know exactly what you mean. So maybe it was 2018. I had the opportunity to volunteer at a children’s home here, people with displaced parents and stuff like that. So these kids are like eight to 16. And so, myself and another woman that worked here at ColDesi were like, “Let’s bring a bunch of transfers and a heat press, and we’ll just make shirts for these kids.” And it was all for free, of course.

And we get there, and the guy who’s running it is just like, “These kids don’t like anything. They are not from good places. So just do your best to have a good time with them.” And he’s like, “And just, every day is a work in progress with them.” Right? So we look at each other, and we’re like, “Oh, what is this going to be like?”

And immediately, we start feeling a little bit of anxiety, like, “Oh, gosh. I hope we represent them well.” So a couple little kids come up, and we make a shirt, and that was cool, and it was fun, and they were super happy, and they put the shirts on right away. Well, next thing you know, maybe 12 minutes tops, and the line was to the back.

Trevor Walden:
Yup.

Marc Vila:
So there’s a pizza station, and there was like a… I forget if it was ICEEs or ice cream or ice bar or something like that, and us. We all just sat around, and we were front to back lined. And there’s the pizza guy standing there, like, “What?”

Everyone chases me down. And here, these kids are lined up for the shirts, and they were super excited about it, and things were going fast. Yeah. I mean, we’re trying to cool them down, and the heat press is getting hot, because you’re working under it. I’m sweating. I wrap a T-shirt around my neck to catch the sweat.

Trevor Walden:
You look into the back of the line, like, “Where does it end?”

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Where does it end? And I gather you had line situations like that at the tournament.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. I’m going to throw one little quick tidbit in here that could help somebody, because it’s helped us-

Marc Vila:
Good. This is amazing. Yes.

Trevor Walden:
So when we started, we used the toner printer, and we’d bring it there and print it out and do the marrying process and do all that good jazz while we’re standing there trying to gab with the customer or the parent to try and make them like, “Okay. This isn’t going to take as long as it’s really going to take,” type thing.

And so, now, what we’ve done, because that moment, whenever you’re just sitting there feeling that anxiety, it sucked. So our shop is like, I don’t know, three miles away from our local hockey arena. And so, what we have done now, because we have the DTF printer, and it’s so quick to be able to get fulfillment done, is we’ll have ordering windows. So let’s say the tournament starts at 8:00 AM and it ends at 6:00. We’ll do our first ordering window from 8:00 to 10:30. And then if you order between 8:00 and 10:30, then you can pick up at 12:30 in the afternoon.

So then we get their number, text them whenever it’s ready to go. And then, usually, the parents, between hockey games, they’re either going to a different arena to play a different game, or they’re going to go to lunch and they don’t want to stand there and wait the entire time for the thing to get done. So what we did is, we made it easier on ourselves so that we didn’t have to sit there and be stressed out whenever they’re standing there, but also made it easy on them to be like, “Wait. I can just come pick it up in a bit?” And you’re like, “Yeah. I’ll shoot you a text message as soon as it’s ready.”

And then that for them is like, “Oh, okay. Yeah. Sold. Got it. Awesome. We’re going to go eat lunch. We’ll come back and pick it up later.” So it’s been extremely helpful for us. And we have three ordering windows, but then no one gets stressed out. They feel great about it, because they get to go and have lunch or go to their next game, and we make sales.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
So that’s a tidbit that we learned along the way.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s awesome. I know that the first time I did something in person, I did everything all together. And then the second time, I just pre-made what we were going to do, and I add to do a little bit of predicting and surveying to help. So reached out to people and asked them to vote on what design they would like best, what type of apparel they would like best, and that gave me a little bit of data, because I didn’t have previous data.

If it’s your 10th tournament, you probably know what’s popular by then. But in the first one, I didn’t know. So I just kind of surveyed out to try to get an idea, “Okay. This was a really popular design, so I printed twice as many of those.” And then when things ran out, I kept a sample behind, and I let people order where it could be delivered later on to them. But no, the window thing is really interesting, because you’re like… So essentially, you did a bunch of orders, fulfilled those. Now you’re taking a bunch of orders, fulfill those, and people are picking up while the second orders are being taken. Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
Yup. Yup. So from 8:00 to 10:30, and then 10:31 to 1:30 or whatever time it would be, if you’re in that window, then you pick up at 3:30 now. And so, we’re taking orders all day, but Trent clicks Print on the printer at 10:30. There’s no more. And at that point, we’re done. If you missed it, I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sure that we could figure out a way to sneak you in there. But for the most part, it’s just, hey, it makes it way easy on him and on the customer.

Marc Vila:
So, Trent, you were just queuing them up in the RIP software?

Trent Walden:
Yeah. So what will happen is, Trevor will be at the tournament, because I don’t like talking very much, as most people probably see from this podcast. So what happens is, I’ll stay at our office. Trevor is at the tournament, and we have an order for him where he’ll get the player’s name and number, because that’s another thing that we offer at these hockey tournaments that nobody else does.

And so, parents, it’s almost like, it just sells them before we even have to try and sell them anything, is you get the front, and then also, your kid’s name and number come on the back, and that’s included in the price of the hoodie, whereas whenever you go elsewhere for a tournament hoodie, it’s, you get the front, and then the name on the back is an additional $5. And if you want something on the sleeve, it’s an additional $5.

And so, Trevor will get their name and number put down in an order form, name and number, and he’ll already have a font and all that stuff designed for it. So it’s just easy for me to type in the name, type in the number, download. But then after that, it’s player name and number, size and color, and then time of order so that we make sure that we’re getting the ones that are in that order window done and ready.

And then as soon as 10:30 hits, I text him, say, “Hey, all orders done.” And he goes, “Yes.” And then the last one is uploaded. I’ll get that information put in. And as soon as that printer has loaded in the queue and ready to go, Print button is hit, and we’re starting to roll. So hopefully, we can get through that period with no errors.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s awesome, actually. And when you do speak, you say good things, so keep that going.

Trevor Walden:
Hey, Marc, you have to know, this is very evolved Trent. Trent would’ve sat in the back room and said that he was on the podcast before. So he’s made progress.

Marc Vila:
No. No. I’m glad that you’re here, because your input’s fantastic. How long would it take to go through one of those print runs, like for one of the orders? In the printer itself till they were ready to be put on shirts.

Trent Walden:
Okay. So whenever we’re getting the orders from Trevor, it usually takes, I would say… Or I’m trying to load them simultaneously. So the order window starts at 8:00. Trevor will have an order by 8:10, and what I’ll do is I’ll print out. He sends me a picture of all the order forms. So I print the order form out at the office, then get the designs loaded, and upload it as quick as I can, or if it’s like, sometimes he’ll have… 8:00, it opens, and by 8:10, he has five orders.

And so, I’ll print out all five orders, load all five orders. And then once those are loaded, I go back and check my phone again. And if there’s new orders, I will now repeat the process of print them out, load them in. And so, that usually is like 30 to 40 minutes, I would say, getting everything loaded in, bags, getting the bags loaded with the actual correct garments as well.

And then after that’s done, that 30 to 45 minutes, click Print, and that’s also about another 30 or 40 minutes. But what we do for our tournaments is, we have our employee. We have them work on that weekend. So as the prints are rolling out of the oven, they can be trimmed, and then we can take the bag with the prepped garment, and we’ll get the name and the number, take it over the heat press, and start fulfilling as they’re rolling out of the printer so that we can make our sale.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah, and start staging the bags.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s awesome. And a simple lesson to learn for that is, just develop your own system that works for you. For one, there’s tons of great, sophisticated systems out there for when you get big. Right? So if you’re going to an order and you’re taking 1,000 orders, that system probably doesn’t work for that, but you can pay for software that will help you do that.

But in the beginning, as you’re getting going, just figure out what works for you. And I’ve heard customers do everything. They email things in. They have a shared Google Doc with Excel, that they’re inputting the information into a shared Google Doc, so they’re both in it live, texting each other, literally just being on the phone, just calling each other on the phone.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
So whatever works, do that and learn a lesson. Oh, here you go.

Trevor Walden:
So this is just our basic order form. If anybody comes in, in general, then I got to get all that information. And then on the back, if you ever need to use extra room on the back, like let’s say they have six different styles that they’re going to have in their order, then we can just slash in between, so like sizes, smalls. I can write smalls here, and then slash mediums, and then the quantities and everything just lines up with itself. But if you ever need extra room, you always have the back, too.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
So for those watching the video, you saw the order form. If you haven’t seen it, what you did was great, is it was big. You had plenty of room to write everything in, and you kind of boxed it out, like, “This is the area for information here. This is the area for notes. This is the customer’s information.” So make things big, easy to read. Give yourself plenty of space.

And like you said, you made room on the back too, so you can add more notes. Too often, I will see folks at live events where they’ve printed out an Excel sheet single line, or they have a notepad, that single line. By the end of it, that thing is a mess, and you’re going to make mistakes. So good call on having a nice, big order.

Trent Walden:
And you were talking about systems, but one of the reasons we’re coming up with even that order form was me and Trevor were talking, and the only way to get things through fastly is having the organized communication.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Trent Walden:
And so, when we’re building it, it is like, what information do you need to get a sale, but what information that you need to get a sale actually needs to be passed back to the person doing the fulfillment? And that’s where whenever it was like, “Okay. Well, size, the color, garment styles, their quantities.” And then the customer name is all key information that we need to pass along. So as long as we hit all of these boxes on this order form-

Trevor Walden:
We should be good.

Trent Walden:
… we should be able to communicate in an organized fashion all the information that needs to pass through to everybody in the process.

Marc Vila:
Right. Right. That’s excellent. No, that’s really, really good. So moving on a little bit from… Those live event information is great. I’m sure some folks are going to take away some good stuff there. I wanted to talk about… You mentioned you do embroidery, too. So how did you make the leap from where you started to deciding to get into embroidery? How’d that go?

Trent Walden:
Do you want this one?

Trevor Walden:
You go for it.

Trent Walden:
Okay. On this one-

Trevor Walden:
I love hearing him talk.

Trent Walden:
Yeah, he does.

Marc Vila:
Excellent.

Trevor Walden:
I’ll drink my coffee.

Trent Walden:
On this one, it really was, at that point in time, we were printing T-shirts, and printing and all came around T-shirts, and it was like, “Well, why not do embroidery so we can have another thing to offer?”

Trevor Walden:
Because people would ask. They would ask for embroidery, but we were so small and starting out. It was like, embroidery machines cost X amount of dollars. We don’t even pay ourselves. We need to be able to have the funds to actually buy an embroidery machine.

Trent Walden:
Yeah. I mean, that’s really how it started. It was just like, we kind of want to expand our offerings. And so, we just decided to buy an embroidery machine. And then after that, we had a very large learning curve, because we had never used an embroidery machine in our lives.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Trevor Walden:
My gosh.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Trent Walden:
The embroidery really, I would say, last year and a half is when embroideries really started to kick in for us.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Good. Good.

And so, I’m glad that you said that, because all of the stuff in our industry has a learning curve to it, even the simple stuff. There’s little things that are hard to explain. And I’m the director of marketing here at ColDesi. So we make videos and content, and I have to explain sometimes to folks that every video can’t be 90 minutes long, where I tell you every single inch of every single step. Sometimes it’s just, folks want to see just how it’s done and the basics of things.

But, of course, I took into consideration how much negative space I put into the art or what colors I was printing with, because this printer does great with these colors or this does not, or in embroidery, I might sew it out on one hat and just be like, “It looks ugly on this hat,” whether it’s just the shape of the hat or the color of the hat. So then I go back and I get another hat, and I sew it again.

So there’s a lot of little work to this stuff, but once you get used to it… Folks will say to me all the time, sometimes in positive reviews, sometimes in negative reviews, “You make it look so easy.” And I’m like, “But it is easy for me.” Just like I’m sure running a printer now, or whatever, is relatively easy for you. You could do it half-awake, halfway through a cup of coffee, and you’re just not talking to anybody, clicking the buttons, printing it, getting things going, and it’s not hard, but there is a learning curve. You got to practice. Right?

Trevor Walden:
Yup. Absolutely.

Trent Walden:
Especially with the embroidery.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
I’ll show you some stuff that I made. This is all work-in-progress stuff, and this is about learning curve stuff too. Right? So this is one hat that I’m working on now. Hopefully, we can see it pretty well in the video. So it says, “Mannamong.” And our art director, her and her son have this comic that they write called Mannamong. And this is puff embroidery, sometimes hard to see on camera, but this is puff embroidery. And this is a work in progress, because the problem I’m running into now is the hat is puckering, which you might not see. Right? And I’m sure you’ve dealt with that before.

Well, this is a $2 cheap hat. Right? And I know that’s part of my problem for this design, because there’s a ton of stitches in here. We got puff. It’s three layers deep. A cheap hat is not going to handle this, and this is stuff that I try to explain to folks, is like, “Sometimes you just need a better hat.” Now, this is another one that I’ve been working on, too. This is a roofing company hat. And again, this is puff embroidery, but this one came out crisp and nice.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. I want to have one of that.

Marc Vila:
Right? Richardson hat. It’s on a Richardson 112. This is not a $2 hat.

Trevor Walden:
No.

Marc Vila:
But it’s super smooth. And I thought I had them, but I have two other versions. I was trying to get it done on a cheap hat. But again, there’s so many stitches in this design. It doesn’t work. So those are just little things you learn, and quality in, quality out, practice, learning curves. I mean, it’s all part of it.

But when I sent a picture to the gentleman who owns this company, I said, “Hey, can I use your logo for work?” And he’s like, “Yeah, sure. What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I saw your hat. I can make it better.” And he was like, “Yes. Okay. Sure, sure.” So I made it better. I sent him pictures, and he’s like, “Oh, can you send me a bunch of them?” And I said, “Well, I’ll send you the design and your embroiderer can make a bunch of them for you, but I’ll make you a couple.”

Trevor Walden:
And those look good. It looks really good.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It looks good. I have another one that I don’t have around here that I like even better, but we’re working on a bunch of little projects. All right. Back to the embroidery question then. By the way, anyone who’s listening to this, I’m sorry, that was very visual part of it, but you can go back and check 40-something minutes into it on YouTube or on our customapparelstartups.com website. But now you have multiple embroidery machines. How many machines did you start with? Did you just start with one?

Trent Walden:
Yeah. We just started with one.

Marc Vila:
Okay. How quick did you get multiple, and what was that journey like?

Trent Walden:
So we bought our first one, I want to say, in May of 2021. And we only had that one until May of 2023.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Trent Walden:
I think May of 2023, we had enough cash just sitting in our business bank account to pay off that Avancé that we currently had. And then after we paid that one off, we got another Avancé. And we ended up actually receiving it, I think, in June of 2023.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Okay.

Trent Walden:
And then two months later, our embroidery was really starting to ramp up. And so, August, we bought another Avancé one. We just bought that one so we didn’t have to get into a loan. And so, at that point in time, by August of 2023… Well, I mean, if you went April, we had one, and then by August, we had three Avancés total.

Trevor Walden:
Summer really hit us hard. Summer was like, there was people coming in left and right asking for embroidery, and we were like, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” And then it was just like, embroidery is time. You can’t make the machine move any faster than the way that it moves.

Marc Vila:
Right. Right.

Trevor Walden:
So we quickly realized, we were like, “We need more heads,” whatever.

Trent Walden:
So we actually need-

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And how many total heads do you have now?

Trevor Walden:
Five?

Trent Walden:
We have, yeah, five heads.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Five heads. So that’s one of the things I really like about embroidery. So one of the things I don’t like about embroidery is, embroidery is just time. Right? It’s slow. It’s not fast.

Trevor Walden:
You can’t outwork. You can’t outwork.

Marc Vila:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And depending what you’re putting on, I mean, it can be done pretty quick. If you’re just doing initials or something on the sleeve of a shirt, I mean, you’re going to hit Start and walk away, and before you fill up your coffee, it’s done. But if you’re doing a logo like this, the Mannamong one that I’m showing here, this logo is 13 inches wide, and I want to say it’s like 30,000 stitches or something. This takes 40 minutes to sew out on the hat.

And so, depending what you’re doing, but the cool thing is, is I just do my job while that stuff’s sewing out. So I hit Start. I listen for the hum. If it stops humming, I think maybe I’m out of bobbin or my threads, they’re broke, and I wait for a pause point and I get up. But the cool thing about embroidery is, it’s doing the work for you, which is different than when you’re running a heat press, because everything you’re heat-pressing is on there for 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds. There’s no time to do anything else.

So an embroidery machine is an awesome add-on, because depending on your design and what you’re sewing it out, you just hit Go. And it’s like having a baby. You got to go and change it. You got to feed it. You got to burp it every once in a while. But otherwise, it’s just chilling there on its own, depending what you’re… And once you really dial in your hooping and your digitizing and all that stuff, then it’s easy.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Trent Walden:
Yeah. For us, whenever we were starting, I mean, it was amazing and awful at the same time, because it was amazing that we got to add the embroidery, but the learning, the tensioning, and trial and error of making sure tensions are correct and not was such a pain for me. Finally, I now know how to do it, but learning how to tension all those things correctly makes a massive difference.

Trevor Walden:
I think Avancé is responsible for a few gray hairs on Trent.

Marc Vila:
Oh. Yeah. All the things do. I think that patience is part of the key to success. A common denominator, which is terribly interesting, is when I talk to a lot of folks who are doing well in their business, and they talk about growing it and getting customers. All of them have a degree of patience in their personality, where when we talk to folks who get frustrated really easily or leave bad reviews, or get really upset at our technicians, typically, they don’t have the patience to get over the hump to learn something that’s a little challenging.

So I would just encourage anybody, if you are the type of person who punches a wall or yells at things when they get… all that stuff, we’re all different personalities. Fine. But if you are, do your best to exercise patience and learning, because once you break that line of like, “Wow, I got it,” then… I don’t want to say it’s easy riding from there, because you still own a business. Owning a business is always a little bit of a challenge.

But for me, it’s no longer an issue whenever I’m going to make a video digitized or get something digitized, sew it out, make a T-shirt. That part of it is the easy part for me. Coming up with the idea, all the other things is the hard part.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. Yeah. No. We’ve had our arguments and battles, because I don’t understand embroidery the way that Trent understands embroidery. So there’s times where we butt heads on like, “Why is this not possible? Explain to me why this isn’t possible,” or “What are you unaware of that is making it impossible for you right now based on the knowledge you have?”

And so, Trent will inform me, and I’m like, “Okay, but I’ve seen this somewhere. I know somebody has done this. So why can’t we do it?” And then that’s where… But like you said, patience. I have to be open enough to understanding that I don’t know everything about embroidery. And so, I need to be able to learn and understand from Trent, who knows way more, and he’s way more educated on… He could tell you stuff about embroidery that I don’t even… He’ll speak a different language to me.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I’m sure even me too. You’ll probably outspeak me out, because I don’t do production all day. I mean, I talk about it a lot. I make machines. I mean, I talk about machines a lot. I talk about digitizing. I definitely do it a lot, but I’m not doing production, which is, it’s another skill set.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. It really is.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. So congratulations to you for learning that and getting through that. And then you see, I mean, it’s like, when those machines are humming, I mean, it’s a joke we’d say, but it’s like the sound of money.

Trevor Walden:
It is. It’s euphoric almost. It’s so great when that, what we call… So when the DTF printer is printing, and we know that we have the perfect feed coming through, and the time on the roller is going perfect, it almost sounds like horses galloping whenever the kicker is on and it’s hitting the excess powder off. So it sounds like that, and I’m like, “You know what that sound is, Trent, right?” And he goes, “Well, like the sound of money,” because it’s basically printing money. It is.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That’s the coolest thing about everything that we do, and embroidery machines, too. Also, you mentioned sound, which is another kind of funny thing to talk about. I’ll be in the showroom and we’ll be sewing out a design, and I’m on the computer in the RIP software messing with something that I’m going to print, and the embroidery machine’s in the background, and I’ll say, “It’s about to thread-break.” And they’re like, “What are you talking about?” And they’re like, “How do you know?” And it’s just like, when you sit in that room, you know what the galloping horse should sound like, and you can hear when that horse is about to trip.

Trevor Walden:
Yup.

Trent Walden:
Yup. I can hear it. With the Avancés, you can tell whenever there’s a thread break that happened, because you hear that… If that noise happens, it’s like, “Yup, there’s something that’s about to have a red light on it.”

Trevor Walden:
Yup. Pause. Pause.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yup. Yup. Well, that’s awesome, and that’s so true. So maybe we could probably do a few more minutes, if that’s fine by you all. I wanted to talk about growing and keeping and getting customers, because that’s one last thing to discuss when it talks… If we talk about the topic towards growing a customization business, getting customers is one thing, and then keeping customers is another thing.

So how do you deal with… I have a few questions on this, but for one to start with is customer service issues, when you have unhappy customers or somebody didn’t like what you did, or you made a mistake. How do you handle those problems typically? I know they’re all individual cases, but maybe you could talk to that a bit.

Trevor Walden:
So I’m sure that there’s a bunch of people out there that had their parent… Their mom growing up was the mom that when you go through the McDonald’s drive-through and you say ketchup only on there, and then they put pickles, onions, and mustard on there, your mom goes in and reads them the riot act. That was my mom.

Marc Vila:
Okay.

Trevor Walden:
Okay. So we had that fear every time. It’s like, I’ll just eat the pickles. I don’t even want to say anything. So for me, I’m the sales guy that talks to the customer, and I always think in my head, “What would my mom want? What would be the expectation from my mom?” And so, for us, it’s always, one, if the customer is flat-out wrong and they just didn’t do their due diligence, as a customer, you have a responsibility to do the customer things that are asked of you from us. But at the same time, if we mess up, and it’s going to cost us money, it’s business. It’s the way that it is. So you got to handle that.

Trent Walden:
We prefer to have the good name or good reputation over the $130 that it could be saved by just saying, “No, that was your error. We’re not going to fix it.”

Trevor Walden:
And in a small town, if we mess up Sally’s shirt, and Sally’s shirt was extremely important to her and her event, then Sally is going to tell all 100 people that come to her event about, “Well, the shirts are messed up because dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” Was that bad word of mouth worth the $400 on shirts, or was it just, “You know what? Our name is more valuable than the $400 that we lost. Let’s just get it right”?

Trent Walden:
I will play devil’s advocate in that he is more often on that side, and I am more often on the side of, “We have things in place that say once you approve this part of your order, you are taking responsibility that everything is correct. And so, if we were beyond this order that you approved, I’m sorry, but it’s not my fault, and I don’t need to replace it for you.”

Trevor Walden:
Well, like you said, everything is variable. So there’s situations that are like, “Okay. Trevor’s point of view definitely is the way that we should go on this one,” or there’s situations where it’s like, “This customer really just didn’t pay attention to what their order was.”

Marc Vila:
Yup. We have to be flexible.

Trevor Walden:
And it helps then remedy… Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. You have to be flexible.

Trevor Walden:
So I would say, as far as getting customers, it sounds weird, but we have an extremely chilled-out vibe to our business. You come in, you’re like talking to a cousin. That’s how I always try and think of it, like, “Hey, how you doing? How can we help you?” When you come in, I’m never disgruntled. Even if I’m disgruntled with Trent and I’m irritated beyond belief, when you walk through the door, you’re my customer now, and I have to be exactly what we want the Walden Bros experience to be like, because when you come in the door, we want you to have a good time, and we want to be able to help you.

Trent Walden:
And an additional thing for the getting customers is, whenever we first started advertising, and we’ve sort of just kept with it, because it’s worked for us, was, whenever we started advertising, I don’t remember what book we were reading exactly, but it had the effect of, “Whenever you hear potato chips, what do you think of?” And for us, it was like, “Well, there’s Lay’s.” And so, our way to go at marketing was, whenever people hear custom T-shirts or custom hoodies or custom prints or anything, we just want it to immediately correlate back to Walden Bros.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Trent Walden:
And so, for all of our advertisements, it was, in the beginning, we kind of did more annoying things. We had a radio ad that’s 30 seconds.

Trevor Walden:
Obnoxious. Obnoxious. Don’t say annoying. Obnoxious.

Trent Walden:
It could be both.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Trent Walden:
30-second radio ad where we said “bro” 45 times in 30 seconds, and it was just to get people to realize that bros and T-shirts. So then anytime we got in public, “Bro, I need a T-shirt. Bro, I need a T-shirt.”

Trevor Walden:
We’ll have these random 55-year-old women that’ll be like, “Bro,” in our face, and we’re like, “Hey, how you doing?” But that’s what they see us as, is they see that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Trent Walden:
And I guess just not being selly.

Trevor Walden:
Keeping them, keeping them. Yeah, not being selly, but keeping the customer happy, too. So if somebody comes in and they place their initial order and we make it, like, “It’s so easy. They did a great job. We love the product, dah, dah, dah,” you have to keep track of everything that you did for them during that order. So we have a software that we use that keeps their order, but also the print dimensions that we used on that order. If they just want to duplicate that order, how do we do that? Well, we need to know the print dimensions that we had or the embroidered area, or whatever, in their customer folder. So we keep Google Drive folders for all of our customers, and it has artwork, print dimensions, et cetera, in there.

Trent Walden:
Embroidery.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. Embroidery, files. Everything is in their customer folder, so that even if I’ve talked to 1,000 people between the last time I’d seen them, when they come in, I can pull up their customer folder and go, “Okay. I totally remember exactly what we were talking about a long time ago, and here’s all of your artwork files. So which one was it that you were talking about?” or I can go and look back at your old order and know exactly what you were having before.

So that is a big part for us, because initially, we didn’t have customer folders. It was like, “We made money. That’s awesome. We sold you something.” And then they’d come back, and they’d be like, “I want to do exactly what I did before.” And you’re like, “Okay.”

Marc Vila:
Yeah. “Do you happen to have one of those shirts you could bring me?”

Trevor Walden:
Exactly. “Can you send me a picture of the ones that we did?”

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
Those were the ones that we got.

Marc Vila:
No, that’s great. You’ve said so many awesome things in there. So I’m going to try to work backwards a little bit in some comments. So one is, keeping folders and information on everything you do is a key to this. Most of the software that’s available that comes with printers or embroidery machines has some ability to do that. You can also use CRMs. You can use Google Drive.

One tip that I’ll add on to that is, whatever you’re using, have a backup. Right? So have backups that you do every so often, whether it’s once a week, once a month, every so often, but make sure you’re downloading that stuff, backing it up, putting it somewhere else, just so it’s always in two places, because that information is so key to growing and keeping your business going, that it’s a part of the money, too. So keep it safe.

Trevor Walden:
Yup.

Marc Vila:
And it does make it really easy. You mentioned your mom and McDonald’s, right? Part of the reason why she would drive through to McDonald’s is because, “I’m going to go there. I know what both of them want. We’re going to get out of there, and we’re going to go to the next thing we were going to do. I don’t have to think about it,” where maybe there’s a new taco place that opened up. “I have no clue what they’re going to like. We’re going to have to figure out through the menu. Are they both going to hate it? Now they’re going to be hungry while we’re on an hour drive to so-and-so. They’re both going to be complaining. I’m just going to do McDonald’s.” Right?

So part of what you said is, somebody can call up and just say, “Hey, can you do the exact same thing again? Do the exact same thing, but do it on a white shirt instead of a black shirt.” Then, they can just call you, and you could say, “Sure. Hang up. The money is done.” They don’t have to worry about it, where if they were to maybe say, “Oh, let me try this online store,” they got to start all the way over again. They don’t know what it’s going to be like. So having that recipe is going to make folks want to come back just because it’s easy and stress-free, especially if you make it, like you said, a chill environment.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. 100%.

Marc Vila:
Yup. And then in regards to getting business and advertising, I think it’s great that you thought of… Being obnoxious can be… Do stuff that fits the personality. So the two of you, you’re younger. You’ve got a chill vibe to you. So make that about your business. I just think make your business who you are. So if somebody is a very business professional, they only wear shirts with ties, they speak very formally, match that to everything.

If you’re chill, wear T-shirts and hats to your business. If you are super bubbly, make all your stuff bubbly and pink and glittery. Do stuff to match what you like for your business or whatever you want your brand to be, because, for one, it’s natural. So now, when you’re trying to think of an advertisement or an ad or whatever it is, our brand is us and our style, so we just make it that way, versus some folks will try to come up with a brand or a style that is too professional or too chill, or they try to be funny when they’re not.

And then not funny is the cringiest thing. When you try to be funny and it’s not funny, that’s super cringe. So don’t try to be funny if you’re not a funny person. And all that’s really interesting, but it’s a great way of doing it. Well, we’ve been on about an hour, so it’s probably time to wrap up. But is there any final thoughts you want to leave before we head out?

Trevor Walden:
One thing I was just thinking whenever you were saying… You just said something and I lost it, but there was… Gosh dang, I lost it. I wish I was sort of-

Marc Vila:
Okay. So I have a final thought, and then maybe it’ll come back to you while I’m talking for a minute here. So we titled this podcast Step Towards Growing a Customization Business. And I think one of the things that’s a takeaway here, there are some concrete things and there are some fluid things, but for one was, you worked hard in the beginning when you had to work hard. So like you said, you were up late doing the mask stuff. You went to an event not knowing if you were going to make money, and that’s obviously scary.

So all of that is part of the journey. Right? You got to endure a little bit of pain. I think it’s just like working out or just like dieting. If you want to have big muscles, you have to go to the gym, and you’re going to be sore for many days. If you’re trying to reduce weight, you’re going to have to feel hungry throughout the day, or eat things you don’t like to eat because you’re changing your formula in your diet.

And the same thing goes with business. You got to get through that. And then there’s a perseverance side of things. When you’re really frustrated with a printer or with an embroidery machine, or anything like that, you’ve got to get past that stuff, which you did time and time again, clearly, which is why you’re able to be successful.

And then the third piece is, this is one of the ones that some people just won’t get it, but I hope everybody listening does. You got to be customer service-friendly. You said, “If I’m in a bad mood, my customers, they don’t have to know that. I want to give everybody the experience of buying shirts with us.” And that is huge.

I was calling some folks the other day trying to buy a service, trying to hire somebody to take some pictures. And this one guy answered. He’s just like, “Hello?” And I’m like, “Did I call a business?” I said, “Oh, is this so-and-so?” “How can I help you?”

Trevor Walden:
Yup.

Marc Vila:
Well, “Is this so-and-so?”

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. Exactly.

Marc Vila:
And he’s like, “Yeah. How can I help you?” And I was like, “Well, I was calling about getting some pictures done.” “Oh, okay. When do you need them?” Wait a minute. We’re not even there yet.

Trevor Walden:
We just bypassed so much dialogue.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. We went through so much, and I’m like, “Wait a minute. You haven’t even said hello to me. You haven’t even wished me a nice day.” I don’t need you to worship me, but I mean, gosh, just be nice.

Trevor Walden:
There’s a customer portal. We call it the pipeline. You have to work them through the pipeline. And Trent always says, he’s like, “You’re so good at working them through the pipeline.” It’s just, once you get reps at doing it, you talk to them. You know what your intros are. Basically, most of the time, they’re just going to respond with one of four ways, and then you need to know how to route from those four ways.

Marc Vila:
Yup.

Trevor Walden:
Just get them down the pipeline.

Marc Vila:
Yup. And those were all little keys to success. And then the last thing that you had mentioned is just kind of knowing when it’s time to take some of that money that you put in the bank and reinvest it in the business. That’s a really scary part, is because all of a sudden, you see your bank account’s got some digits in it, and you’re like, “Wow, this is actually like a business.” And then you’re like, “Wait a minute. We’re going to take all of that money and buy something? I hope it’s going to make us money.”

But that’s kind of part of the risk and reward that you take. So we’ve told folks in the podcast before, you need to have a place where you’re putting profits and you’re putting that money, and then this way, you actually have something to pull from. You need to decide when it’s a good time to finance versus maybe just pay cash or pay something off.

And then everyone’s got a different formula for that. You’ve done both. So you’ve kind of seen what works for you. So I encourage everybody out there to figure out that for you. And the biggest thing that I’ve realized in this conversation is, I didn’t get any rules that were hard and fast for you all.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
You financed some. You paid cash for some. You have rules for customer service. Sometimes you have to break them. You tried one thing on live events, and then you changed it the next time. That adaptability is a key to success. So hopefully, folks out there listening have kind of learned some steps to growing the business. I think what I just outlined there are some of them. But I want to wrap up the podcast with a little bit of a commercial type of a thing, because I know something about both of us. Both of us, or all three of us are fans of the ColDesi Graphics service.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. Yup.

Marc Vila:
So I’ve seen you guys place a lot of orders. And all the stuff that I showed here, I mean, I digitized through there. And it’s funny because folks ask me, like, “Oh, well, it looks so good because you have an insight into it, or it’s because it’s you guys.” And I’m like, “I order it like you.” I literally go on the internet, and I order it through the portal. The only difference is, is I create the coupon codes, and it’s ColDesi doing it. So I don’t pay for it.

But I order it online. I make a coupon code real quick. I drop it, and it goes through the system. For one, I want the true experience every time to make sure if things are not going right, I can message a manager and say, “Hey, by the way, did you know this happens?” But two, it also works. And every once in a while, there’s a mistake. I respond back. So what’s your experience been like using the ColDesi Graphics?

Trevor Walden:
Awesome. Awesome. We actually have our own artwork creation prices set up, where we make money off of the ColDesi Graphics, using that service, and it completely eliminates the stress of us having to digitize. I mean, we do artwork, but… Yeah.

Trent Walden:
For him in the sales process, it makes it much easier, because it immediately eliminates one of those questions, where whenever the customer comes in, the way we have it set up, and then he talks to them as, “If you just have nothing, well then, you-“

Trevor Walden:
Oh, yeah. Let me do this. Let me do this. I like this part.

Marc Vila:
Okay. All right.

Trevor Walden:
This is one of my favorite things. I have a click funnel in my head on this.

Marc Vila:
All right.

Trent Walden:
Well, and it’s ColDesi Graphics.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah, based on what ColDesi has. So there’s three types of people that come in for artwork. The first person has their artwork all ready, but it’s in a crappy, low-quality format. So we need to upgrade that in order to make it a printable file, so it doesn’t look bad. Yeah. So the second person that comes in is the person that has a chicken scratch. They have an idea of what they want. They have a screenshot of some style that they like, but they want it to be theirs. So that’s the second phase.

And then the third one is the person… This is my favorite person, Marc, is when they come in, they’re like, “Hey, I’m so-and-so with X sports team, and I’m the parent of John, and I have no idea how to do any artwork or anything. We just want something cool.” And I’m like, “I love you.”

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
So all three of those people have… Their problem is solved if you use the ColDesi Graphics service.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. No, because that’s how we kind of tiered it. So I’ve used graphic services for so many years working in marketing, then we started using a service ourselves outside, and I was like, “Gosh, I hate ordering this.” And I would hate ordering graphics, and to the point where I start… Then I trained somebody else on our marketing team how to order graphics, because I was the boss, so I could pass it down, and then they were like, “I hate doing this.”

And then I was like, “We need to do it better, and maybe that’ll help people.” Right? So from the ground up, we started it up, and we were thinking from the decorator’s perspective of, “All right. We know that we have folks who have no clue what they want. We have folks who just want to mess with stuff, and we have folks who just want to clean up an old logo or something, that they lost the art, but they just have an old JPEG or something that they saved from somewhere.”

And we tried to put it there, and then also price it in a way where it’s like it can be marked up to a retail. And then for the people that it works for, it’s gold, especially if you’re not a super awesome… If you’re a super awesome graphic artist and digitizer, part of the desire is doing the art. They may actually hate the production side of it, but they love the art.

But depending where you are, I love the service. It’s great, and I really appreciate that you all do, too. And then for embroidery, I just like it, because when you order an embroidery file, you get a picture of what it’s going to look like. So I know right out of the gate if there’s a problem sometimes, like, “Oh, I didn’t explain this right to them, or they read this wrong,” or whatever it is, and I can hit a reply and say, “Hey, this is actually supposed to be this, not that,” whatever.

And then when I sew it out, I pretty much know that an expert digitizer has done this, where when I would digitize stuff myself, I would digitize it and then I have to fix it, digitize it and I have to fix it. Now, I get it digitized, do it. If there’s a problem, I just basically send an email, go in there and hit an alert, and send a message, and then I’d just go and do my job again, and come back in a little later and it’s fixed, which I think is huge, because my strength is, I’m not an artist. I do all these other things, so I’m going to do the things I’m better at.

Trevor Walden:
Yup. The time value that you gain back simply by just passing it off to ColDesi is… Yeah. It’s one less thing that I have to think about. Look at my list today. I’m sure you have a list similar to mine, but I don’t want to try and deal with graphics for every single one of those people on the list today.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s a lot of work.

Trevor Walden:
I know that ColDesi has got that. Yeah. And then I’ll just get an email when it’s ready to go.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast. We had a little bit of a long episode today, but I think it was an entertaining episode. There was a lot of great information. Hopefully, we look forward to having you both on here again. So yeah, for those folks listening out there, if you go on to the various socials, you can search for the Walden Bros if you guys want to see more about their story and check them out, or if you need to send them some business or something.

And so, you can follow them. Definitely go to coldesi.com. If this is the first time you’ve kind of heard from us, go to coldesi.com. You can live chat with any of our folks there and learn about that, and you can see links to the graphic services, if that’s something that you’re interested. But we appreciate having you on there. And everyone out there who’s been listening, I’m sure you appreciate the Walden brothers just as much as I do, and have a good business.

 

 

In this episode, we delve into the exciting world of Direct to Film (DTF) printing and how you can transition your screen-printing shop to embrace this innovative technology. We’ll start by explaining what DTF printing is and why it’s gaining popularity. Next, we’ll break down the investment costs involved, giving you a clear picture of what to expect financially.

We’ll explore the wide variety of materials you can print on with DTF and detail the essential equipment you’ll need to get started.

Wondering if you should keep your screen-printing machines?

We’ll weigh the pros and cons to help you make an informed decision.

Additionally, we’ll discuss other important factors to consider during the transition, provide insights into the current DTF market, and guide you on how to obtain a sample DTF print to see the quality for yourself.

Whether you’re a seasoned screen-printer or new to the industry, this episode is packed with valuable information to help you navigate the switch to DTF printing. Tune in and learn how to expand your printing capabilities and stay ahead in the competitive market.

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the CAS Podcast. My name is Marc Vila, and today, we’re here to talk about how to convert a screen-printing shop to DTF. So let me tell you who should be listening to this episode. For one, if you don’t have a screen-printing shop and the name of this one threw you off, I’m sure you’ll learn a lot. There’s a ton to learn in this particular episode of the podcast, so I’m going to recommend you stick with it.

If you do own a screen print shop, if you have some manual presses or automated presses, maybe you have decided to not bring in direct to film yet, and you’re a little bit cautious about it, maybe you’re trying to figure out, “Can you replace some of your equipment with direct to film printing?,” and potentially you’ve brought in something like a really compact sheet-fed machine that just hasn’t really integrated into actual production and you’re trying to figure out how to make that the best it possibly can be, and that’s who this episode is really for, is about converting a shop or integrating a shop from screen-printing to DTF, and if you’re doing any other type of transfers or anything like that, or you’re brand new, then yeah, we’ll do our best to cover everything here. And I am going through a slideshow, so there’s a video component to this. You do not have to watch it if you’re listening to this. That’s just fine. I’ll do my best to describe everything in words, but if you go to YouTube or customapparelstartups.com, you can find this episode and you can go through the slideshow with me on video.

So without further ado, let’s go ahead and dive into the slideshow and talk about how to convert a screen-printing shop to DTF. So first, I’m just going to talk about … I’m going to just get the commercial out of the way, right? My name is Marc Vila. I’m with ColDesi. I’m the director of marketing here.

If you’ve listened to the podcast before, we’ve got tons of episodes. You’ve heard me, and I usually don’t super-commercial this, but since we’re going to be talking about a lot of our equipment and how it’s different for some other things out there, it’s important that I just say a bit of who we are. So at the time of recording this, we’ve sold over 1,400 direct to film printers across the U.S.. These are not compact, little sheet-fed machines. These are commercial roll-to-roll style, direct to film printers, designed for production shops.

We’ve got training and support right here in the U.S.A. A lot of folks are concerned about how they’re going to get up and running, and ColDesi has made sure that we’ve got folks to help you do that, with a focus on uptime and quality. We recognized right from the start that if screen print shops want to bring this in, that they’re going to need to make sure that they’re running, that they’re producing shirts, and that the shirts that output essentially at the end are great quality because their customers are used to that. I’m going to talk a tad about what direct to film printing is. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, just about everybody listening is going to know what this is, so I’ll be pretty brief, but we’ve got plenty more information on ColDesi.com if you’re not familiar with the process.

But direct to film is the first true digital solution for screen-printing shops. You can actually integrate this in and do production, and here are some of the reasons why. It’s a full-color digital print, as I mentioned, so same amount of work from one to 100 colors, and it’s only ink and adhesive. And what that really means is you’re going to get a high-quality output, a great stretch, a great wash, vibrant colors. There’s no vinyls or any other materials that are going to be on your shirt.

It’s a high-speed process. It’s designed to do everything all in one in the equipment. This means that because it’s all-in-one and it’s fully digital, you could do short and long runs, so you could do 10 shirts or you could do 500 shirts, all with the same design or different designs. You can actually do variable data too. So when you’re creating your artwork, you could say have a different name on, or a different number or something like that on every single transfer, and once you run your job, each transfer can be very, very specific to the customer at the very end.

Next, I’ve actually created a bit of a Venn diagram, the two overlapping circles for those of you not actually watching. And on the left-hand side, I’ve put what’s just screen-printing, so we’ll talk about that. On the right, we’ve talked about what’s just direct to film, and in the middle, what they have in common, which is really why screen-printing and direct to film are so close together and why it’s really being adopted really well by screen print shops. So to be brief on this, what’s just screen printing, right? Very large production of single logos. If you’ve got a one or a two-color logo, and you need 5,000 of them, screen-printing still is going to beat that out in speed, cost, everything.

So just low color, big numbers, great for screen-printing. It’s also got a really low cost per print, especially when you’re at those big numbers. You don’t have other costs that are in there. Once you’ve kind of set up your screen and you get going, you can do it tons and tons and tons of time again, which really brings that cost way down when you’re doing big numbers. And screen-printing also does specialty applications.

So you could do a puff, and glitter and all these very, very interesting things that you don’t necessarily get and transfer production. Now, what’s just DTF, right? DTF is full color digital, as we mentioned before. You could do short runs. It’s clean.

You don’t really have a lot of messes that you have to clean up at all. Everything is self-contained in a system, so it’s a very clean workspace. It’s also easy to learn. You can train somebody how to press the transfers in literally minutes, and you can train somebody how to operate the equipment in essentially one week worth of training, a day worth of training, but you can get somebody to learn how to use this equipment really quick. Compared to screen-printing, all of the steps are very specific.

Some of them need to be very, very accurate and very precise, and done a very certain way. So proper screen print training is weeks, months, I mean, years, really, to master the craft, and you can master running a direct to film printer very short period of time. Variable data is also what we mentioned. You’re not really going to get variable data in screen-printing. And then, the last one to be added here is it’s a low-water consumption, which actually has been a hot point lately.

A lot of people have brought this up, because in certain areas or in certain places, either water is limited or expensive, or they just don’t want to blast through with a pressure washer, making a mess and spraying water all over the place. It’s just not really fun and friendly to work with water on the job like that, so you’re not really doing that in direct to film. So now, what are they both, right? The middle of our Venn diagram here. They both can do high production, they will both create a high-quality output that your customers are going to love, they both wash great, they both have a good stretch and return, vibrant colors, and they’re both designed to print friendly, meaning that what you design and what you want to output, you are going to be happy with it.

Your staff or however you do your production is going to find it easy to do, I mean, to get the desired output that you want, and then your customers ultimately are going to be happy with it. So being able to design stuff and actually print and get what you want is really great in both of these technologies. So next, kind of preparing your shop, getting ready to print, that’s what we’re going to go through next. And by the way, I’m doing a little bit different here with my pauses and such because remember, I am going through a slideshow. All right, so preparing your shop, right?

We’ve got a few things that I’ve listed here in my slideshow. So one we’ll talk, space requirements. For the most part, what we like to say is if you’re a screen print shop and you’ve got a four-color setup, manual setup, the space that you’re using with that is going to take up more than what you would need for a direct to film system, okay? A compact system, you can operate in 200-ish square feet without a problem. I mean, this is room to walk around, and a larger system, you could three, 400 square feet.

I mean, this is all very … These are conservative numbers. It all depends on your shop and how many heat presses and such you need, but the space requirements is reasonably compact, and because most of the work is being done within the equipment, you don’t need lots of other equipment around. You essentially are going to have your printer. You may or may not have an extraction unit, depending if you already have one or how your shop is set up, and then you’re going to have heat press equipment, and then, of course, a computer on the side to load things in.

And that’s just about it. That’s all you have for equipment. So all of that can fit in a nice, tight space. You don’t need a ton of space to operate this. The other is climate and environment.

So you are going to want to be in a temperature, humidity-controlled environment. The rule of thumb we kind of say is if you’re comfortable, the machine is going to be comfortable, but you’re going to want a nice relative humidity, you’re going to want a nice relative temperature, you’re not going to want to run this in an open air shop, so you’re not going to have the bays open and giant fans blowing towards your printer. This is going to be in a closed environment, and you’re going to want to control it. So if it’s freezing outside, you don’t want it freezing inside. That’s probably the big thing that’s going to matter the most.

If it’s really, really dry, if you live in the desert and you have an open air shop, that’s not going to be conducive for direct to film printing, so that’s the big takeaway from there. Power requirements is another thing to go over. In a nutshell with this, it’s less power than you’re running with your screen-printing, essentially. If you’ve got an automatic press and a big dryer, definitely requiring less power than that. We’ve got all the specs on all this type of stuff, but you’re running heat press machines and a compact dryer and a printer.

So the printer is just like any other printer out there. It doesn’t require a lot of power. It’s not going to draw a lot. Your heat presses are going to be standard. Most of your heat presses, you can run off of 110 plugs, so that’s pretty standard too, and the dryer is reasonably compact too.

So all in all, because of the compact nature of this, you’re not going to necessarily need brand new electrical if you’re already set up for screen-printing. If you’re not set up for screen-printing, you probably are going to want to discuss with a pro about that. So we’ve got, here at ColDesi … On all of our slides here, by the way, I’ve got a phone number and a website if you’re watching it, but if not, ColDesi.com or marketing@ColDesi.com is an email. You can email questions directly.

We’ll make sure we get them answered, or you can visit C-O-L-D-E-S-I.com, and you can live chat or go to the direct to film area and get a lot of these very, very specific details I’m not going to get into because it’s super boring. It’s not conducive for a podcast, but we’ve got that information, and the good news is, is you typically are not going to need specialty things happening, especially if you have screen-printing already. Okay, so kind of the best choice for your shop is what I’ve said called this next topic. So what do you need is direct to film, right? For you, which direct film printer should you have? Okay?

So I’ve brought through a lot of different pieces of information, and we’ll just kind of bullet through those. So competition, right? This is stats that we’ve put together, surveys, etc. 75% of shops have or will integrate direct to film by 2025, okay? So that number is huge.

If you have not pulled the trigger yet and you are just a typical screen print shop, chances are, if somebody is calling around asking for something specific that you cannot produce with your screen-printing equipment, whether it’s a short run or a specific number of colors, or a full digital print, the next phone call they will make somebody is going to say yes, especially by next year. So it’s being adopted all across the board. Now, that doesn’t mean everybody’s fully converting over. We have customers that just have it for certain jobs. We have other customers that 90% of their business has moved over to direct to film.

Another is kind of the near me on-demand trends. Customers want more now. That’s what I kind of said to this, right? We’re in a market where folks are going to want as many colors as they want on whatever color shirt they want today, tomorrow, if they can get that. The great thing about direct to film is it allows that to happen.

You do not have to spend eight hours setting up a job, then run the job, and then spend maybe potentially eight hours getting back to normal. You can actually queue up jobs and print them up essentially on-demand. So, I mean, you could do stuff, and we have tons of customers delivering stuff same next day because of the fact that it’s digital, it’s reasonably easy to do, and it’s quick. Full-color digital, now that I said that, is another. Clients want digital because they can get it, right?

And that’s kind of the nature of things right now, right? Fast food is a success because people can get it, not because it’s the best, not because it’s the healthiest or anything like that, but if you can get it, people are going to want it, and a certain percentage of people are going to want it. So when folks know that they can get a picture of a baby or a puppy, or a bride and groom on a shirt, and they know they can get it reasonably quick and for a reasonable price, more people are going to ask for it, and you don’t want to be stuck behind with the only one saying no. Short runs is very similar to this. Folks know that they can buy one shirt.

They know they can buy 10 or 15, and that the number of colors doesn’t matter anymore. 20 years ago, that would not have been true, right? You could have called around everywhere and said, “I want a picture of a puppy on a shirt. I need 10 of them,” and everyone would’ve said no, or they would’ve provided some alternate way of being able to achieve that, and now, a ton of shops can say yes to that, and it’s growing. And then the last bit of the market analysis I said was logos of the future, okay?

So as digital expands, more clients will need digital. So what do I mean by that is similar to as I just mentioned before. If 20 years ago, if you’d have called around and you said, “I have a logo,” and you sent a picture of the logo, and it was literally a picture of a dog, like an actual picture of a dog, and then it said pet grooming, everybody would’ve said no to that. They couldn’t do it with embroidery, you couldn’t do it with screen-printing, couldn’t do it with vinyl, you couldn’t do it with any of the technology that people had 20 plus years ago, and even further. Now, everybody has digital or growing, everybody has digital.

So as that happens, logos are beginning to evolve. People are putting gradients in logos. They’re no longer capping the number of colors because the digital is available for it, because they actually can get that stuff printed, whether it’s business cards, flyers, brochures, the internet, of course, and even T-shirts and hats. You can get full color, so people are making full color digital logos. Scalability, kind of this is another thing to consider for your shop.

So one of the important things about direct to film printing is the fact that once you start to offer it, your customers are going to want it, right? So if we’ve had shops, they come in and they bring something really small sheet-fed machine that’s clearly not available for scalability on this, it’s essentially the same speed as like a DTG printer or something like that, and that doesn’t accommodate for growth, which is why these roll-to-roll style of printers that ColDesi has do accommodate for that growth. So you want to go ahead and take a look at your production, how much you print per hour now, and I would start to go into the assumption that you’re going to want most of that business to convert over to direct to film. So the more the advice is don’t go with the minimum machine you need, go with something that you can grow into, and consistently, we hear that from shops, and we have found a lot of shops have… They buy a small printer, and they end up getting another one within a year because it can’t keep up.

So definitely look at the space you have, how much you expect to print out of it, and really look at the number of orders you’re printing today, knowing the fact that we have shops that have 90% converted over to direct to film, right? That’s a huge number, especially when you’re considering how much output that could be per day, okay? The next great part about scalability on direct to film is the actual training. It’s really easy to bring folks in and teach them how to operate a heat press, where they can do a couple of shirts a minute, right? So that’s a fantastic thing, because teaching people how to screen-print is a process, it’s hard to find talent, and it’s really hard to get somebody who’s also going to stick around for a long period of time nowadays, so training is really great.

You can scale in both directions of long and short runs, is another part of scalability. So if you currently are doing medium, small size runs, 50 shirts, 100 shirts, and you want to scale up, you can do that with a direct to film printer. If you’re currently are only offering, or most of your jobs are only 100 to 500 pieces or something like that, you can also begin to scale down, and we’ve had plenty of customers that have integrated systems where they say, “If a customer wants to order something, as long as they place the order by this cutoff time, it will make it into that afternoon’s run.” And then they line up all the jobs together, and they could deliver the same day, prints, even if the customer only wants one or two or 10 shirts. And another thing about scalability that’s really interesting is the low-cost nature of the scalability, right?

So what I mean by that is if you have a four-color press or an eight-color screen press right now, and you’re kind of reaching the maximum capability you can print with that, in order to level up, it’s going to cost you a good amount of money and/or space. You’re going to need either bigger press, or automation, or larger ways to print or create screens, all the different processes. We know all the different processes from automatic color mixing to how you clean your screens, and all of that stuff actually can get particularly expensive and take up a lot of space. When you’ve got a direct to film printer, let’s say you bought a 24-inch two-head direct to film printer, which is kind of like the medium size, and you’re starting to reach the capability of what you have now in regards to production, now you’re producing the maximum amount per hour out of your shop, chances are you can just add another heat press and significantly increase your output, because that’s usually the choke point on this, is the heat press. So you could potentially have two, or three, or four heat press machines depending on what you’re printing and your printer can keep going and you can have an operator running that all day or even on multiple shifts, and you’re adding heat presses to be able to keep up.

So your growth is low cost, meaning compact size, 16 by 20 heat press, couple thousand dollars, and it doesn’t take up a lot of space, right? A few feet by five feet, something like that is plenty of room to be able to operate fully-operated heat press. So it’s great scalability, direct to film is very friendly, and the big takeaway is just make sure you get the right equipment for your shop and consider how you plan on scaling. Next, we’re going to talk about the investment. So what is it going to cost to be able to get a commercial high production piece of equipment for direct to film? The number we’re talking about today at the time of recording this is about 15 to $35,000, or 400 and 900 a month financed, and this is for varying pieces of equipment.

Maybe you need heat presses or not, extractors, ink, all that stuff. So the equipment cost is pretty reasonable, considering that some of you listening to this could have one piece of your screen-printing equipment could have cost you that much. Not even enough to make shirts, but you’ve got a whole system that can produce final printed shirts within that 15 to 35 or 400, 900 a month. Also on investment, in regard to consumables, this is the biggest thing that people don’t think about often, and when I talk about it to folks is you see the eyes open up, right? It’s a light consumable inventory, which means that you have basically five to seven colors, depending on the printer you get.

Adhesive and film, and that’s it. That’s essentially your entire inventory. I mean, there’s little things, cleaning solutions and stuff, but for the most part, that’s what you’re operating with. Compare that to screen printing, you can have… I mean, I’ve seen walls of colors, gallon cans everywhere, pre-mixed things and containers for certain…

You have a customer with a certain color of purple, so you keep some of that. That inventory almost never shrinks. It almost is evergrowing. And you also have an inventory of screens, because if you have 40 customers that are often repeats, you probably keep those screens, and if those jobs are four-color, you’ve got four screens you’re storing. So your screen inventory is almost infinitely growing and your color inventory is growing.

That’s not true with direct to film printing. It’s a light consumable inventory. And heat press machines, as far as investment goes, typically, I like to say you probably already have a heat press that works for this. If you have a T-shirt shop, the heat press you have probably works for this. The big thing is, is you want even pressure, you want even temperature.

Those are the big things, and you hopefully want a way to be able to measure what that is so you’re not guessing, but any good quality brand heat press, generally speaking, will work. There are way too many heat presses out there to get too much in the details of it, but definitely just talk with one of the pros at ColDesi here, and they’ll go ahead and dive into the details if your specific one will work. All right. Next, let’s go ahead and talk about operations. What does it look like to operate a direct to film printing system? Okay?

So let’s just talk about the start and end of the day. The beginning of the day is … I mean, relatively, you walk in, make sure everything’s fired up. You’ll do a nozzle check. Basically, a print test takes a couple minutes, and if everything is good, you start working, you load jobs up, and you hit print.

If maybe you fill up top-off ink, top-off powder, stuff like that. So all that’s a few minutes, and you’re ready to print. You’re ready to go into production. At the end of the day, you have a cleaning routine that you do. So there’s certain parts you clean. There’s mainly taking cleaning solution and a cloth, and wiping certain areas down to keep the actual printer itself clean.

And that’s essentially the start and end of your day. You just test to make sure everything is working well, and clean it. And if you did your cleaning at the end of the day, when you come back the next day, that beginning is essentially no work. It’s very quick. Job setup and post-job labor.

So there is relatively no pre and post-work. Unlike screen printing, there’s a lot of pre-work and a lot of post-work. A lot of setup, a lot of cleanup. That is not the case with direct to film. You have your start and end of the day, but during the day, as you’re doing jobs, when you go to move from one job to the next, that’s all handled digitally.

So you are queuing jobs up, and they’re coming out of the printer, and you don’t have to change or do anything in between jobs, and that’s huge, especially if you’re kind of running jobs that aren’t ready to be heat-pressed yet, so maybe you’re starting to print, but you’ve ordered shirts and the shirts that haven’t arrived yet. They don’t come in until tomorrow or until later in the day. You start to run jobs and you prep and cut and have all your transfers ready to go, and the next job is coming out immediately. The other thing to discuss in regards to operations is handling reruns. How do you handle reruns?

Because it’s digital, I think it’s relatively self-explanatory, that when you want to print a job again, you just literally hit print again, right? You don’t even necessarily have to do that many, because you can store these transfers. So a lot of folks, what they will do is if they have a particular customer that is often a return customer, they will go ahead and they will print the job, print a handful of extras, you can store them in a cabinet, and then when you need them again for a customer, it’s going to take you 30 seconds to make a shirt. The last part to cover operations is color matching. This is stuff that folks ask a lot about, “How can I match colors?”

“Can I print Pantones? What if my customer has a particular corporate logo?” So the type of printing that we’re doing here has a really large color gamut. So you can cover tons of colors, tons of colors. And when you need to match a certain color, what you would do before with screen-printing essentially is take a bunch of ink and mix them together until you get the right color, get that approved by the customer, and then you run your job off of that setup.

Well, you can do similarly but all digital. So if there’s a certain color, a certain green you’re trying to match, or red or blue or whatever it is, and you can print it as the art sits, and if you need an adjustment, you can make that adjustment either right in the RIP software or in your graphics software, and it can be done in both directions, and you can even queue up a few at a time. So maybe you do one a little higher saturation, one a little lower saturation, and the original artwork in the middle. You can print all three of those at the same time, so you can easily test and run and adjust. And here at ColDesi, we have experts that will help you learn how to do that if you have any struggles.

But for the most part, there are millions and millions and millions of logos for corporations and people who need specific colors being printed every single day in direct to film throughout the world. So the fact of the matter is that it can be done, and it’s happening every day. Okay, so let’s talk about a bit of what you need next. So equipment requirements. You have your essential direct to film equipment, printer, dryer, heat press.

The printer is what’s going to print the ink. The dryer is what is going to dry and kind of cook, cure the adhesive, and then the heat press is what you use to actually adhere it to the shirt. So those are the steps. You print ink on the film. When it’s an automated process, the ink then travels through a shaker, which essentially is spreading powdered adhesive onto the ink, that comes out as kind of powdered that runs through a dryer.

The dryer essentially heats up, that adhesive powder bonds it to the ink, and as it comes out, it’s now dry and it can be stacked, stored, or placed on a T-shirt ready to be pressed. The supplementary equipment that you need, you do want to ventilate or extract because you’re using a dryer, and adhesive, and ink and such. There’s going to be things that get released out, and you’re going to want to extract that out of the environment, so you’re going to have an extraction unit, or … I mean, it kind of is an air filter in so many words for anybody who just hasn’t turned. Just think of it that way.

That’s the easiest way to think of it, but you’re going to want to ventilate this stuff out, and that’s going to be a supplemental piece of equipment you’re going to need. And a simple one, it goes without saying, but it is a great point, is transfer storage. So you’re going to want to wait place to store transfers, so whether it’s Tupperware bins or some sort of baggy systems. I mean, I’ve seen everything, but you’re going to want to wait to store transfers that’s kind of airtight and in a closet where you can keep it out of the light, and this way, you will have those transfer store for months and months and months. Folks ask, “How long does a transfer last for once you’ve printed it?”

The official answer that I’ve heard most folks say is kind of the official one is six months. The reason that’s official one is because it’s a very safe number. However, we’ve got a gentleman that works here that printed a bunch of logos two years ago, and every month, he takes one out of his desk drawer, puts it on a shirt, presses it, and adds it to the shirt. And he has been doing that for two years, and these transfers are still viable. There’s no problem with them at all, essentially.

However, because there’s a million different environments out there and humidities, and temperatures, and all that stuff, six months is a good, safe place. All right. We talked about supplies, but that is an essential part. You need your ink, you need your adhesive, you need your film. And then the other things you’re going to need, I kind of labeled those as considerations, but cleaning solutions, cloths, stuff like that to keep your equipment clean. Of course, scissors and things like that doesn’t even need to be mentioned.

And then, another thing is what we call a repair kits, so ink lines, dampers, and other essential machine parts. It’s great to keep this stuff on hand, because some of these things are consumable over time, that they wear out like an ink damper’s part of the printing system, and that will wear out over time, so it’s good to keep these things in stock. Of course, we sell them all and plenty of people just buy them on demand as they need it, but I’ve been in this industry for, gosh, about 15 years, and I’ve sold tons of different equipment, and the folks who have the lowest blood pressure are the folks who have repair kits or what they call emergency kits on hand, so it’s a great idea just to keep some of that stuff. It’s not necessarily that much money, and it gets you to continue printing in the event that something goes out at an unexpected time. Now, maintenance. We touched a bit on maintenance, but let’s just go ahead and just go through it real quick, because this is a common question.

You’ve got a daily, monthly, annual kind of routine you’re going to go through, right? The annual one might be replacing those dampers, which will take a little bit of time. The daily stuff is wiping things down. So essentially, keep it clean. That’s the big part of the maintenance, keep it clean.

Supply levels, you have ink, adhesive, and film. These are all very visual to be able to see when they’re low, so you’ll be able to do this every morning or at some sort of a clockwork, and the machine has some warnings and some things to let you know where those supplies are. We talked about the environment, temperature and humidity controlled, and then we talked about storing transfers. You want those stored, climate controlled in a closed environment. All right, so what’s next?

“Do you continue screen print operations?” This is, folks are really curious, “Where is my screen printing equipment going to end up?” And the most important thing in this whole question topic is to understand that your shop is unique and it’s unlike any other. That’s the most important thing to consider, so you have to consider, “What types of jobs are you going to do?,” “What types of jobs may you be doing in the future?,” and, “What are your customers’ like and demand?” Okay?

And then you can kind of weigh out pros and cons of everything, but I’ll say some general things that I’ve learned. One is, one in two color jobs, when you’re over a couple 100 pieces, a lot of folks will keep and use their screen-printing equipment for that. So maybe it’s just one color jobs over 200, they’ll go ahead and screen that. Another that they keep it for is maybe specialty, like sleeve leg or infant size or something, and they just leave their screen print set up just for that. So they will direct a film everything, but if they need to drop in some sleeve, logos, or something like that, they just do that on the screen.

So some folks will mix and match. Part of the shirt is direct to film, part of it is depending on the specialty application. If you’ve got a large automatic or a large very multi-color press, there are folks who deprecate some of that stuff because they find it hard to do eight or nine or 10 colors with all of that set up when they could easily do that on the direct to film, especially since most jobs being done out there are under 500 pieces, most jobs being done are 100 to 500. We’ve surveyed and asked all around, that’s most jobs, and because that’s most jobs, direct to film works really well in that space. So high color up to 500, it’s fantastic.

Once you’re breaking beyond that, if you do have a lot of five, 10,000-piece orders, you’re a particularly big shop, you may still be using that automatic to fulfill some of that. So we talked about specializing equipment in that, we talked about setting the parameters that fits your needs. You’ll find that color and job size number, and then really, just which equipment do you have is worth the space and the time it takes to maintain it or keep it up and running? And you may just find that you can sell off some equipment, you could store some equipment, you can convert areas of your shop like a dark room or a storage area, you can convert it into a revenue generating space now. Maybe you never had a room for a cutter or you never had a room for an embroidery machine and you’ve wanted to do that, you could potentially turn some of your shop into revenue-generating space, or the last thing about dealing with the space is we talk to folks who say they plan on downsizing the size of their shop, not because they’re producing less, they just don’t need the space anymore.

So they lease an entire length of an industrial plaza, and maybe that last bay, they no longer need, and that could reduce their rent by hundreds, no, if not, thousands of dollars in a month. So these are all things that folks do, and that’s what I would consider. The important thing to do is kind of write some of these things out, write out all the different types of jobs you do, and imagine where they can be, and then, of course, just go along with the journey, and you’ll figure it out. All right. Now, production costs.

What’s the cost of ink, adhesive film, cost per print, et cetera? So a simple number, a short number that people say is 0.0054 cents per square inch. So how does anybody do that math, right? So we kind of just say a full front is going to be less than 50 cents to be able to … When you’re printing a left chest logo, is going to be change, if you’re thinking about that, a dime or something like that.

So the cost per print is pretty low. It’s relatively low. The ink and the adhesive in the film go a really long way, so a full order is doing thousands. The best way to really determine this, which I love, is perfect. For one, is during your jobs, the software will job cost for you, so before you print your first print, you can see how much the job is going to cost you, so you take the customer’s art, load it up, it’s going to tell you how much it’s going to cost per print to do that, including all the supplies, and then therefore, you can go ahead and turn around and charge your customer properly for that.

Alternatively to that is if before you start printing and you want to know what a couple of popular jobs cost, you can send art to our team here at ColDesi, and they can job cost it for you, or they can help estimate, at least get pretty close to what that cost would be, and we can even print that sample for you, so they can print a sample for you. They’ve done live webinars, live one-on-one, folks where they send their art in, they print it for them, or we have art. Sometimes it’s close enough. “Here’s a logo. This is how much it costs to print it.”

They print it, they put it on a shirt, they send it right to you, and this way, you can feel it, touch it, wash it yourself. So the production cost in a nutshell is low enough to be plenty profitable for screen print shops to have adopted this all over the country, and there’s a reason why that, what I say before, 75% of shops have or plan to adopt by 2025. So the cost is low enough for everybody to want to do that, and that’s really the bottom line. Okay. So, in my slideshow here, I kind of have the final questions. As I mentioned before, these are FAQ, so I’m just going to kind of rapid-fire through these and wrap it up.

So the first one, that by the time I get here, everyone says, “Well, how do I get a sample?” That’s easy enough, right? You go to ColDesi.com, you email marketing@ColDesi.com, give us a call, and just say, “Hey, I need to see it for myself.” So people ask the next, which leads to the next question, “How does it wash and feel?” Well, you can see for yourself by getting a sample.

And the ColDesi prints are designed to feel great, wash great, and make your customers happy, and as we said, not all ink and film and printers are the same, so you’re definitely going to want to see the ones from ColDesi if you’ve not loved something you’ve seen before potentially, but your customers are going to love the way it feels. It stretches great, it washes great, it goes on all different types of materials, cotton, poly, blends, all of that stuff. Next folks ask is kind of about the quality, is the color quality. That does come up a lot. The colors that come off this are beautiful and vibrant.

Now, the specialty things you don’t achieve, like metallic gold, you can maybe do that with screen-printing through a specialty process, and that’s not going to happen out of a CMYK printer, but all the colors you’re going to get out are going to be beautiful. If you have particular art that you are concerned about, the best thing you can do is get the art in to the ColDesi team and have them print it, because that’s it right there, right? Take your biggest customer’s art, and send it through, and make sure you’re happy with it. Next questions are about the process. “How much does it cost to print?”

I actually just covered that, so I’m glad that we went through there, but go ahead and ask our team about specific artwork, whether it’s ones we have, so we can go ahead and send you a sample of something that’s already done, ready to go, and we can tell you how much it cost to print. That’s the most common, the way that people do it. “And how do I determine the best size printer?” And I covered this, but essentially, what I would say would be go through the process and the plan that I discussed before. Look at all your jobs.

Consider, “If I didn’t have to prep those jobs, which ones do I think I would run through my direct to film printer?” Get a count on those, right? “How often do those come through? How often do you have to produce? How long does it take you to produce now?”

And I would fulfill a printer that, at bare minimum, meets that requirement, and I would add 25, 30, 50% more. That’s typically the number you want to go for because your customers are really going to like what happens, and as … I’m sorry, what they get, I should say. They’re going to like what they get. And once you start selling folks, “You know what I could do that same thing in full color,” they’re going to want it and they’re going to ask for more of that stuff, and it’s the same amount of work for you, so you’re going to be happy that you keep those customers.

Now, I actually skipped this question, “What’s the process start to finish?” We have a demo that you can watch that covers this whole thing, right? So just contact us and just say, “Hey, I just want to see a full demo,” and they can send you videos, and you could literally watch every step. But essentially, what happens is you take your artwork, just digital art, however it’s done. You do not need to color-separate, you don’t necessarily have to have a vector, you just want a high-quality print.

Whatever you ask it to print, it will, low quality or high. So you have a high-quality logo, you run that into a software, the software is going to process it and prepare it for the printer, and say you need 100 of them, you hit times 100, and then you hit go. The film that you’ve loaded into the printer will feed through and print your color and your white ink. It will print a white base to cover all of the colors, and this way, you can put it on any color shirt, so it’ll work on dark color shirts, light colors, et cetera. Sublimation, for an example, doesn’t work on dark colors. There is no underbase for it.

So I always say to folks, if you don’t understand the process, “If you spill spaghetti sauce on a white shirt versus spilling spaghetti sauce on a dark shirt, the tomato sauce is basically not going to be seen on a dark-colored shirt, and it’s going to stand out like crazy on a light-colored shirt,” and that’s why sublimation works great on it. For direct to film, you have that white underbase and you have the white adhesive, so you can put it on any color, but it will print out, then it will put your powder adhesive on. I mentioned this earlier. It runs through a dryer, which essentially cooks that all together, and then now, you have your transfers on a roll. You cut those up using scissors, cutter, whatever you need.

It really depends on how you gang up your jobs and how you cut those up, and then those go over to a heat press. You put your shirt on, you put your transfer on top, and you press it, and the press time, relatively speaking, we’ll just say, is 10, 15 seconds. That’s like a press. Typically, you peel, and then a lot of folks will do a post-press afterwards for about five more seconds just to kind of push it into the shirt, improve washability look, feel, et cetera. So that covers the process.

And last few questions, “What heat press do I need? I actually covered this earlier, but chances are, the heat press you have will work if you use it for other transfers. The big thing, you want quality heat, quality pressure. That’s basically the rule of thumb for all transfers in general, but most heat presses folks have air presses they run, they’ve got swing-away, clamshells, all those styles work. “How’s this different from other transfers?,” another question, because people have had toner transfers before, which they like or don’t like the process.

It doesn’t matter. They’re different than that, right? This is a liquid ink going on and a powdered adhesive that’s cured, so it’s very soft and malleable, which is different than, say, vinyl or toner transfer, that is more textured, right? You put that on a shirt, and you feel it a lot more. This is a lot softer hand.

Some folks say it feels almost like a really, really thin coating or something on the shirt. It’s very thin, it’s very soft. You can squish it in your hands, you can stretch it. It’s got like, I don’t want to say rubbery, because sometimes that can sound negative, but it’s got that stretch and return type of a feel to it, and it feels nice in your hands, compared to if you’ve done print and cut, or really thick vinyl or any of these other things, they don’t really feel great in your hand. It feels like there’s paper on the shirt or there’s plastic on the shirt.

It feels heavy and not breathable at all. You don’t get that with direct to film. And as I said, you may have felt a direct to film transfer before and not liked it. I would challenge you to check out the ColDesi one if you have, just to be sure, because it probably is different. And the last bit is, I mentioned it earlier, but you can print on just about any type of shirt, so lights, darks, poly, cotton, blends, et cetera.

The last question is, folks ask a lot about the safety of the ink, the adhesive, all stuff like that, “Oh, someone on the internet said it wasn’t safe,” things of that nature. So this is simple to address. For one, if your area that you work in has specific safety requirements on materials you use, what you put on apparel, what you use in your shop, if the building you have has certain rules, or you’re just generally concerned that you want to make sure that you’re operating with things that are safe to use, then we have safety data sheets on this. So I would just say if any of those things apply, which is usually why people are asking, because the building they have doesn’t allow it, the city doesn’t have, they have to get a certain license to do certain things, if you need any of that, just contact our team, ask for the safety data sheets. That’s the best way to handle that, and that’ll tell you all there.

And chances are, if you are screen-printing now, stuff that you’re using now is probably has a much scarier-looking safety data sheet than the direct to film stuff, because there’s a lot of chemicals involved on the screen printing side of things. So I doubt you’re stepping into worse territory, but the bottom line on that is to just go ahead and get a safety data sheet if you have any concerns so you can look over it yourself, and that’s the official stuff. All right, so the last bit is … We’ll wrap up with a commercial, right? I hope I’ve answered a ton of questions that you’ve had.

Hopefully you’ve learned something here. There’s so much more to cover, I know, but this is, I feel, a pretty good amount of information in a compact period of time considering. If you’ve want to see demonstrations, get a sample, get a sample of your own artwork, do a one-on-one demo, whatever it is, you can go to ColDesi.com, you can email marketing@ColDesi.com, or you can give us a call, and any of those are great way to reach us. And we have a team of folks that specifically handle all different types of shops, so if you’re a startup, if you’re kind of consider yourself a standard screen print shop, if you are a unique situation, maybe you don’t even consider yourself a screen print shop, you just happen to produce something in a vertical line of work, and this is part of the process that you think can improve how things are produced in your plant or whatever it might be, just reach out to us, and the folks that are over here that are DTF experts will help you out. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast.

I hopefully did my best on doing a slideshow that might not be watched, but as mentioned, go ahead and go to customapparelstartups.com, and you can watch this on video or see all the slides if you want to, or if you have anything specific you need, just reach out to our team. So thank you very much again, and have a good business.

In this insightful episode of Custom Apparel Startups, we welcome Howard Potter back to discuss the nuances between Direct to Film (DTF) printing and traditional Screen Printing. With his deep-rooted knowledge from A&P Master Images, Howard breaks down the pros and cons of each technology, helping entrepreneurs make informed decisions tailored to their business needs.

The conversation begins with an overview of each printing method’s technical demands and operational scopes. Howard elaborates on the initial investment costs, ease of operation, and scalability potential of DTF and Screen Printing, giving listeners a comprehensive comparison.

Highlighting key factors like print quality, production speed, and cost-effectiveness, Howard shares his firsthand experiences with both methods. He discusses how DTF offers flexibility and precision with lower setup times, making it ideal for small to medium runs.

Conversely, Screen Printing is celebrated for its economic benefits in large batch productions and its lasting print quality.

Further, Howard addresses common misconceptions and challenges associated with each method, such as the steep learning curve of Screen Printing and the upfront costs associated with transitioning to or starting with DTF.

Listeners will come away with a clear understanding of which printing method might best suit their current operations and future growth plans, armed with Howard Potter’s practical advice and industry insights. Whether you’re a startup in the apparel industry or looking to expand your existing setup, this episode serves as an essential guide to mastering these popular printing techniques.

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. My name is Marc Vila. And today, we’ve got on Howard Potter with A&P Master Images, on again. Hopefully, you’ve listened to other episodes where we featured Howard here and his expertise on the business. So, thanks again for coming.

Howard Potter:
Thanks for having me.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, great. And I’ve really enjoyed our last couple conversations. The folks who initially listened to it in the beginning on our teams just really said, “Oh, wow. That was really good information. That’s actually going to be really helpful to people.” So, I’m hoping everybody out there listening gets the same thing out of this episode. And today, we really want to talk about a topic that comes up a lot in our forums, on our phone calls, social media, everywhere. It’s kind of the analog printing is what I would say. Technically, I call it analog printing versus digital printing. In other words, screen printing versus direct-to-film printing, or DTG printing versus vinyl cutting.

And these processes that are digital printing processes, where we’re printing pixels with either toner or droplets of ink, versus processes where we’re manually laying down or producing colors, like screen printing and vinyl. So, Howard, you have a ton of experience in both of these processes. So, maybe we just start off with what processes did you get started with? Why did you choose that? And then how did you evolve into doing some of the other ones? And a good description of that.

Howard Potter:
So, about 21 years ago when my wife and I started from our home, we only had a 14 foot by 14 foot room. How most businesses start, either a room in your home or a garage. And I had a graphic design background. So, basically, I had reached search sublimation when it wasn’t even really brought to the forefront yet. It was still in its infant stages. People didn’t really know what it was. No different than direct-to-film now. I think we’re in our second generation or whatever of it. So, sublimation was something that I brought on because it was roughly about $5,000 to invest in a decent setup. You could spend less, but $5,000 was a key point to really be above a hobbyist, and it didn’t take up much space and it didn’t pull a lot of power, it didn’t require any ventilation or anything like that. So, it was something that was safe to have, especially when I had kids at home.

And so, we started off with that and it literally led to the next thing we got into, which isn’t on this topic, but embroidery, because again, it was another item. It didn’t take up a lot of space. It started off with a single head embroidery machine. As our company grew and we moved the business out of our home, we then expanded into screen printing. Our first screen print space took up roughly about, I’d say 500 to 600 square feet. And you can get away with less, but comfortably being able to move, have your supplies, a manual press, a small dryer with a 24-inch belt on it widthwise by eight foot long and space to clean and pressure, wash your screens, burn your screens, emulsify them.

And then, from there, I mean we were pretty heavy into screen printing for a while because the direct-to-garment printing was being announced over that time period. And we’re talking probably 12 years ago, 13 years ago. And when I researched the direct-to-garment printing, it didn’t have the output that I was looking for at the time, and it was very costly to get into a printer. And you still needed parts of either heat pressing or running them through a dryer to cure the ink. So, that’s probably one of the few processes we skipped over, and we allowed our sublimation and our screen printing to catch both sides at the time.

Now, fast forward, 2024, I should say, actually I think it was the end of 2022 when we had just started researching the direct-to-film printer that you guys actually make, which is your DTF-24H4. We researched that because when I got the email on what it was, I was like, “I think this just solved all my issues between screen… If not all, but the majority, 95%, 98% of my issues with screen printing and sublimation to where I don’t need to buy all those extra supplies, I don’t need all those extra man hours for cleaning screens, emulsifying screens, registering them, cleaning up after everything.”

And the more I researched in the direct-to-film, I realized no matter what size unit you buy, even if you buy the largest unit, it’s still very compact, clean, organized, takes up less space, doesn’t pull nearly as much power, it takes less setup time, your in production more than you are prep time. It’s easier for the designers to design for, it gives your customer more capabilities than they ever had before because they were stuck by, is it a white item with full color? Or is it spot color or a simulated process with screen printing or half-tones with screen printing just with spot color half-tones and what’s that going to cost me? Whereas direct-to-film actually simplifies everything. It’s even easier to sell because it goes on so many different products. Customer service doesn’t have to worry about a setup charge, breaking down the callers, any of that. They just sell it for what it is.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Okay, that was great. That was a loaded answer.

Howard Potter:
Sorry.

Marc Vila:
No, I loved that. And so, I say this a lot in podcast episodes for folks who listen, but I often will take notes while somebody is talking, not exactly, but there’s key things you say that I want to make sure we respond to and address that I predict some people will either need further explanation on or we want to deep dive deeper into. So, your answer was ideal and it let me put in a handful of notes here. So, I’m going to respond to a couple of those things just in summary. So, I like in the beginning you had said, so you started with sublimation and then embroidery. They could have gone the opposite way. You could have started with embroidery and gone sublimation or at the same time even.

And the key thing with that was is that it’s a small space, those technologies are small space and they don’t require really special power or special ventilation. Nowadays, both of those technologies, the price has come down significantly from when you started. You can get a pretty nice sublimation set up for 1,000 bucks-ish, like Sawgrass, brand name printer. And it’s not super high-speed or anything, but you can make a business out of that. And then, embroidery too. Back 20 years ago, an embroidery machine would easily be $15,000, $20,000 for a full setup, and now you can get them for $10,000. You can get quality equipment for $10,000-ish.

And I’d like to describe a few of the things you had said too. So, the way I think about customization, and I think it’s an important thing to understand for anybody in the business or getting into it, is I really consider there’s three ways of decorating because we said analog and digital, which are true, that’s two ways to separate. But another way to separate is actually how things are adhered to the garment. And they’re either adhered through a chemical reaction through some sort of bonding or adhesive, or through a mechanical interaction. And so, starting the opposite. Mechanical is embroidery. It’s knots. It’s thread and knots. There’s a mechanical machine moving and tying stuff together. Friction is holding that whole thing together.

And then, we’ve got the chemical reaction stuff. And that’s really on that sublimation side. Sometimes that’s in screen printing when you put certain things in the fabric to remove color out the fabric, so you can add other colors in. And you’re actually physically chemically changing the dye and the garment. And then, we’ve got our adhesion styles, so direct-to-film, white toner printing, vinyl, those are all adhesion. So, we’re actually, we take a color, whatever that is, whether it’s from liquid ink or from vinyl or whatever it might be. And there’s glue in so many words being put on the back of it. And then, that glue goes on a shirt. And generally speaking, heat and pressure activate the glue.

So, if somebody’s listening who doesn’t understand what that means, it’s almost like a glue stick. When you heat it gets all melty and it soaks into whatever you’re wanting to glue. And then, once it cools down again, it gets hard again just like it was before. And that’s how direct-to-film and vinyl, all those basically are working that way. So, I think it’s important to understand there’s chemical reactions and that. Now, saying that, all of these processes, as you mentioned, going into the next, they take up different amounts of space. And you had said that when you went into screen printing, I noted that you said you wanted about 500 square feet to comfortably work. Just as a quick visual, a two-car garage is going to be like 400 or 500 square feet.

Howard Potter:
Yeah, 20-by-20, 20-by-30.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. So, visually, that’s the space we’re talking about to comfortably operate. Was that a four-color screen press or-

Howard Potter:
Yes. Yeah, my first one was… Because at the time, when I started, this is the great thing in the power that people have at their fingertips. I learned how to do web design too, but internet was just becoming a thing. And when you look at those things versus now, yes, there was less information out there back then. You had to really cold call to get information. You actually had to know who to research because the Yellow Pages were still big. So, now you have all this information out in the web, but you have to really watch what information you’re reading because you have a lot of people that put false information or not accurate information out there, which then causes people to make the wrong investments in the wrong type of technologies for their end results. So, it’s very interesting how much more… Like this podcast, for example. I’ve got 21 years of experience. You guys have a ton of experience yourself. And there’s so much that they’re going to gain faster from it nowadays versus what I could back then.

Marc Vila:
You know what? We’re really fortunate to be in this time that we’re in, we’re getting all this information and have the ability to have a couple experts or at least people that claim to be experts who have been doing it for a long time. We’re experts because we’ve been through the fires a few times. But to be able to have folks like us [inaudible 00:12:04] information free to be able to grab out there and get. Because yes, when I started working this industry about 16 years ago, I mean doing initial research was a challenge. Websites weren’t nearly as good. Facebook groups didn’t exist, podcasts didn’t exist. YouTube was there, but not nearly the amount of content.

Howard Potter:
No. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
So, we’re fortunate. We’re also a bit unfortunate to some degree because, as you mentioned, there’s so much information out there and there’s so many groups of people and so many opinions and impersonators and bad-written stuff on the internet, no police to say what’s true or not true because sometimes truth is almost subjective on things. So, a conversation I had with you just before we started the podcast was that a lot of folks will jump online and they’ll say, “I’m starting a business. What machine should I get?” And gosh, that’s an amazing question and gosh, is it a dangerous question. And two examples, are you starting your business out of your house with kids there? Are you starting it out of your house with kids there, but you also have steel building out back that your grandpa built and he used to do some machinery in there and he’s passed away and left it to you and it’s empty, right?

Because that’s two totally different situations. I mean, you could throw in a big giant screen print set up back there if you wanted to, and the you have plenty of room for ventilation, as you mentioned. You got plenty of square feet because that building might be 1,000, 2,000 square feet. Way different than if you live in a condo in Miami. So, I think that it’s a dangerous question to ask. So, understanding the differences between the strengths and weaknesses of this stuff is important. And then, also understanding what’s right for your space and your business is important. So, maybe we can go into a little bit on maybe bullet point or back and forth on the strengths and weaknesses of the different types of technology.

And I have a thought in my head and then I’ll pass it to you. We’ll split analog and digital as we mentioned before, right? So, digital is everything that you are printing individual dots to make whatever image you want. Let’s define digital as that. And then, analog is we are either manually picking or making colors and putting them down individually. So, before you said you had started with a four-color screen press set up, that means you could do four colors at a time. That’s the maximum amount of colors you would do in a piece of art without other complex work happening. So, kind of saying that that’s the difference between those two there.

One of the strengths of the analog stuff is, generally speaking, it’s just really inexpensive to do per piece. That’s the biggest strength of it is a roll of vinyl, if you’re just talking about using vinyl as an example, 30 bucks for a 20-inch by five yard roller, 30 bucks maybe. So, if you’re doing little logos, like little left chest or if that image that’s on your hat, if you were doing that in vinyl, doesn’t cost like nothing, 15 cents. And the same for screen printing. What would that cost in screen printing ink, like a penny?

Howard Potter:
No. Well, because we buy all top of the line inks, so yeah, this size, yeah, it’d be pennies. The big thing though with the analog that I didn’t even take into account until you get into the digital format is it’s cheaper to get into, but it’s more labor-intensive on the backend, which you’re paying for every day. So, when we look at the average size shop, obviously we have close to 30 staff here, which is much different than what the economics or the environment is in the average shop. The average shop is lucky if they have one to five people.

So, how do you maximize the usage of that when you break down… And don’t get me wrong, screen printing, we still do it, we’re just not doing it as much. When you break down, all right, I’m only spending say five or 15 grand, whatever it is to get in the basics of screen printing, we spent upwards of 25,000 to get into it initially. And when you look at those things, you’re like, “All right, 25 grand, I’m looking at probably a $450 a month payment. I could run one order a day and make that payment easily. But how much time am I losing cleaning screens, prepping screens, doing the artwork?”

So, how we had to do things back then because there was only three or four of us at a certain point when we got into screen printing, one day would be dedicated to artwork and printing positives. The next day would be burning screens and cleaning screens. The third day would be actually producing orders. When you break that down, you got the cost of the chemicals, the water, the electric, you got to insure everything too. Let’s not forget that. And the great thing is they’re less mechanical parts, so it’s harder and it takes longer for things to break down, less maintenance, but there’s all that added cost and time and physically touching everything, even if it’s just you.

And especially going into the future with the way things are going with the workforce, you have to maximize time now, not later because if you learn to do that better now you’re going to be more productive later financially too. So, that’s where when we go from analog to digital and you take something like direct-to-film, you’re taking all that extra time of prep work, finish work out of it, and you’re prepping less and producing more consistently with whoever’s there and it’s easier to teach.

Screen printing, there’s a lot of finesse to it. You got to know how to burn a screen just right. Get your lighting, your time down. What emulsions do you like to use? How many coats of emulsion are you going to put on a screen? Are you doing two coats on both sides? Doing a reverse stroke on one side? There’s a lot of different variables and training that goes into it. Whereas if you’re into the digital age of direct-to-film, there’s less training, there’s more producing out the gate, there’s quicker turnaround and your dollar in training someone on direct-to-film versus screen printing.

But where screen printing can shine is when you have customers needing 100 or 500 or 1,000 pieces and you only need to print one or two colors. And if you’re doing a one color on a manual, you’re going to pound them out pretty quickly, and on auto, you’re going even faster. So, when you’re at a one to two color, depending on the quantity, which I usually say 50 to 100 pieces or more, is where you start to see that still hold true to that still that’s still cost-effective time-wise, but it makes you more profitable that way. But if you’re starting out of your home, direct-to-film versus screen printing, even with the smaller units, you’re going to get more bang for your buck and you’re going to be more productive and cost-effective running that direct-to-film than you are screen printing, and it’s going to require less people.

Marc Vila:
Right. Okay, so you had some great stuff in there and I wrote down a couple of things too. So, what I got from you here is one of the great things about the analog processes like screen printing or vinyl is relatively speaking, the upfront cost can be lower. For a vinyl cutting system, no matter what you get, even something small or a single-

Howard Potter:
Yeah, like two, three grand for a vinyl plotter.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, you can get a desktop-sized cutter, commercial grade, 1,200 bucks. And then, you need a heat press. Let’s just say you went with a brand name but not a big one, 800, so like two grand you could do a system. And probably reasonably close to that for a single color small screen print system. So, one of the reasons that looks and is very appealing, because while I only have to spend two grand, that’s a great way to start. Once I grow into it, then I’ll spend more money. The danger in that is what you described is the time.

And this is something I see very common that happens in the startup is somebody… And by the way, this is the true with mowing your own lawn. This is the same thing if you want to paint your house. It’s the same thing if you want to get into baking or bread making or cooking or smoking meats, the tools to get started… You can smoke meat in a generic brand kettle style grill, not even like a Weber, but a cheap one from like 100 dollars. You can smoke meat in that. Now, the challenge is if you have really cheap knives, you’re going to hate cutting up everything ahead of time and trying to get the little fats off and all that stuff’s going to be really hard. You’re keeping the temperature the same in that cheap metal thin case is going to be really, really hard. All these things are harder. It’s a lot more work, right?

Because you didn’t want to buy, say a Traeger or recteq brand type of smoker that was going to cost you $1,500. So, you spend $100 not $1,500. Very appealing. You can do it. The challenge is that if you don’t work through all the extra work and all the challenges to have success, the chances of success are smaller. The chances of you saying, “Smoking meats is way too hard. It’s way too much work. It’s so easy to waste money and ruin stuff. I don’t want to do it again.” And then, you give up.

And I think that is exactly the true of all the other examples. If you get a really cheap mower, you’re going to hate mowing your lawn, it’s not going to look good. If you have a crappy edger, it’s going to get tangled all the time, and it’s going to take you twice as long to do it. So, it’s a little bit of that with some of these analog processes. If you start with a really cheap screen printing set up, yes, you can get started.

Which by the way, I’m pro. I am pro that. I am pro do something, don’t not do it. So, if you have to do it, you need to mentally be prepared that it’s going to be a bunch of work, it’s going to have headaches and you’re going to want to get out of that situation. Alternatively, if you are willing and able, if you got the guts and you’re able to do it, you got to have guts to take… You had to have guts to put five grand into a sublimation printer 20 years ago. That took guts. That’s a decent amount of money. How old were you, like 21?

Howard Potter:
That’s big money back then.

Marc Vila:
How old were you, 21?

Howard Potter:
Yeah, I was 22.

Marc Vila:
So, you’re 21, 22 years old to take five grand and do that. Whether you financed it, borrowed it, had it, that’s nobody’s business. But no matter what, that’s a scary moment.

Howard Potter:
Oh, no, no, no. That’s a good conversation. I think we should talk about this. I want to set the stage for this. Everyone says, “Why is this happening to me? Why can’t I do this?” Let me set the stage. I grew up in group homes. I had nothing handed to me. My wife and I bought a house when I was 22, she was 19. We got married in the backyard. Started the business later that year. Had our first kid on the way. I literally used our credit card because my interest rate was lower. Low back then was like 8%. And I had a great credit score, so I knew-

Marc Vila:
I think that’s low now.

Howard Potter:
Yeah, exactly. And so, I was pouring metal at a mill 13 days on, one day off, working 12-hour shifts. Just working overtime. But I was putting it on my credit card. I knew the interest would be a tax write-off anyways on the business. Bought the stuff. Literally within the first two weeks, got the hang of it, tweaked some stuff, was selling coffee mugs and some apparel and mouse pads, and started generating revenue right away, just off me doing it. But you got to be smart with your money. I’m looking at it, all right. I’m going to pay $5,000, plus every time I got an order, I took the profit, I wailed the credit card with it. So, I didn’t let that five grand sit there for two years or three years as I was making the money, I didn’t take profit out of the business, I paid that debt down instantly.

Marc Vila:
Okay. No, that’s good then. And I like that attitude of I was able to get credit, I did it because… And whatever it might be. This is a little sidebar to that story, but one of the things we talk about is some folks may say… Let’s go an extreme example you have a credit card that’s like 23.9% interest, right? That’s not a great interest rate. And if you were to put five grand on it and then you have your minimum payment and the time to pay it off, it seems like it’s a scary thing. And however, when you start doing the math, this was going to the mugs, how much about were you selling mugs for back then? How much retail?

Howard Potter:
Oh, just a single mug? I was at $20 a mug.

Marc Vila:
Okay. And then, if it was a business that wanted 20 or 40 of them?

Howard Potter:
Yeah, if they were 20 to 40 of them I’d probably be around $10 to $11.

Marc Vila:
Okay. So, you were maybe making somewhere between 8 and 15 bucks a mug, right?

Howard Potter:
Yes.

Marc Vila:
Just finish that thought and then let you go into it real quick. So, let’s go on the bottom of that, eight. So, 5,000 divided by just eight bucks, that’s 600 mugs. That’s on the lowest end by the way. That’s not even your high end. That’s on your lowest end of the numbers. That’s about 600 mugs. That’s not that many orders over that period of time to pay it off. So, what I would say to somebody is, if you got a dream and you got a credit card and you have got a little bit of guts to do it, even if the interest rate is high, if you start hustling and paying the debt off, you own a business and you did it, versus… And this is lots of thought processes. I’m just going to say I like that because you did it when you were hot and hungry and ready for it and you had the guts to do it. You did it.

Versus saying, “Out of my paycheck every week, I’m going to put in $60,” or whatever the number. Because you probably would not have put in more than 50, 60 bucks a paycheck, I imagine at that time if you were to save to buy one. That means that same number, five grand divided by 60 bucks a paycheck, it is going to take you 83 pay cycles. If you’re getting paid every two weeks, that’s years. I’m not going to try to do the math, but that’s years to get started. At that point in time, you’ve lost the gusto, you’ve lost the dream, you’re tired. You may give up between now and then. So, I say do it and then pay it off if you can. And we sidebarred into this conversation, but I think that’s great because both of these things we said are extremely important.

Howard Potter:
I’ll make it even better for you.

Marc Vila:
Sure.

Howard Potter:
So, not only did I start it out with an 8% interest credit card, everyone gets offers, even with people with not so good credit, where they get a credit card offer with no interest payments for 12 months if you take a previous balance and move it to their credit card. So, I think it was like three or four months in I got that, I moved that debt to zero interest and had 12-

Marc Vila:
Yeah, good.

Howard Potter:
So, it’s knowing the rules to the game to play them, but also being financially savvy. I mean, listen, I tell people this all the time. Everybody’s like, “Where’d you get the name A&P Master images?” I said, “Well, the phone book was out and if you had an A and an ampersand, you went to the top of the Yellow Pages for free in bold.” I didn’t have $700 back then to advertise. It was all cold calling and mailing and things of that nature. But when you go back to the printing and the processes and everything that we’re talking about, there’s nothing wrong with being frugal with your money, but also don’t sit on your hands waiting for it to happen either.

Marc Vila:
There’s a balance.

Howard Potter:
Well, it wasn’t a gamble for me because I did the research on the process and how everything chemically bonded with different coatings and fabrics and all that type of stuff. So, I seen that I could do short or large runs, and I could teach anyone to help me, right? Because I had my wife and my father-in-law would help me once in a while, heat pressure to do mugs. So, I knew I had resources around me that I could maximize the output. Again, think about it today, sublimation was the answer back then for me. Fast-forward it 21 years later, everyone’s starting out now, gets to choose direct-to-film over screen printing and over sublimation, and be efficient and profitable faster than I could be way back then.

And the difference, we talk about analog versus the digital, the cost startup cost can switch, but the backend cost switch as well. Like we were saying earlier, meaning screen printing can be cheaper upfront to get started in, but you have way more cost than your labor. Whereas direct-to-film, you could have more upfront cost depending on what machine you go with, but you’re going to have way more profitable backend because you have less time waiting around for something to be produced. You’re instantly up and running fast with quality.

Marc Vila:
With quality. And quality is something that I think is an interesting part in this analog versus digital type of conversation. And tell me if you agree with my thought on this. You can both get quality equipment and quality output on low-cost analog products. You cannot get quality output and quality equipment on low-cost digital products. So, I can buy $1,000 cutter or a $1,800 screen print set up, that’s cheap, and it will produce a quality product. If I buy a thousand or $1,800 direct-to-film printer, I probably am going to be really upset sooner or later at the failure of the finished product.

Howard Potter:
Oh, yeah. Your ROI, your return on investment-

Marc Vila:
And I think that digital requires a bit, digital requires some investment, but you’re going to get the money out of it. And I think that’s a dangerous spot people fall into is they say, “Oh, I can start DTF or screen printing for $1,500.” And I would say, I mean you can’t. I mean you can, you can buy that, but-

Howard Potter:
And you’re going to be miserable either way.

Marc Vila:
Yes, you’re really going to be miserable… And you’re going to be more miserable on the cheap DTF or a cheap direct-to-garment printer or digital printer. So, if you’re going to go digital, which is the way to go in the future, digital is the future in the long run, then take the leap is my thought. If you’re going digital, take the leap. Don’t go cheap into digital because this equipment is very complicated as much as people might not think it is. It’s very complicated on the inside and you want quality parts.

Howard Potter:
Yeah. Well, here’s the other crazy part about it. And I get this. I’ve never been fearful of a payment. And it’s not that I don’t worry about making a payment. The thing is, I’ve done all my calculations. I’ve run my cost analysis. I know what the monthly payment is, I know what my power consumption is going to be. I know what my square inch cost is going to be. I know what my average production rate’s going to be. I didn’t know all those things when I first got going with sublimation, but I had a rough idea when I started running some basic numbers of what I was reading and learning.

So, I don’t care what manufacturer it is of what the equipment or what the process is, you have your tax, you have your sales reps, you have your information that’s out there, whatever number someone gives you, say they tell you you can produce 80 shirts an hour, whatever the process is, we’ll lowball it to 50. Be safe. Always budget on the air of caution. No different than building a home. You always figure 5% to 10% over budget, right? Well, in this case budget lower production numbers and lower output to make sure your costs are still going to make it. So, we went with the DTF-24H4 machine, and we knew that it would take over screen printing from what we tested before we even bought the unit.

And so, we bought a unit that we could have went with the middle one of the DTF-24H2, which is a two-head versus a four-head. Well, what did I think about? Well, two extra sets of heads, it could print faster. That means my team is at the printer less time in the day. We can grow into the machine. These are things that people really need to analyze before they make the plunge. Now, what is your goal? Is this a hobby or are you going to take it serious? Mine started as a hobby because I went to school for design. I was making great money pouring metal, but some things happened in life with my child, which forced me to make it a full-time job, which I’m glad I did to this day. But take the payment. Say, it’s $500 a month. I’ll do the math right here on the calculator. $500 a month. You have a minimum, I say 22 business days a month because you want to have your weekends and stuff, the average person.

Marc Vila:
Yes, definitely.

Howard Potter:
So, 22 business days a month. You’ve got to make $22.72 cents a day. If you can’t do that… Now, let’s figure electric and all this other stuff from your home. So, even if we double that say 100%, you’re talking not even $45 a day to create your own career.

Marc Vila:
To create your own thing. And that’s a great thing about… And you’re talking about investing in a strong hefty piece of equipment that can do a lot. So, I do think that we can probably start to close up the conversation a little bit. I think this has been great, but I think we both agree that the analog processes that are older in technology, meaning they’ve been around longer, like screen printing and vinyl cutting and things like that, they’re great for a lot of their reasons. Like you said, you have a big order that’s a couple of colors and it’s worth the time and the setup, and the cost per piece is very, very inexpensive over time. So, it’s a great part of the business.

And especially, if you’re A, a startup or two, trying to grow your business, the digital stuff, this is computers and machines doing work for you, that’s what they are. So, a direct-to-film printer, since we’re using that example a lot, that is applying all the colors, applying the adhesive it, putting it for a roll-fed machine, putting it into a roll that’s getting ready to go into the next step of production. It’s doing all of those steps. The analog system, a human does all of those things in so many words. A human picks all the colors, physically, goes to a shelf and picks off buckets. If the color’s not there, a human mixes the color visually looks at it-

Howard Potter:
Which can take an average of 15 to 20 minutes to a mix of color, depending on the size, whether you’re a quart, gallon, how finessed the color is, you can easily add 15 to 20 minutes. Then, you also have to swatch it and cure it to make sure it holds the color content that you’re looking for for your [inaudible 00:37:51] match.

Marc Vila:
Right. And depending on the garment you’re using, it could change a little bit. If you’re putting it on a brown shirt, it may look different than on the yellow shirt. So, all of those things are done by a human. And the digital processes, take that and make a machine do it. So, the machine is picking the color. And there may be a little bit of work because you may need to tweak the color or the saturation, for sure that’s part of it. But the cool part about that is if you’re mixing manual colors for screens, I’ve got to mix the color, look at it, check it, maybe run it through the dryer, it’s off. And that’s a process. It’s a circle I have to keep doing.

On the digital side, what I’ll do is if I have a color I’m really trying to hit that I know is a weird orange or red, which in general those colors can be weird. In my software, I will go in and I’ll print 80 saturation, 90 saturation, 100 saturation. I’ll change for these four hues. I’ll bring all of that into one piece, hit print, walk away, go do something, come back, all of them are printed. And then, I can look at my six examples. Number two was the right one, that was the 90% saturation on the magenta. Boom, done, and I’m going. Where the human would’ve gone one, add more, one, add more. So, that step turns from 30 minutes to six minutes, I don’t know.

Howard Potter:
And then, you’re stuck with the waste in screen printing. Once you mix it, that’s only for that customer. You have to hope they come back and want the rest of it.

Marc Vila:
Right. So, now the point in that is now you have to be good at predicting how much you’re going to use for the job… You have to have mixed colors and then run out with eight shirts left or something.

Howard Potter:
Oh, yeah. I got one better for you. Because direct-to-film took off so good and so fast for us last year when we really hammered all year long with it, I probably have over $3,000 worth of custom mixed little quarts, where there’s probably that much ink in them or that much ink, because people just dropped screen printing all together. So, we’re doing five orders, I would say dollar amount wise, we’re doing five-to-one ratio, five in way of direct-to-film and one in the direction of screen printing now. So, all those little mixtures, we’re literally just going to take them to the dump and get rid of them because they’re just taking up space.

Marc Vila:
So, you mix too much or you’re going to purposely mix too much and store it because they’re probably coming back and going to make an extra quart-

Howard Potter:
Well, in our case, everything switched, like a light switch to DTF from screen printing. So, it made those colors obsolete instantly.

Marc Vila:
They make them obsolete. And the same is true with vinyl. We sell vinyl equipment and vinyl here at ColDesi. And the space that we have for a toner printer or for sublimation printer, any of the digitals, DTG, DTF is like a corner. That’s what occupies the showroom. And then, anytime we need to fire it up to do a demo or a video, you turn it on, you fire it up, you run it. The vinyl, when we did that, we had a desktop-sized machine that could cut less than 20 inches. That thing plus all of the colors of vinyl that we needed because if we wanted to do camo, that was a camo color. We had all the basic colors. Then, all those basic colors in glitter. And then, we had all the fancy interesting things, the glow and the dark and the puff…

That whole demo area took up this huge space because all of these rolls… And then, if we were doing, oh, St. Patrick’s Day is coming up. Let’s do a St Patrick’s Day video for YouTube using our vinyl cutter. We want to do it in dark green and glitter green. So, we would order from the warehouse dark green and glitter green. We would cut out those design… The rest of that roll would sit there until we had another green design. So, you end up taking up all this… So, whether it’s the liquid or it’s the vinyl, every color becomes inventory. And then, if you run out of that color, you’re going to have to order it, order a new one or mix a new one if you hopefully have all the ingredients to mix it. Where digital, typically CMYK, that’s your inventory, or maybe there’s light magenta or light cyan too.

Howard Potter:
I mean I’ll break down the mask because I was actually just running it while you were speaking. Right now, we have ColDesi’s largest printer, the 24H4. Supplies, we probably have 10 to 12 rolls of material on hand. We have a minimum of four to six of each ink color and on average, 20, 25 bags of powder. And even if you add my heat process, we have four Hotronix Swing Aways, we’re probably using 225 square feet. And we produced over a half million with that printer last year, and that wasn’t with its max capability.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And the same thing here. We have pallets of rolls and material, pallets of the powder glue and all that stuff. And that occupies, I’m not going to get into details, but a corner of the warehouse. And the vinyl, I should plug my laptop in. I can’t believe this mid-podcast, I didn’t plug my laptop in, but the vinyl is like five rows of inventory that we have to keep shelf-on-shelf because we have… I’m stepping away from the camera for a…

Howard Potter:
No, you’re good, you’re good.

Marc Vila:
But-

Howard Potter:
Here’s the crazy part. Go ahead, sorry.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it’s a huge amount of space, huge. And by the way, we have 20 inch rolls and 40 or whatever it is, two sizes. So, if you have two different cutters that you’re doing two different things and you’ve got two sizes. If you have an oversized screen printer and a standard size, you’ve got two sets of everything. The inventory just grows and grows.

Howard Potter:
It chews up space. So, I ran the math. So, by us using no more than 225 square feet roughly, and we did a little over a half million in production last year with that unit, our square foot worth is $2,222 per square foot value.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, wow. What I love about this topic is each little piece is a rabbit hole of information. And so, that’s what I love about it because it’s fun to dive into and there’s a lot to learn and I love to learn new things. I’m addicted to it. So, I love this topic because it’s so deep. The downside of that depth is going back to a statement I made earlier, you can’t go on a Facebook group and say, “How should I start my business?” And expect anybody… I’ll say this, and this may or may not offend some people who’ve done it. I’ve probably done it. Anybody who answers that question without asking you at least five questions is doing you a disservice.

You can’t answer that question without asking, “Do you have a big space to work with? Are you in an apartment? Can you invest some money? Who are you going to sell to? What are you going to make?” I mean, there’s a lot of-

Howard Potter:
“Is it a hobby?”

Marc Vila:
“Is it a hobby? Is it a side hustle that you want to stay a side hustle?” For example, we have a lot of customers who are educators or former educators, retired educators. And a lot of them want a side hustle, and they don’t want to quit being a fourth grade teacher because they love it. It’s a passion for them, they love it. However, they do have times of the year where they maybe have the summer offspring break, things of that nature, where they can have a little side hustle that they can use to make some money for vacations, Christmas presents, and that’s what they want. So, “I want love my full-time job. I’m not trying to leave it. I want a side hustle.” So, the side hustle answer, it’s important. This is an important part of the process, but I’m always a fan of the digital processes and I could tell you are too.

Howard Potter:
Yes.

Marc Vila:
And I will typically lean towards folks going that way. And then, I just think that the final thoughts on it, for me, are if you’re going to go with a digital process, you need to… And these are things we’ve said, or I’ve said, you’ve said, but you have to invest in something quality. If you cheap digital, you’re going to be unhappy, that’s the bottom line. And probably if it’s sold on Amazon, you’re going to be unhappy.

Howard Potter:
Oh, yeah.

Marc Vila:
Because you want something that’s actually going to be there to make you money. And then, when you’re ready to take the leap, if you’ve got the guts to take the leap, do it, just like you did. You took the credit card and you put five grand on it when you were working 12-hour shifts. That takes guts because that five grand could have been for, I don’t know, 1,000 other things in your life. So, if you’ve got the guts to do it and you want to do it, you take the leap, pay some interest if you have to, work the system if you can, like you said. But the digital process is the way to go and it’s very well worth it if you invest in the right digital process for you. So, ask the questions. If you want to ask opinions of people, if they don’t ask you questions back, I would be skeptical of the answer that’s too simple.

And then of course, a little ColDesi plug. The folks over here at ColDesi spend so much time learning about all the different technologies, all the different capabilities, all the different reasons why you would or would not buy something. They get paid to sell a vinyl cutter. They get paid to sell a DTF. So, to them, they want you to be happy and get the right thing because that’s the culture here. So, I would say you should talk to some experts. And I think it’s a good idea if you’re talking to experts, you talk to experts that sell different things because if you call the guy who just sells screen printing equipment, he is going to sell you screen printing equipment. If you call the person who just sells-

Howard Potter:
You go to a car dealership, right?

Marc Vila:
Yeah. They’re going to sell you a Jeep if it’s a Jeep dealer.

Howard Potter:
If this all I have in the lot, I’m trying to get you to buy whatever’s on this lot. And that’s a good point too, because not to drag this out, but that’s another reason why we have so many different processes in our company because it also starts with where the industry was. And now, all of our newer equipment shows where it’s going and why we’ve made those investments. So, you don’t have to make the same mistakes I did.

Marc Vila:
Well, and I think that what you did in a lot of different ways is a good trajectory, and you’re just starting with what you had and what was available at the time. So, I would gather 20 years ago if a direct-to-film printer for printing t-shirts was available, that probably would’ve least been high on the deck-

Howard Potter:
It would have been high.

Marc Vila:
It would’ve been on deck for you at minimum. It would’ve been part of the decision making process. But the mistakes you didn’t make were you didn’t, right out of the gate, come out with the cheapest thing you can buy when you started with your sublimation printer. When you were able to pay off debts, you did it. When you were able to invest in a different technology, like embroidery was your second one, you did that because that rounds out your plate a little bit for your customers and who you could sell to.

So, you did those right things. So, you made mistakes, but you made a lot of great decisions, which is why you stuck around. So, I think that’s wonderful. And I think that anybody listening here who maybe you don’t know anything about the industry yet and you’re learning, that’s why you’re listening to this episode. And you may listen and this is reality. Someone’s going to listen and say, “Yeah, but I made a mistake. I messed up my credit when I was 19 years old. I don’t have five grand.” And I would just say, “You take the steps then. You take the steps to fix that. Maybe it’s not tomorrow or maybe someone else helps you out to it.”

Howard Potter:
You get the lease option. You can lease equipment too, depending on the value.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, you can lease it. If you can’t get approved for leasing, then maybe there’s someone that will work with you. But the point of it all is, and just kind of my final thought on it… I think my second final thought because I already had one final thought. But my second final thought is kind of just like you got to take your leap, make your right decision, educate yourself. And when we’re talking about analog versus digital stuff, the analog processes, although they’ve stood tests of time and they’re low-cost, ultimately, it’s more work always. It’s always more work for you. So, I would say, what can you afford more? If this is a side hustle or you’re just getting started, can you afford 10 more hours of work a week? Or can you afford to figure out how to sell 15 more shirts a month to make the difference? Because that literally can be the difference in a payment between a cheap thing and an expensive thing. 150 versus 300 is like 16 shirts.

Howard Potter:
Exactly. The problem is we get hung up on this big dollar amount, right?

Marc Vila:
Yes.

Howard Potter:
Whether it’s five grand, 50 grand, whatever it is, I’m living proof to tell you, I started with five grand worth of equipment. I now have over $800,000 worth of equipment, but 90% of it’s all paid off because I kept that same format of investing in a technology, mastering it, promoting it, selling it. When the next thing came along, I jumped on it before the next person. Because here’s the other thing that’s very important that people need to understand, the longer you wait to get into a process, that means everybody else is capitalizing on the market faster. It doesn’t mean you can’t still enter into it, but they’re capitalizing on it faster. So, the quicker you jump in, the quicker you’re going to start making money.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. The early adopters will have more headaches and frustrations because they are the ones that have to help learn and help build it.

Howard Potter:
Pave the way.

Marc Vila:
But you earn that in the rewards of making more money when it’s worth more. The late adopters have almost no headaches because everything’s completely matured, but they’re fighting the slimmest margin time of a technology. So, if you are saying, “I’m probably going to wait until maybe three years for DTF to mature more before I invest,” by then, the gold rush is gone and now it’s common. So, I think when you jumped in right in a sweet spot, and I think we’re still in that space. Currently, at the taping of this in March of 2024, we’re still in that sweet spot space where there’s tons of big shops that don’t have it. And when we interview those shops, a lot of them that are doing screen printing, they’re losing business to digital, to DTF specifically.

But analog shops are losing business to digital because of all the benefits of digital, which we didn’t go into these yet, but as many colors as you want, as small of quantities as you want-

Howard Potter:
I mean photographs, half-tones, distressed.

Marc Vila:
Photographs, half-tones. And someone could say, “I could do all that in screen printing,” but that’s hard. It’s hard.

Howard Potter:
You can and-

Marc Vila:
To turn a picture of a face into screens, it requires a lot of skill. It’s not something you’d do tomorrow.

Howard Potter:
Well, let’s break it out even simpler than that. All right. Say, I’m printing for a high school or a business and they need youth and adult, but now youth goes down to extra small, maybe even toddler, and then adult goes up to 5X. Well, wait a minute. This 10 by 10 print won’t work on the smaller youth sizes and it’ll look too small on the larger sizes. With the digital, you can adjust that sizing by minor tweaks when you’re setting up the file in the print software to adjust it for pennies on the dollar more for your customer to accommodate them. In screen printing, you’d have to print all these positives, set up all these other screens, and you’d have triple the setup time.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it is interesting and it is fascinating, and we could dive deeper and deeper, but I think we started off with maybe this was going to be a shorter podcast just covering a topic, but it ended up, this is what happens in this exact conversation, is it unfolds into a lot. So, I think we’ve got a bunch of great information here. I hope that everybody listening, you’re headed in the right direction. So, what the homework I would leave people with, I describe in a lot of episodes leaving people with homework are, if you are new to the business now and you’re just starting to learn, I would continue understanding more and more. And do your research. Talk to people on the phone. Don’t rely on Facebook comments and TikTok short videos to make your decision. Talk to experts, research, ask for samples. And if something seems a little too good or too interesting or too cheap, be skeptical. So, that’s one.

And if you’re only doing analog stuff now and you’re like, “Oh, I’m still researching this DTF,” I mean, I’m going to encourage you to move, make the move, get going, take the step because we’re still in a really hot time. So, that wraps everything up for me here. Howard, thank you so much again for jumping on. I know that this little bit of time or this hour that we’ve been on the phone right here is going to have a lasting impact for a lot of people out there. And I hope you know that every time we do one of these podcasts, there’s a bunch of people out there who we change their life in one way or another. It sounds so simple and corny, but it’s a fact because every time we do an episode, I will get a phone call or an email or a Facebook comment that said, “Because of this, I did it. Because of this, I changed this.” So, I want you to just got to go to bed thinking about that.

Howard Potter:
I mean, the thing is, at the end of the day, there’s 320 million people in the United States. There’s less than 400,000 that know anything about any process of customizing. So, no matter if you’re just getting into the industry or adjusting to the industry, there’s still plenty of wealth to be had to provide for your family or to build a large company if you wanted to, it’s still there. It’s still ready to be-

Marc Vila:
Yep, and we talked about that the last time we met, so that’s great. Well, thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. Hopefully, you got a lot of great information out of it. I’d like to wrap up just saying that the podcast is essentially produced and sponsored by ColDesi. So, go to customapparelstartups.com if you want to check out video of this, show notes that we put in there, we’ll put in links and other information. And check out coldesi.com as well. You can look at the direct-to-film printers mentioned in here, direct-to-garment printers, cutters, white toner printing transfer. So, there’s a lot of different things that we offer there. And all those technologies are great for certain people in certain situations doing the right thing.

Right now, both Howard and I clearly are fans of direct-to-film printing, it’s a super cool technology. But the other stuff that’s all out there is great for other applications too. So, do the research, jump on there, learn watch videos, and enjoy. Thanks again, Howard. We’ll see you next time.

Howard Potter:
Thank you.

In this compelling follow-up episode of Custom Apparel Startups, we’re delighted to welcome back Howard Potter, of A&P Master Images, for another deep dive into the world of custom apparel. This time, Howard sheds light on the troubles encountered when starting a t-shirt business and shares invaluable advice for both new and established entrepreneurs in the industry.

Kicking off the episode, we tackle one of the most daunting questions for newcomers: “Which machine to buy?” We stress the importance of broad research and caution against getting tunnel-visioned on a single technology. The landscape of apparel printing is vast and choosing the right equipment is crucial for your business’s specific needs and goals.

Growth is a central theme of our conversation. Howard underscores the necessity of forward-thinking, particularly in terms of spatial planning. Anticipating future expansion is vital; many businesses struggle because they run out of room or fail to utilize their current space efficiently. He offers practical tips on scanning your property and equipment regularly to identify items that can be repurposed or removed, thus making way for essential upgrades or additions.

Howard also introduces the concept of “temporary fixes” for immediate problems, but he warns against relying on these for too long. The discussion moves towards a critical analysis of production, time, and space utilization. He advises that operating at 95% capacity is a clear sign that expansion is overdue. Ideally, businesses should start thinking about improving their space or equipment when they hit the 70-75% threshold to avoid stagnation and ensure continuous growth.

Beyond the technical aspects of running a t-shirt business, Howard emphasizes the foundation of any successful venture: providing excellent service, treating people right, creating outstanding products, and committing to education and transparency. These principles, he argues, are non-negotiable for long-term success in the custom apparel industry.

This episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone looking to navigate the challenges of starting or expanding a t-shirt business. Howard Potter’s expertise and candid advice make it a must-listen for entrepreneurs eager to make their mark in the world of custom apparel.

Here is the list of tips for growing your business:

• Get the right equipment for YOUR business
• Consider the space you have to work and make sure you have room to grow
• If you are not using things or running out of room, be sure to scan your space and see how you can improve efficiency
• Consider your % output / % time / % space
• If you are at 95% production / space … you need to expand
• Really you should be improving space / equipment at 70-75% rather than waiting
• Simple rules for growth
• Provide great service
• Treat people right
• Create a great product
• Educate your customer
• Be transparent

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello, everybody, this is Marc Villa with the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. And if you listened to the last episode, we were with Howard Potter and we were talking about direct-to-film printing and some decisions to make or some things to consider when making that decision. And today, we’re going to talk about the T-shirt business.

So Howard, I want to welcome you. Thank you so much. I just greatly appreciate your time and I know you’re helping a bunch of people out there. Why don’t you just give us, again, a quick little quip on who you are and what you do for anybody who might not have listened to the last episode?

Howard Potter:
My wife and I have been in business for 21 years. We offer screen printing, embroidery, direct-to-film, vinyl graphics, 2D, 3D, UV, laser engraving, sublimation, and even more. We’ve even built online stores. So we’ve been very fortunate over the years to get into a lot of different processes along with rhinestones to see what works, what doesn’t work, and build a very stable and long-term company out of this.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s excellent. And that’s why this question that we’re going to pose is perfect for you and it’s perfect for anybody listening out there who wants some real-world experience. And as I mentioned in our last podcast, you started doing one type of technology, then you had troubles and made it through, and then added another one, which I’m sure had its own troubles and pushed through, and then another one. So you’ve gone through this, I’m sure, like a wave of struggle, success, struggle, success, but that wave for you is like a good-acting stock market. It always goes up and down, but in the end, it was way higher than it started.

And so I wanted to discuss what are some troubles or some problems that you have in growing a T-shirt or any customization business, and how did you solve them? So you can kind of be very specific with problems you’ve had or just some in general. And I’ll just start with, I’ll kind of open the floor with one because we discussed it in the last episode, so if you didn’t listen to that, you should. But one of the problems is deciding what equipment to get or what technology to work with.

And the problem for that is I think much simpler. The answer, I should say, to that problem is much simpler than it really is, right? Because the long answer is, “What do I want to do? And what do I want to sell?” And space and power and all this stuff. That’s the long answer. The short answer is don’t all of a sudden think you should get a piece of technology because you read about it once on the internet or your friend did it or you’ve heard the words before and assume that’s what you get.

And we run into that all the time. We have people who will call up and say, “I want sublimation.” And then, “What are you going to make?” “I’m going to make concert shirts for death metal bands.” “Great. They probably don’t want a bunch of white T-shirts, so you don’t want sublimation. You probably want to do something that’s good with darks and cotton.” “No, I’ve heard sublimation.” And they get stuck there and it’s like, “You should break free.”

So my answer to deciding the equipment is break free of what you think you should buy. Direct-to-film is hot right now. I don’t know if it’s good for you, listening, because I don’t know what you’re looking to make. So break free of what you hear you should get. Research. Let that knowledge just decide on what is actually best for your business model, customer, space, personal capabilities, all of those things. And then that will drive the decision forward. So the simple answer is just do some research, educate yourself, then make a decision.

So that’s how I’m kicking it off. Howard, how about you? What are some troubles you suspect folks will run into and how can they resolve them?

Howard Potter:
Well, there there’s 1,001 different problems people have in a day, a year, and we’ve got to be everything to everyone around us.

One of the problems I still have to this day is growth, which people wouldn’t think that’s a problem, but it’s a good-bad problem is what we call that. And if we go back to the grassroots of starting out of our house in roughly a 15′ by 15′ room, we did that for about four or five years, and we hit to about 125,000 in production out of our house, which the average shop in the United States only does usually about a quarter million to 350,000. And so we had to make a decision of are we going to move, buy a larger house and build something out back and just work out of it? Are we going to take this thing retail and be professional and have a brick-and-mortar?

So we went through those trials and tribulations, and what we did was we moved into a plaza and rented a 650-square-foot space. Now, again, when I went into that space, I also made sure I looked around and I was like, “All right, what else is here?” And what I mean by that is, is there room to grow? A lot of people, when you’re growing, they don’t see the dotted line. And one thing a builder that’s had over 50, 60 years of building experience taught me from his family was when you plan something, plan it with a dotted line. So if you go past that, there’s room for expansion, there’s room for growth. No matter if it’s space or technology, whatever, think outside the box.

So I was probably about 26 when we moved into this space. The next door had someone in it, the upstairs was fully empty. Within a year, I took on more space upstairs. I was able to negotiate a deal, just had to figure out the ergonomics of the workflow. And literally over a five-year period, we went from having 650 square feet of that entire building to 4,000 of it, which was like 67% of the entire plaza at the time.

And this was back in 2012, 2013. We plateaued in the sense of we’re still growing, but we had no more room to grow where we were at. So I started talking to the owner of the property about purchasing it. Again, planning. While I’m thinking about it, I’m like, “Well, if I want more space, I’ve got to kick people out, but if I keep those businesses in, it’s residual revenue to pay for the mortgage,” and I’m like, “do I want to stop my growth for pennies on the dollar or do I want to get bigger and keep up with this?”

So we reached out to our home city where we live, which is not even a five-minute drive, and found that there was some properties that they had that weren’t really marketed, and they started showing them to us. So we actually made the investment to purchase a 5,400-square-foot building with an acre of land. Again, we already did projections, again, research and projections, knowing in a three-year period where we were going to be at next. So we knew the building wasn’t going to be big enough for long-term, but we figured if we can get two to five years out of that additional space, that would be great.

Well, we buy the building, acre of land. We move in. Six months later, we outgrew it. So why did we outgrow it? It wasn’t just growth. It’s going back to technology. We invested in more equipment to keep up with all the production that we needed to get out so we could turn over the orders faster.

Let’s fast-forward to today. Last year, we had invested and built a 3,000-square-foot facility behind our existing building, and we were able to move probably a good 60% of our equipment into that building to create more retail space and production space within the existing building. And I’m here telling you, again, I outgrew that already. Now we’re looking to triple the size of that building, but again, we have the land, so it’s not like we have to move.

Marc Vila:
Right, right. Well, the first one is planning for growth and having a vision for growth, which is definitely a problem. And I think that there’s a few things that you’ve said in there, but the story is really important.

So one is recognizing when the space doesn’t work anymore, and then taking the leap. And when you take that leap, kind of say, “Well, I’m not going to take the leap just to solve for my problem today. I’m going to take the leap into renting a space, buying a space,” whatever’s right for you, “building a bigger house, building a steel building on your property.” I mean, whatever your life is for you.

But when you take that leap, if you were the last example I said is let’s just say you already have land. You’re going to build a steel building outside your property to make into your shop. Well, if you’re considering a steel building that is 2,000 square feet, 1,000 square feet, maybe how much is it for 1,500? Because you need 1,000. How much is it to build a 1,500 one? Oh, wow, that’s actually not that much more. I have the space. What am I going to do with that extra 500? Well, the plan is to grow your business. You’re going to fill it up and then you probably will wish you would’ve gotten the 2,000-square-foot one potentially, but that’s the dream.

But I think that that’s like the good lesson is to plan for the growth and make sure that you don’t stop yourself. Because the problem is, we talked about in the last episode, people buying a machine that’s potentially too small and can’t grow. There’s another theme that you brought up again, space, making sure you have the space to grow. Very often we run into folks who either stop themselves with equipment and don’t reinvest or didn’t buy a big enough one in the first place, and then you’re stuck and it’s hard to get out sometimes when you get stuck.

So whenever you can, I think the answer you’re providing to me that I’m reading it as is whenever you can, build yourself a space, I don’t mean physically, I just mean in general, whether technology, printing, whatever it is, get yourself space that lets you grow because then you have room to get into it. You’ve got a motivational to fill that vacuum, whether it’s physical, technology, whatever it is.

Howard Potter:
Yeah. And it’s not even just that too. It’s that, yes, but it’s that and more. It’s be cognizant of throughout your year, each year, whether… Every January, I’ll scan my entire property inside and out for space, getting rid of stuff we don’t need, being more efficient. Before I look to gain more space, I make sure I’ve executed every possibility of reutilizing what’s already there before buying more or building more.

And so another way to utilize more space, you’re eventually going to need stock for supplies, or you need stock for finished products. So we have a tractor trailer on our property. We have a 16′, a 24′, another 24′ and a 6′ trailer for housing different types of things instead of getting more building space. You know?

Marc Vila:
Okay.

Howard Potter:
So yes, you lose time going out to those trailers, but it allows you a cushion before making that big investment. So it buys you time, and you give up a little bit of time to gain more revenue on the backend to build up to what you really need.

And the other thing too is when I’m looking at more space, you got to execute what’s there first. Make sure you maximize every square foot as possible. Then from there, you want to get to the planning phase of where do I see myself three to five years from now? And you want to make sure you’re not going past the 90, 95% percentile of being maxed-out all the time because then that means you need more manpower to ramp up production to get it out of your face faster. So you want to make sure things are moving accordingly.

Once you’re at that 75, 80%, you want to start doing your research of what the next phase is. You don’t want to start doing your research when you need it. It’s got to be a minimum, you want to plan a minimum of six months ahead of time because things are going to change. So if you start having the conversation now, you’re measuring twice and cutting once more often.

So in my story, yeah, we kept growing, but it was good because it was controlled growth and I didn’t have to fight for the space. I worked up to the space, and then I would take on a little bit more space than I needed so I could grow into it. No different than a direct-to-film printer, for example. You buy more than what you need within a safe zone, whatever your financial safe zone is. So in our case, we talked about, you were mentioning, well, if you got 1,000 square feet, you were going to go for 1,500, but you really want 2,000. With our new building, it was built technically two stories. Where the offices were, we had the ceiling reinforced so we could stack stuff up with the forks on my tractor.

Well, once we looked into it, for $38,000 more, we had custom stairs built, a half-wall, additional lighting, and flooring put in, and we gained another 900 square feet with easy access.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s actually some really good points that I took out of there. And throughout our conversations… Well, I’ll have more conversations with Howard, by the way, for those listening out there in the future. If you don’t know or you hear it, I’m taking a little bit of notes because I’m wanting to put that on our website or in the YouTube video so you can just have some quick things to jot down yourself or realize. So I’m doing that as Howard’s saying some things, and there’s a couple of things you said that I really like.

You kind of talked about either running out of room or not properly utilizing, whether it’s space or things, whether it’s equipment, whatever it is. So it could be shelving, it could be a piece of equipment, it could be actual space. So it’s a great idea to frequently go through and assess everything, your space, what you’re using, what it’s being used for, the capacity. Can you repurpose space? Can you throw things away? Can you retire things? Can you sell things? Can you reorganize your space to fit better?

So these are things we do in our houses all the time, right? I mean, you reorganize your garage, you reorganize your closet because it’s a mess, and you give some clothes away so you can make room for other clothes or for a shoe rack. We do that all the time personally, so do it with your business.

And one of the things you had said was kind of maybe temporary solutions to things. So for you, it was you needed some storage. You can get a tractor trailer out there that can hold some things, and it’s not the most convenient way to hold those things, but it solves it immediately, reasonably inexpensive, reasonably convenient. So if you can fix problems within your business with a quick, temporary solution… And we do this at home too, right?

I’ve been reorganizing some space in my garage for some hobbies I do. And I said, “You know what? If I had one more shelf, I can move all this stuff. I know I don’t want that shelf for a long time because I’m going to put it in front of another shelf. It’s not optimal, but it’s 60 bucks at Lowe’s. It will put all this stuff. It frees up that corner. Now that corner, I can put these table and these shelves and I can actually start doing something immediately until the bigger project of changing all of those other shelves out happens.” So you can do that in your business.

And then the second thing is you talked about kind of percentage of output, percentage of time. I’m also going to add percentage of space. I really liked this because you had said that if you’re at 95% production, 95% workload, 95% space, I think it works for all those things, then you’re already capped out, even if you’re not at 100%. You’re ready to the point where growth is going to be hindered by it so you should be thinking about improving space equipment, staff, whatever it is at 70, 75% of output or capability, rather than waiting till you’ve reached 95, 100%.

Howard Potter:
That’s right.

Marc Vila:
Did I capture that correctly and summarize it correctly?

Howard Potter:
Yes, yep. Excuse me. Dry cough.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, no problem. Talking does that. Okay, good.

Well, we covered, I think… I covered a few things. This is what I have so far, and then we could talk about if we want to add one other tiny little quiz to kind of wrap it up.

But we said… I started it off with what equipment to buy, and that’s real important. We have a whole episode about choosing a direct-to-film printer that we did with Howard, and you can listen to that and we dive a bit more into that conversation. But that’s a really important problem, and the solution is really simple.

We talked about growth being a problem. That actually is… I’m really glad you said that. I did not expect you to start with that actually, but it is, gosh, is it a problem for so many of our customers, for us here at ColDesi, for everything. Growth is a challenge. If you want to get to it, deciding if you want to because that’s a whole nother separate conversation is do you want to grow? And what does that mean?

Howard Potter:
So I… Oh, go ahead.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, go ahead.

Howard Potter:
So I just wanted to chime in two seconds on that, and I’ll tell you why. Because when we talk about research, years ago, when I started this business with my wife, my wife’s like, “Why would you want to get in the T-shirt business?” We had so many shops around us. Well, the advantage was I had already gotten a degree and had several years of design experience, and most people in this line of work don’t have actual physical design, professional design experience.

But even going past that, what I researched was, I mean, our industry as a whole is roughly $50-plus billion, but in the United States, there’s roughly less than 400,000 people in the United States that know anything about any of these processes. So there’s a percent of a percent that know anything about it. So we actually have the upper hand and the advantage to control where we want to go with this and make it our destiny. We just have to know that that opportunity’s there and how are we going to tackle it, and what do we want out of it?

So you have constant supply of resources and you have constant demand. You’re in the middle doing this, teetering, where am I going to go? You have to make that decision on a regular basis because you can grow as large as you want to.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. You know what? You said something, and this is something that I… Kind of a thought experiment I have with folks a lot when I’m talking about this.

So if you go to not in our industry, a fictional business, an insurance office, and you say, “I want everyone, all my staff, I want everybody to wear Nike or Adidas polos and khakis. That’s our uniform. We want to be,” whatever your reason is. So you tell folks, “Go to Dick’s Sporting Hoods, go to wherever, buy Nike or Adidas polos.” What are they going to cost? 50, 70 bucks, right?

Howard Potter:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
How much would it cost to get a reasonably, maybe not that brand, but a reasonable quality embroidered with your logo? What would you charge for something like that for if they wanted 20 or 50?

Howard Potter:
Yeah. So depending on stitch count and how many locations, roughly, you’re going to be anywhere between the $25 and $45 range on average.

Marc Vila:
So it’s actually… And I knew you were going to say something like that, right? Because even if it was… I went and got, I worked for a business and we had Nike ones, and I think those were $60, if I recall, that it cost to get those.

Howard Potter:
Oh, yeah.

Marc Vila:
So it is the same amount of money to tell your staff to go to the sporting goods store and buy Nike or Adidas, polos as it is to go to an embroidery shop and get custom-made ones. And that’s where I think the limitation of our industry sits at is that that business exists almost more than the ones that get customized shirts. There are more businesses that don’t have customized apparel than do, and all it takes is somebody in our industry to go up and say, “Hey, in your office, you’re wearing a Nike shirt. You know for the same amount of money, I can get you a shirt that’s just as nice of a quality with your logo on it?” And people are like, “Really?” “Yeah, for sure.” So I think that that’s great.

Howard Potter:
Well, not only that, right? The other thing that really helped us jump past… There’s still businesses in our area that are anywhere between 10 and upwards of 20 years older than us, and they’re still the same size they were when we started.

So to give everybody a rough idea, when we started out of our house, my first year, I did maybe 10 grand and I went to 25, 50, 75, 125, whatever. Now today, I’m very proud to say this, we employ 30 full-time staff with full benefits, and our company broke over $3.5 million last year, and we’re still not anywhere near the biggest of the biggest companies in the United States, but we’re still naturally growing and gaining market share.

And how did we do that? It was basic family values. Treat people how you want to be treated, have great customer service, get back to them within a timely manner. And the third thing, make sure your quality is working to set the bar every day.

So when you were touching on getting your logo customized, why we struggled in our area at first with growth, even though we were growing, was we had to explain to people our stuff was a dollar more at times because we did put more thread into it. We used 100$ USA-made polyester thread, and it was educating the customer. Once that caught on, it created a steamroll of, “Wait a minute. When I need these people, they’re there. When they tell me they’re going to have something done, it’s done. And God forbid they do make a mistake, they’re there to fix it.”

Guess what? You’re never paying for marketing. Your customer is your advertising because they’re wearing what you’ve done for them.

Marc Vila:
You know, it’s funny. I actually created a new problem and the solution just in the statement you have there.

So a problem is you can’t grow, right? And the solution is… It’s actually so simple, it seems like it’s not a right answer, but if you do this, I’m telling you, you have… 40 other people have said almost the same story you’ve said to me just in that little quip there. If you can’t grow or you’re not growing, provide great service, treat people right, create a good-quality product that you can be proud of, and educate your customers. And you didn’t say something, you didn’t say this word, but I would say be transparent with your customers too.

Howard Potter:
Yes, yes.

Marc Vila:
And just say, “I’m trying to grow my business. One of the ways I’m trying to grow is by making the best product out there. I was looking at some of the other things. I was looking at what you’re wearing right now and the hat,” I’m not talking about you by the way.

Howard Potter:
Yeah, yeah.

Marc Vila:
Your hat looks great. “But I’m noticing the hat that you are wearing right now and the logo that whoever put that on, it looks okay. I don’t want to insult your hat. It looks fine, but I can do better than that. And if you give me a shot, I’d like to do that and it’s going to cost a couple bucks more, but you’re going to look A+. Do you want to look A+ or do you want to look B+? I think you kind of look B+ now.”

I don’t know how that conversation goes. It goes with however your personality works, but you can be transparent with customers. Let them know you want to create great things. If they cost more, let them know why it costs more.

And yeah, I mean, some people don’t care about customer service, don’t care about quality, don’t care. They just want something super cheap. And if that is the business model you’re running, then go for that. Make the cheapest, fastest thing you get, and you’re a process efficiency person and lowest cost. But most of the people in our industry that are successful that I speak to and that have grown their business, whether it’s slowly or quickly over years, tell the same story. “I treat customers right. I let them know why I’m selling it. If there’s a problem, I do my best to honestly resolve it as best as I can. I apologize for when I make a mistake. I find a solution when there’s a problem.”

You mentioned in the last episode that screen printing, you messed up on a shirt, you already tore everything down. You have two things. You can say, “Hey, customer, I know you needed 50 shirts. I only have 49. I’m going to refund you that 10 bucks, 20 bucks for that shirt I didn’t make.” Which I mean, I guess that’s a moral thing to do, but did that make the customer happy?

Howard Potter:
No.

Marc Vila:
No. Maybe they didn’t feel ripped off, but-

Howard Potter:
99% of the time, it doesn’t. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
But not happy, yeah. Yeah.

Howard Potter:
Well, it’s funny. I’m sorry to cut you off.

Marc Vila:
No, go ahead.

Howard Potter:
You made some really good points here because we had an order a few years ago for a screen print order. We did everything correctly. So one thing that we do as a company, we’ve been doing it for probably 12 to 14 years, is as we’ve gotten bigger, our budget increases with this. And we talk about marketing, but people don’t think outside the box sometimes of what marketing can be.

If a customer makes an honest mistake approving an order, whether it’s the physical product or the artwork, whatever the case may be, and we customize it and we give it to them and they’re like, “Oh my God, I messed up. It wasn’t you, it was me. I shouldn’t have approved this. I was looking for my phone, dah, dah, dah, dah,” if they’re respectful and they’re transparent themselves saying, “Listen, it wasn’t you. It was me. What do I got to do to get this fixed? I’ll pay for it,” whatever, 99% of the time, we budget about 10 grand a year now where we pay to fix it one time for free.

And there’s a specific story that’s very dear to me because it was for a local police officer that had passed away, and another one of our local troopers was putting on the event, and he had accidentally approved the proof with one number transposed or whatever because that’s how it was given to us. And we’re talking a $1,700 screen print order, and he opens up the box. He’s like, “I can’t believe I made this mistake.” He goes, “I’m such an idiot. I can’t believe I did this.” I said, “Well, what’s the matter?” I said, “Let’s look at it. Can we fix it?” He goes, “The numbers are backwards.” I said, “Yeah, there’s no way on a couple hundred shirts,” or whatever it was at the time, I said, “there’s no way we’re going to be able to do this.” He goes, “Listen.” He goes, “I don’t care what it costs. I’ll pay to replace it, dah, dah, dah.”

And my wife and I looked at each other because we’ve never bitten off one shot like that for someone, went back to our office, worked the numbers, figured out what it was going to cost us, and we went back out to them and said, “Listen, you’ve been a long-time customer. You’ve got a lot going on. This was a really dear friend of yours. We’re going to absorb this because we can write it off. We’re going to absorb this.” And just the emotion on his face was enough thank you right there. But we went and reproduced the order correctly, and our social media lit up because he had done a whole post about what we had done for not only him, but for the event.

And so we didn’t do it for that, but it led to that. Doing good because good is good to do. You know what I mean?

Marc Vila:
Yeah, yeah. That’s a great story. And one of the things, I talk about it here at ColDesi and when we have meetings and we talk about customer service and helping, and I’ve owned my own businesses before and my father owned a business, so I’ve been around sales, customer service, and marketing my whole life. And you’re going to be presented with opportunities to go above and beyond. Now, sometimes the above and beyond is unreasonable. You have to sit down and do the math and think about it, like you and your wife did.

But what you should not do is draw hard lines that, “You approved it. No.” You should never have that line. The line should exist, but I think it should be a dotted line maybe, not a hard line.

Howard Potter:
Yes. No, you’re right.

Marc Vila:
That sometimes there are times where I walk through that line and sometimes there are times when I don’t. And when you walk through and you go to the other side and you break the rule, or whatever you want to call it, think about it as for one, sometimes you’re just doing a good deed. And this was partly just a good deed for people who serve the community. And there was a death involved. There was a lot of good deed behind it.

But the secondary thing you think about is, is this a marketing opportunity? Is this a customer service opportunity? What are all the opportunities? And we could probably do a whole episode just on this, but I would have potentially some sort of a checklist and say, or a scoring model, “And if I can check off three out of 10 boxes, I’m going to break the rule,” or, “if I can score over 10 points and give everything a point, I’m going to break the rule.”

And in this case, just a fictional version of it, it’s an old, long-time customer. One point. There’s emotion involved, there’s death, and there’s community service. These people serve the community, another checked box. And then this person’s also connected to the community, so there’s a marketing checkbox. And I mean, there’s nothing wrong with checking the box to say, “This is a good marketing opportunity too,” because that doesn’t make it immoral, thinking of it that way. But you should think about all those things. And if you check a bunch of these boxes, you’re like, “We need to break this rule. Of course we do. It’s going to make us feel good. It’s going to make us do good for the community, and also, it’s probably going to help the business.”

So I think that that’s a great story, for one. I mean, it speaks a lot about you and your wife as people, but it is a really great way, a lesson to learn because I see a lot of customers who I’ve talked to over the years and talk about their hard rules and what they will never do because they got burnt before. But if you want to get… We talked about making pizzas a couple times here. If you want to make really great pizzas and you’re going to mess with a super hot oven or a grill, you’re going to burn yourself.

Do you want to make great… And I said this to my daughter when I was teaching her how to cook. She was pulling something out that was really hot, and she’s like, “Oh, it hurts.” And I said, “Yes, it’s not burning you. It’s just hot. Do it quick. It’s just part of making the recipe.”

Howard Potter:
It’s part of the process, yeah.

Marc Vila:
“It’s part of the process. It is hot.” And I said, “But that’s okay. You’re not hurting yourself.”

So I think when you’re crossing that line of the rules and you’re doing these customer service things, it’s going to sting, it’s going to be hot, but as long as you’re not causing injury to your business, you’re making the pie, you’re getting better.

Howard Potter:
Yeah, yeah. Couldn’t agree more.

Marc Vila:
Great. We covered a lot of great stuff today. What machine to buy, the problem with growth, running out of a room, not utilizing things, considering percentage of output, percentage of time, percentage of space, and just what are some things you could do that are very basics of what you can’t grow?

So what I would encourage a listeners out there to do is, for one, one exercise you could literally do right now is talking about the percentage of output, time, space, et cetera. Do an analysis of your business. Schedule time this week or next week to go out there, look at your business. What’s a space I’m working in? Is there wasted space, wasted equipment, wasted time? Can I improve that? If you can, do it. If there’s a piece of equipment you haven’t used in two years, use it or get rid of it. Make the space for something else. If you can reorganize something, if you could buy a $60 shelf to put stuff in and get those boxes off the ground and make room to have more room to work in, use the space. So that’s one thing you can do right now.

And then the second thing, I think, that’s a longer-term thing is to consider your growth, consider how’s your customer service? How do you treat people? What’s the quality of your product? And is it where you want to be? This one’s harder to do, in my opinion, because we’ve got a little bit of cognitive dissonance in our brains. We’ve got all of these things where when you’re doing something and you’ve taken time to do something or you’ve spent money on something, you justify that everything is right and it’s the way it should be. So you’ve got to step out of your business a little bit, completely step back as much as you can, look at it from as high as you can, and say, “Is my quality right? Can my customer service be better? Can I treat people better?” Whatever it is. “Am I educating my customers enough? Am I charging the right prices? And if I’m not, why not?” And ask all these questions.

And this is something I heard a psychologist say something about self-improvement. He said, “At night, lay down and think about the thing that you want to change in your life. The thing that you can’t say to yourself that is in your brain that you won’t say out loud to yourself is the biggest change and the hardest one to do.” So I think that’s the same for your business. If you’re looking at all those things and you have one that you’re scared to answer, whether it’s the quality of your output or your pricing, if that’s the scariest one, then you got to ruminate on that for a little bit and see what you can do to improve it.

Howard Potter:
Exactly.

Marc Vila:
Well, Howard, do you have a final sentence or two you’d like to leave the folks with too?

Howard Potter:
Yeah. I mean, wake up every day like it’s your first day starting your business. Work it like a farm. Never assume you have all the answers. Never assume we all have all the answers. We’re talking about things through trials and tribulations that have worked, that have proven to work, that build longevity. But we all have something that we can add to these topics in our lives, in our daily lives, and we just need to be able to remove ourselves back long enough to really look at the scope of the picture of what we’re working in every day to make it a better place to work and to build our companies up.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s excellent.

Well, there’s going to be… I’ll definitely say something. We’ve done about 200ish episodes, and I’m being 100% honest here with you is that I, at the end of every episode, whether I was with Mark Stevenson, who used to also be on the show and other guests, we usually assess afterwards, like, “How good was that?” And there were episodes where we were like, “Dang, that’s going to help a lot of people.” And the other episodes were like, “Good information. I don’t know if it’s groundbreaking.”

This episode, I felt something really positive about this episode, honestly, myself. I think that for the people out there who listen to this and they take your thoughts to heart, and they will actually change their business and do better. I really feel that about this episode.

Howard Potter:
Awesome.

Marc Vila:
And in my opinion, if you’re listening to this and you didn’t get that feeling, I would do a couple of those exercises I mentioned a couple minutes ago because I really think if you do them right, you’re going to get that Eureka moment and you’re going to say, “I know what I can do better. I know what… That cutters been sitting in the corner for two years, and I’ve been telling people I can’t do stickers. I can fricking make stickers. I’m going to call that customer back right now and tell them I’m going to make the decals for their company trucks that I told them I couldn’t do. Why did I tell them I couldn’t do it?” So you’ll have moments like that that’ll change you.

Well, thanks everybody for listening. A million thanks to Howard for coming on and sharing your knowledge and your experience with folks out there and looking forward to having you on again. Again, these are kind of little more mini-episodes. Normally an episode’s 45 minutes to an hour. These are a bit cut down, but we want to dive into one question, answer it for you, and hopefully you walk away with having had a really great moment to help you improve your business and all that.

So thanks again, Howard.

Howard Potter:
Thanks for having me, guys.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, no problem. And as I kind of say at the end of episode, go to CustomApparelStartups.com if you want to check out the video of this episode or any notes that I’ve taken during the show, I’ll include those there. And you can go to ColDesi.com and learn about a lot of the different product and technologies that we mentioned in this episode. So thanks again, Howard, and everybody out there, have a good business.

 

 

In the latest episode of Custom Apparel Startups, we are excited to feature Howard Potter, from A&P Master Images, who brings his wealth of knowledge to the table on the topic of Direct to Film (DTF) Printing. Our discussion, “What You Should Know Before Buying a DTF Printer,” covers the A to Z of preparing to make an informed purchase of a DTF printer for your business.

Howard emphasizes the paramount importance of conducting thorough research to identify a trustworthy company. It’s crucial to partner with a company that not only sells you a printer but also supports you throughout your printing journey. Equally important is considering the space your operation has available, as DTF printers come in various sizes and have specific space requirements for optimal operation.

He advises potential buyers to request samples from providers. This step ensures that the print quality meets your business’s standards and expectations before making a significant investment. Additionally, Howard stresses the importance of investing in quality supplies, including inks and films, to guarantee the best output and durability of your printed products.

A central part of our conversation revolves around the challenges businesses might face, particularly concerning time management and staffing. DTF printing, while lucrative, demands careful planning and allocation of resources. Howard shares insights from his experience, noting that even the largest units are not overly complicated in terms of power requirements, which can be a common concern.

Highlighting the potential of DTF printing, Howard reveals an impressive fact: it is possible to generate more than $500,000 in revenue with a single DTF printer in a year. This statistic not only underscores the efficiency and profitability of DTF printing but also serves as a powerful motivation for businesses considering entering the space.

This episode is packed with invaluable advice for anyone looking to venture into DTF printing or expand their existing operations. Howard Potter’s expert insights provide a roadmap for navigating the complexities of purchasing a DTF printer, making this episode an essential listen for those in the custom apparel industry.

Here are the top considerations before purchasing a DTF Printer:

1. Find a company you can trust
2. Consider the space you have to work with
3. Get samples
4. Look for a company that provides quality supplies with their machines

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. My name is Marc Vila. And today we’re going to do something a little bit different, we’re going to do a mini podcast series. And we have a very special guest with us that I’ll introduce momentarily. But the point of these podcasts are to talk about one specific topic where we’re going to dive semi deep into a question and get some real world answers from a real world professional out there. And without further ado, time to introduce. So we’ve got Howard Potter with us today. And I figure rather than me talking and telling all about your story, I’d like you just to tell us a little bit about you. So Howard, why don’t you tell us about what you do, what kind of business you’re in, and maybe how long you’ve been in it?

Howard Potter:
Again, thank you for having me on. My wife and I started A&P Master Images about 21 years ago. It’s a family owned business. Both of our kids are in it. We do everything from design, work, build online stores, screen print, embroidery, direct-to-film, sublimation, rhinestones, sewing, you name it. We offer over 10 different processes and services within our company, and we’ve been very blessed to grow this thing to what it is today, so, again, thank you for having us on.

Marc Vila:
Excellent. And everything that you said there I think is enough to show that all of those processes are challenging in and of their own, selling those processes each individually have their own benefits and pros and cons, so you’ve learned a lot. And the most recent technology that has swept the market is direct-to-film printing, which is one you’ve mentioned. So you do sewing, which is a very old technology that’s been around for generations and generations, and direct-to-film, which is a new technology, and I think that asking you questions about direct-to-film is really important because you’ve gone through rhinestones, you’ve gone through cutting, you’ve gone through screen printing, all these other things that you’ve gone through, you learn a lesson, you go, you learn a lesson, you go. Just before this started, we were actually had a brief conversation with each other and we talked about cooking, and if you like to cook with your family or your family likes to cook for you, the more you cook or bake, the better you get at it in general.

So if you’re handed a cut of meat or a particular baking recipe, and you’ve been baking or cooking or grilling or barbecue for 20 years, once you get that new one, you’re immediately probably going to be better than the person who’s never done it before. And we run into a lot of folks here who are either brand new to the industry or maybe just been in a few years and they’re thinking about direct-to-film printing, they don’t have that experience. So the question I want to start today, or the question we’re going to cover today, Howard, is what should you know or what are some decision-making things when it comes to buying a direct-to-film printer? So what should you know before buying a direct-to-film printer? And I’ll give you the floor to answer that however you see fit. What are some things you should know and some things that are part of the decision making process if you’re going to buy one and what you’re going to buy?

Howard Potter:
Okay. The history of my direct-to-film experience is now just over a year old, about almost a year and a half old now, from research to production, everything. What actually sparked the interest was the email that came about where I’d seen the equipment come through on my email and I immediately started researching. And a lot of people are going to ask, “Well, why’d you stop in the middle of your day and start researching?” Because we talk about processes like screen printing. It’s a process that’s very, very old, still very lucrative, still very good, but there’s a lot of steps to it, there’s a lot of technique to it. It’s more demanding of your time, there’s a higher risk to making mistakes, there’s a higher risk to not being able to fix your mistakes in a timely fashion.

So I’ve been screen printing now for, out of 21 years of business, at least 15, 16 years of it, and have done very well with that part of the process where at one point I think almost two years ago before we got into direct-to-film, I think we did close to 900,000 just in screen printing. And so the thing that I asked myself was if I’m going to get into direct-to-film, what’s the longevity of it? What’s the quality of the prints? How much space does it take up? How long does it take to learn? How much educational time is it going to take for me not only to educate my staff but my customer? So I took about four hours, which is a very short time period to research a process, to realize there’s different quality levels of inks and powders and mixtures. But other than that, you’re not dealing with very many other components besides a quality machine, quality ink, quality adhesive powder, and then you have your quality company that you want to team up with to purchase all this from that you know you can rely on.

So once I got past all that, that’s where ColDesi came in, because I have a longstanding history of working with your guys’ company on rhinestones and different processes, buying materials and things like that, and supplies, and I was like, “Wow, let me look at their printers.” And I think at the time you had three different models. And from there I’m like, “All right, what’s our business plan?” Well, our business plan is to keep growing. We grow by 15 to 30% a year. So I had to research and make contacts I think it was with Mike Angel, one of your guys’ sales reps there, great source.

And I asked him, I said, “What are the dimensions of these machines? How much space do I need around the machine to comfortably work for safety and for production purposes?” And so we stopped, we talked, we went over all those things, and I knew out the gate that the middle machine that you guys sold, which I believe it was the two head, just before you get to the forehead, would do the job. But when I looked at the cost comparison from the second machine to your largest unit, I’m like for, “$250 to $300 at most a month more for everything I’m looking at, I can go into the biggest unit they make and I can grow into the machine and only take up a little bit more square footage than if I went with the middle size unit.”

For us, it comes down to the ergonomics of the equipment. It came down to not only that, it pulls less power than screen printing. Screen printing, I have two dryers that pull 60 amps each. And when we first got into direct-to-film, we only had the machine running for an hour or two at a time with only a 30 amp unit for the entire power consumption. So I looked at the power, the ease and all that type of stuff. And after those four hours, I reached out to you guys and also went over, hey, can we get samples of the prints so I could test the durability and the quality?

And I want to say it was with three to five days, you guys had some test samples, prints and we tested them. And how I test is most people will think you’ll just go home and test the laundering at home, right? No, we went to a customer of ours that owns a local laundry mat and we had them literally put it in with every load they were washing for a day. It had to have gotten washed almost 30 times that day with some quick cycles, and hot heat, extremely hot commercial heat, and it held up really well, so I was really impressed with that. Because at the end of the day when we started screen printing, we wanted to be one of the best out there quality wise and turnaround time, so our screen printing will last two, three years. When you look at direct-to-film, I believe you guys state that it’ll last a minimum of 55 washes before it even starts to even think about showing any signs.

Now, I can tell you, over a year later, I’m wearing stuff that still looks like brand new and I wear it at least once a week. So we’re past a year I’m already getting and it still looks like new. So it’s nice that you guys give a base minimum, but it actually lasts longer than that if you’re doing a good job on your end, on your production artwork, your adhesive powder, and all that. So you also have to look at what’s the consumer need. Do they need a physical print that’s going to last four or five years? The average person don’t keep a shirt four or five years. It’s usually a year to a year and a half they’re throwing it out and getting another one. So this process, the ease of the use, the quality, it hits all those different spectrums for you the person that’s going to be selling retail or wholesale. So for us, it checked a lot of boxes.

Marc Vila:
That’s great. And actually, I opened up my notepad here so I could take some notes on some points you made, because I want to be able to write in the notes of this episode the answer to the question. So let me just go back and summarize, and then I’ll just make a couple quick comments on some things that I really liked that you said. For one, research the process was the first answer that I got from you that I heard. It was you saw some information come in and you said, “You know what? Let me look at it.” You took a few hours, I think you said four hours, to just go through whatever it was, watch videos, read articles, just understand the process. So I think that that’s important is understanding the process. Then you had mentioned about finding a company that you can trust. And of course I try to keep the Custom Apparel Startups podcast semi-agnostic from recommending ColDesi.

I work for ColDesi, that’s no secret in the podcast, and we try to just give the right answer, and then ColDesi as an organization just tries to provide the best product and service we can. So we hope that the right answer is ColDesi, and I like that you shouted us out on that. But all the things we’re going to talk about today are all things that everyone from salespeople to management and in between talk about on a day-to-day basis, and we try to answer these questions and say, “How do we make a printer that answers all this?” So you said find a company you can trust, I think that’s important. There are printers, cutters, screen printing, everything that you named that you sell you can buy from eBay, you can buy from Amazon, you can buy from overseas by yourself, but that takes away a company you can trust.

I trust that if I need a toothbrush, I’ll order it from Amazon and get it tomorrow. Whatever. And even a phone charging cable. However, if I buy a direct-to-film printer or a cutter from there that’s a generic brand, I’m going to have no relationship with Amazon on that. There’s going to be no conversation there. So those are things we talk about a lot. The next on the list, just to bullet through these next few, consider the space you’re going to be working in, I thought that was great. Way too often people don’t consider power or space when they’re making equipment decisions, and they could have gone bigger because they have more room, or they got something a bit too big and they can’t get it in or out, or they don’t even have the right power. So consider your space and all that else.

Get samples, I really liked that. I tell folks all the time, we get comments on social media mostly, but everywhere, what does it feel like, what does it wash? And this is not just direct-to-film, this is every technology we sell people ask that and I just say, “Just ask for a sample. They’re free. You call us up or live chat, say, “I’m interested in direct-to-film printing or direct to garment printing or whatever you want, can I have a sample?” And we’ll send it, and wash it, wear it, touch it, feel it, do whatever you can because the proof is right there.” And I think that’s part of working with an organization you can trust is that there’s no shyness about getting samples out as long as your expectation is set correctly. And then the last bit, which was actually you said towards the beginning, but I wrote it down late, was quality supplies, making sure that your working with an organization and a printer that uses good ink, good powder or glue, good films, and then of course the parts within the equipment are important too.

So all of those together, I loved all that stuff. And I can go on and on about it, but I think you answered it well. Now to go a little bit deeper into some of this stuff, you had mentioned something about that there were multiple models, and one of them was going to get the job done, but you decided to go a little bit bigger because it was just a couple hundred dollars more a month. And the mindset that… Well, how do I word this? The troubling mindset with folks is someone who’s been in business for 20 years, you don’t look at a machine payment like it’s a car payment. You’re looking at as this is a cost of owning business, what’s it going to produce and what is this output?

And for folks new to business or brand new to business or very short time in business, they consider the payment to be more of a liability than maybe it is. So I would like to ask, when you’re making a decision on a direct-to-film printer, how did you go through that thought process without considering, well, wow, 200 and something dollars more a month, that’s a lot more money. Somebody might think of it that way. You thought of it differently. And I’m curious on that thought process.

Howard Potter:
Yeah, there’s multiple factors that go into it. So let’s go back to the unit that I purchased, which was your guys’ 4 head. It’s given me two sets of print heads, so I can print a lot faster. I want to say it’s about an hour and a half, two hours, somewhere around there to almost print a full roll of this material. So if you’re on the middle of the road machine that you guys offer or that most people would offer, it prints a lot slower. So right there, you’re gaining time. Now, let’s be honest, the average screen print shop or shop in general doesn’t have more than one to four staff, so what’s limited on you every day? Your time, your resources, your manpower. So buying the larger unit out the gate gains you revenue naturally because your employee isn’t standing at that printer as long. So that’s step one.

Step two, they could actually, the size, most shops screen printing takes up more square footage, pretty much I would say quadruple the square footage and then some, depending on your size of company. Your largest machine you sell, you’re talking for 150 square feet with the printer, and that’s being generous with it, because I measured mine, and it’s roughly to safely have space all around it comfortably with supplies you’re talking eight foot by 15 feet of space, that can fit in most homes or garages. The fact that it’s off a 30 amp breaker is the same as your dryer in your house, so your power consumption… So even if you wanted to start up out of your house with the largest unit you guys make, you could be making serious money and growing into this thing. To give some facts and figures, last year we had your guys’ unit running for 11 months after we got it up and running and we did a slow roll of it, we still produced a little over a half million dollars worth of production with that one printer and still didn’t maximize its capabilities.

So when I’m looking at the payments, I’m looking at all different factors, looking at the space, is it going to make my staff’s job easier, because when we compare direct-to-film versus screen printing, I’m not burning screens, I’m not printing positives, my designers don’t have to sit there and make multiple layers for the artwork to get it set up, they’re not having to clean screens, they’re not having to clean squeegees, they’re not having to clean spatulas, they’re not going to have to wipe up the ink around the stations from the screen printing ink, so that automatically gets you into faster production instantly. So it makes my designer’s job easier. Now, again, if I’m a smaller shop, which I’ve been there because we started out of our house, out of a 15 foot by 15 foot room, your time’s limited. So this machine naturally pays for itself because of you’re gaining time on all different avenues, you’re not taking up a ton of space, it’s a cleaner work environment. So there’s a lot of benefits all the way around with this.

Marc Vila:
Okay, great. I love that answer actually. And I took a few more notes that… And all this will be in the notes for those who go to the website or are watching this on YouTube. I’ll have these notes in there. But one of the things you mentioned that I like a lot is one of… Or I’ll paraphrase this, but one of the biggest challenges is time or the staff of your time or the time of yourself, whoever’s running the equipment, that’s the biggest challenge consistently in all of business. So this is a completely side story, but this is literally how it works and why this is so important is that I had worked for a restaurant when I was young and they were open for breakfast and lunch, and they wanted to try opening up for dinner. Right?

Howard Potter:
Mm-hmm.

Marc Vila:
The challenge wasn’t the recipes, because they had great chefs. It wasn’t the menu, it wasn’t ordering the supplies, it wasn’t advertising. That was all easy, that was easy to do, every single one of those things. It was you couldn’t have people work from 05:00 AM getting ready for breakfast until 10 o’clock at night when dinner is done. So they needed essentially a whole separate staff and they couldn’t all just start working night with no experience, so they had to split the staff. So I had worked some weekends for breakfast and then weekdays for dinner. All the challenge was the time and the staff. So it doesn’t matter if you’re screen printing, if you’re direct-to-film printing, if you’re running a restaurant. Whatever you’re doing, time is everything. I don’t even remember who said this, but I’m going to pretend to quote it anyway, it was something to the effect of physicists saying that some of the stuff that they’re scared of… I think it’s actually it was an Interstellar, I believe he said the only thing he was scared of was time because time is the one thing that we can’t control.

So when you’re investing in a good piece of equipment, time is what you consider as the killer. And I had spoke with somebody who was doing vinyl cutting, and they were doing a lot. They were doing I think 200,000 a year in revenue in cutting vinyl, so that’s moving a lot of vinyl material, but it was working like 15 hours a day, weeding, weeding, weeding. So the cost of the equipment was really low, but the cost of the time. And the gentleman said, he’s like, “I was basically getting ready to just shut the doors.” And somebody was like, “How can you shut the doors? You’re doing a quarter million dollars in revenue.” And he’s like, “No sleep, no time with my family. Can’t golf anymore. Can’t go out drinking with my buddies anymore.” All the things he loved to do, he stopped doing. So he ended up getting a direct-to-film printer, boom, all of that. You mentioned something else that you said that you were printing about a roll in an hour to be-

Howard Potter:
About an hour and a half, two hours roughly, yeah,.

Marc Vila:
Hour and a half, two hours, sorry.

Howard Potter:
It depends on the file loading and everything we’re doing.

Marc Vila:
And so just for those who don’t know, that’s 100 meters worth of material. And then the answer of that is very variable depending on what you’re printing. The larger the prints, the more space, the longer they take to print. But that’s why that number can vary. You could print an entire roll in 30 minutes if you have tons of negative space, you could probably do it in three hours if you’re filling up every single millimeter of that role. So that’s how much you’re talking about there. Another piece of note I said is a large unit isn’t necessarily complicated in space and power, which is great. It was back to a consideration earlier that you had mentioned. But when you’re looking at all different types of equipment and you’re considering what you’re going to do, consider the power, take a look in your home or business, what breakers do you currently have now, what power do you have available.

And this is not only true of direct-to-film printers, but anything. Heat press machines can use up a bit of power too. But all of this stuff is not unreasonable compared to when you say some large-scale screen printing equipment does require some pretty special electricity. If we would just want to use a simple terminology, it’s not something that’s just a ready installed where you may or may not already have some of the stuff enough to run a direct-to-film printer quote already installed in your home or business. And then the success story is the last note I just made here is that not even necessarily pushing it to the max. You had a half million in revenue in one printer. And I think that’s a great story to tell about getting an equipment for your goal. Not always. There’s a balance for everything. You’re not going to buy 40 machines at once. That’s ridiculous. But there’s a healthy balance in that.

Howard Potter:
Well, the thing is too, the payment being a couple hundred dollars more or $250 more, whatever it ends up actually being with everything that you invest, you have to look at it this way. If you know you’re going to be in business, I don’t care if it’s 10 more years, 15 more years, whatever it’s going to be, you only have so much square footage to work within, so you need to maximize. So how we do everything in our company is our embroidery, for example, we did 900,000 in embroidery in 650 square feet. So I take that dollar amount that we did in actual production divided by the number of square feet, now I got a gauge of what am I actually producing per square foot. So I’ve maximized my output and my value per square foot in my space. And like I said, I’ve started in very small spaces. If I would’ve had something like this, I probably would’ve never got it in the screen printing.

And it’s nothing against screen printing, screen printing’s always going to have a purpose, but let’s think about something, you get done printing screen printing a 24 shirt or 50 shirt order that’s a three color front, two color back, and one of them happens to get messed up and you don’t notice it when you’re packing out the order, the customer gets it, and they have to have it, because it’s for an event and everyone in the company’s got to have it. What do you do?

You either don’t replace it and you just wipe it off the bill, and you lose the customer forever. Great, you didn’t have to deal with the headache. Or you have to reregister five screens that can roughly take you 10 to 15 minutes per screen, reset all the ink, retest print, then print one final piece. You’re going to have an hour, hour and a half right into that. Or you have a direct-to-film printer, you warm it back up in 10 to 15 minutes, and under a half an hour you have the print set up and done and heat pressed on and out the door with zero extra bodies having to pitch in. One person can handle all that.

Marc Vila:
Right. And one person can do that. And I would also imagine that, and maybe you do or don’t do this, but it’s probably pretty easy if you’re printing the fronts and the backs there to just print two extra fronts and two extra backs that you just cut and store and put in the customer’s file.

Howard Potter:
Yeah, no, that’s exactly it. And the other factor is too, I love screen printing, we still screen print to this day, but we’ve actually made… So here’s the other thing. This is where direct-to-film, if you’re already screen printing, adds value to your screen printing. So I tell everybody, I’m like, “All right, you’re getting a full color print for the price of a one to two color screen print. So now we’re not screen printing nearly as much and it’s usually bigger, bigger orders on our automated press, not so much on our manual. So now that just made it even easier for my team. Two, we’re turning our dryers on less, but we still have them in case we need them.” So it made that end a little bit more streamlined. Now our minimum screen print order is a minimum of 12 pieces.

But what’s happening is everyone’s going away from the screen printing to the direct-to-film because they want that full color now, now that the capability’s there. And let’s face it, what do you have with screen printing? You have setup fees for every screen. Direct-to-film, unless you choose to charge a setup, you never have to charge a setup fee. You just build in your cost of your artwork time or whatever, and that’s it. You’re done. So it’s a cleaner interface, requires less people, less space, less cleanup. It’s checked so many. And if you’re starting from your house, you don’t really ever have to evolve from your house unless you choose to.

Marc Vila:
I love everything you said that. And I like the evolution of this conversation a little bit because it went into what should you consider when you’re buying one, but it’s also a bit of why it might be right for you too, because that question really it’s part of the question, because the first thing that we said was research the process. Once you understand how it works, if you’ve got a good visionary mind and you’re thinking about business, then you start considering the things like, well, how fast does it, are my customers going to be happy with it? What can I sell that’s different? And thinking about the forward movement of technology.

So I think we answered this question thoroughly and there’s a million little rabbit holes we can get into, and I hope to again on some more episodes, but we can wrap this up for now. And we’re going to speak more with Howard on a few other topics, so definitely stay tuned for other episodes. Howard, thanks so much for coming on. You can feel free to drop a final thought if you want to for now. I’ll give you the floor for a moment.

Howard Potter:
The biggest thing I want people to start thinking about in our industry, and, again, I started this when I was 22 out of my home, it’s one of those things that’s an evolving industry. Technology is always leading the way, and sometimes we get caught up in the minutiae of every day, not looking to turn to more of the technology to make our life easier. So we’re not that guy in the vinyl shop weeding vinyl and not having the time with our family, or feeling like we’re just never getting ahead. So I’m very thankful for being on this podcast because I get to learn and remember things that I taught myself or things that I need to look back at, and I hope everyone just keeps gaining more information and knowledge and ask themselves more questions about what could be better within their company from this podcast.

Marc Vila:
That’s excellent. I work in marketing, and the same is true for that just as it is in this industry that we work in and that I market in. But if you just consider thinking about businesses over the years of our lives and businesses that have come and gone, and if we just consider big brands, we grew up going to Blockbuster Video. Friday night, that was the best if you can get a pizza and go and pick out a movie, and you had to get there early enough because you knew you wanted to watch that one, and you didn’t want all the copies to be gone. And Blockbuster Video owned this, and Netflix just took them over.

And there’s plenty of story there, but they tried to do the streaming and they tried to do… But they were just like they had this model that was working really well and the world was changing, and they did not adapt and change when they had the power and ability to, and the same happens in marketing if you aren’t considering the new platforms or considering how you’re going to market or new ways to market. And then the same in our industry, as you mentioned, you’ve got to adapt your business, offer different technology. Maybe you don’t get into every new technology because that doesn’t make sense, just like I’m not going to market in every single place, but you got to find the ones that are right for you and you have to move forward.

Otherwise, eventually you will get stuck, and you don’t want to end up being the shop that has an old sign with a customer base that’s [inaudible 00:30:41] slowly. And like yourself, you mentioned your children, if you’re the type of person that’s looking to build a legacy type of business, something you could pass off to your kids, which when we survey our customers, I don’t remember the number, but it was a huge number, surprisingly, 80% or something like that, 85% said one of the main reasons they wanted to do this was something that passed to their family. So if you’re thinking about that, what you said is right on it. I think that was a great finishing thought.

So thank you so much. Hopefully people are going to find this really valuable. I know a lot of people will. So thanks everybody for listening to another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. You can go to customapparelstartups.com and you can see this video and read some of the notes that we’re going to put in there. You can go to coldesi.com and see some of the equipment that we’ve talked about. And thanks again to Howard. We’ll see you again next time.

Howard Potter:
Thanks.

Marc Vila:
Great.

 

 

Mike Angel shares his expertise in apparel decorating, focusing on the cutting-edge technique called direct to film printing, or DTF printing for short. This method has completely revolutionized the world of apparel decorating, offering numerous advantages over traditional methods. It is not only faster and easier, but also more cost-effective and versatile.

With a DTF printer, you have the flexibility to take on both small and large-scale projects. You can effortlessly create and print the same design on a wide range of fabrics, allowing for endless possibilities in customization. Unlike other technologies, DTF transfers require lower temperatures and shorter press times, making it ideal for more delicate fabrics as well as durable fabrics.

DTF prints boast exceptional color and detail, surpassing many other apparel decorating methods for apparel decorating with photo-realistic images, and the prints are highly durable, withstanding stretching and washing with ease.

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. And today, we have another special guest. We’ve invited on Mike Angel here from ColDesi, so thank you and welcome to the show. Would you just give everybody just a quick summary of what you do here at ColDesi?

Mike Angel:
All right. Thank you for having me, Marc. My name is Mike Angel and I head on-demand business development for ColDesi, and on-demand means all things e-commerce and all things with volumes as little as one, if that makes sense. What we concentrate on with on-demand is being able to sell products, digital printed products online, and also be able to produce them efficiently. That includes e-commerce technology, order management technology, as well as equipment like DTF printers, which are phenomenal for on-demand types of businesses.

Marc Vila:
There’s lots of 20s right now, right? So 2021, 2022 was really big. 2023 were really big jumps in the direct-to-film printing industry. And you’ve been in this industry 60 years or something like that?

Mike Angel:
Yeah, 572 years.

Marc Vila:
572 years. But in all seriousness, did you start in the ’90s? Or when did you start working in this industry?

Mike Angel:
In 1998.

Marc Vila:
1998, okay. So you’ve been in this industry about a decade longer than myself. And I feel like I know a lot so I’m throwing another decade of experience on that. I can only imagine all the things you’ve learned. And over the years, you’ve seen DTG printing come alive, embroidery machines evolve, white toner printing come in. But a lot of people are talking about how direct-to-film printing is different than a lot of those. And I’m just curious on what’s your opinion on is direct-to-film different than those and what is different about it?

Mike Angel:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So DTF, direct-to-film, is a game changer. I hate to use that term. Throughout the years, we’ve used that several times. But it truly is, and there are two things that are special about DTF. The first is it is its own thing in terms of the technical aspect of direct-to-film printing. In other words, the print itself. So it can be people try to compare it to vinyl or toner transfers or screen printing, but it truly is its own media medium. Medium?

Marc Vila:
Yeah, both.

Mike Angel:
Right?

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Because the media that it goes on is a specialty type of film, and the medium itself is actually what is being created is different than everything else.

Mike Angel:
Right. So technically, it’s a water-based pigment that has high washability. It has very vibrant look. The pigment can be profiled so it’s easily profiled to match customer color palettes. We’ve got 50 plus washes before you see degradation to the prints. You need a spectrophotometer to see it after 50 plus washes. We’ve had studies done at the Florida State University’s textile lab. It has a white ink backing which not only provides the opacity and gives the artwork pop, but provides the ability for the powdered adhesive to stick to. So basically what you have is a solidified ink, for lack of a better way to describe it. And that glue is what’s pressed on to any type of fabric.

So that is a combination that we haven’t seen before, to be able to take one printed piece of artwork and apply that same print across a wide variety of products. So anything, cotton, anything polyester. And that could go for apparel. It could go for just straight material. It could go for caps, soft-sided coolers. So you have your soft goods, backpacks. It’s unbelievable. It also has a low weld time, so it’s a very low time. You’re talking 7, 10 seconds worth of press time, and very low temperatures comparative to some of the other transfer systems. So at whether your cotton products, you’re up around 300 degrees to really get a good melt and weld and adhesion to the fabric. But if you’re on something a little more delicate like performance wear, which is very proper, you’re wearing a performance polo right now.

Marc Vila:
Miss that patches.

Mike Angel:
I’ll address that in a second why this is so significant, but you can then drop the temperature down at 270-ish, so there’s no dye migration or releasing from the substrate. And so right off the bat, technically you’ve got a beautiful print that’s stretchy, that feels good, and goes across a wide variety of products. And the transfers themselves don’t have a shelf life so you can pre-make some and store them without any issues as well. So very versatile.

The second thing that this all addresses is the ability to meet that on-demand process and philosophy we’ve been talking about. To be able to now profitably print one unit. That’s, to use the word again, game changer in the industry, to profitably be able to produce one unit. So you have a very low material cost as well. Material cost is around a half a cent per square inch. So a 10 by 10 piece of artwork’s going to run you at 50 cents or so, and you can produce it quickly. It can go across a wide variety of products.

And with that, you’re able to then sell as little as one product, hopefully through your web store. And the end customers will pay a premium for the ability to purchase just one for you because traditionally they haven’t been able to do that. You have minimum quantities, color requirements, how many color separations and all these requirements and setup fees and all sorts of things. But you can now produce as little as one unit profitably, get a premium for it, but also be able to scale with the same technology and produce many. So now you can produce redundant runs. So whether it’s 1 or whether it’s 1,000, you can do with the DTF system.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, and the setup time is pretty minimal for whether you’re doing 1 or 1,000. It’s literally going on a computer and typing in 1 or typing in 1,000 and hitting go.

Mike Angel:
True digital production.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And so you said a lot of great things there so a few things popped in my head. One, you compared to some other technologies. So popular the technology for decades now is sublimation printing. It’s a great way to create a transfer and store it for a period of time and then place it on a piece of apparel or hard good or something like that. The problem with sublimation goods is you’re very limited on the materials and the colors and the materials that you can work with. So a ton of people are doing that technology and then they tell customers no when they want a dark blue shirt with a white logo on it because you literally cannot do that. So then alternatively, they’ll be screen printed or vinyl cut it, which has been again, another technology for decades which are both great and they look good and they wash well and all that stuff because their technology has been around forever.

The challenge is what I have right now is a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-color logo. So for one, if a customer hands you this, you’re probably going to, if you’re doing one of those methods, your first instinct is probably to see if you can get them to reduce the number of colors because that’s more work for you. And you either have to charge them more for the work, do more work for less money than another customer, or convince them to do it in one color. Direct-to-film printing as a digital process, so it really doesn’t matter if it’s 1 color or 100, it’s the same amount of work. So that’s a wonderful change too to the business is the amount of colors and if there’s gradients or anything like that. For the most part you can just be, “Oh, sure. I can print that logo.”

And then we’ve got other technologies like DTG or white toner printing, which are digital processes that you don’t have to worry about colors. And the materials you’re going to print on, I don’t want to get too much in the weeds on those things but both of those are reasonably versatile to some degree. But the problem with those is just the time. So white toner printing and DTG printing, depending on what you’re printing, how large it is, et cetera, et cetera, can eat up a decent amount of time to get those printed. And it’s not a crazy amount of time, minutes, let’s just say, a few minutes, which is not that big of a deal, but times 100 is 300 minutes. That’s a decent amount of time to work.

Where on your direct-to-film printer, to do 300, you’re clicking print, it’s going through the process. You’re not having to do all your transfers one at a time at that point in time, you’re just going through the process and you’re doing other things in your shop while it’s printing 300 of these. And then when you’re done, you’re applying them to the shirts, like you said, 7 to 10 seconds at a time, versus other processes with either curing on DTG or on white toner, could be 30 seconds or 45 seconds or a minute or depending on what you’re printing, it’s a little different. So we can just say minimum, half the heat press time, and then you’re not doing a single garment at a time when you’re printing process. You’re printing on a roll. So that’s really cool things comparing to those technologies.

Then there’s screen print transfers, which I’m not going to claim to be a super dark expert on, but I’ve done them before. And I’ll say that when I had done screen print transfers before, this was before or right when I got or just before I got in the industry, I was selling some apparel and I would order screen print transfers. And I remember one thing with these was that if I touched them while they were too hot or tapped them with my heat press again, I could melt off a part of the transfer or damage it. And for one, direct-to-film does not do that. You could tap it with the heat press a bunch of times. If you had a wrinkle in the shirt, you can just iron it. You can just hit it again and it still holds up. Can you tell me a bit more about comparing it to screen print transfers and benefits or not?

Mike Angel:
Yeah. Screen print transfers are going to fall into the same category in terms of minimum requirements. You’re not going to be able to order one screen print transfer. You’ve got to order a batch of them. You’ve got a minimum quantity. And we’re also talking about screen print so there’s color separation.

Marc Vila:
And can you just break that down what that means for just a minute for anybody who might not know?

Mike Angel:
So for every color in a logo or piece of artwork, there needs to be a screen burnt. There needs to be a screen made. And so with that comes a cost factor. The more colors, the more the print’s going to cost you, and the more the minimum requirement is going to be because you have to set up a press to do so. And so it’s cost-prohibitive to be able to, again, sell online and meet the demands of the current customer base. This is what the customer is asking for. The customers these days have budgets or they don’t want to order a couple of hundred to meet a certain price point, or they want the ability to buy a wider variety of products at less quantities. That’s just the way it is across the industry. So that’s a major difference technically. You mentioned some of the difference in terms of technically, mechanically, the heat temperatures are different, the application process is a bit different and not as tolerant and easy as it is with DTS.

Marc Vila:
Right, right. I found the first time I did a direct-to-film transfer, I just like, “Wow, that was easy.” And I’ve done I feel like every type of technology out there. I’ve done just about all of them in the customization industry outside of a few. And maybe just the only stuff I haven’t done is probably laser or something like that, but that’s a machine doing all the work anyway. But anything that involves hands, I’ve pretty much touched all the different types of transfers. And all of them have their little quirks, but the first time I did direct-to-film, I was literally just like, closed it, I opened it, and I was like, “Wow, that was actually fricking super easy.”

And you mentioned the performance fabrics. One of the challenges with doing performance fabrics are they can, I’m just going to use a bunch of words, distort, discolor, burn, change the consistency of the fabric easy. So if you have to do sublimation which is really high temperature, or you have to put it under a heat press for a really long period of time, you can actually end up with a section of your shirt that looks a little bit different. So when you get to bring that temperature all the way down to, what, 270, 280, 290, depending, something within that range for 7, 8, 9 seconds, that really minimizes the chance of that happening.

The way I think about it, at least sometimes, if you had a plastic spatula and you dropped it in a pan for a second and picked it up, nothing’s going to happen to it. It’s designed to be able to handle that heat. You’ll just pick it up, everything’s fine. But if you drop that spatula on the pan and didn’t realize it and you let it sit in there for one minute, you’re going to have a spatula that is either completely melted or at minimum warped in out of shape that you’ll never get back into shape. And I think that’s the difference is that you could put a piece of apparel that is susceptible to heat over time.

And then I was watching something on TV last night, and I’ll finish with this example because I like it. So I was watching MythBusters. You’re familiar with the show?

Mike Angel:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
It was just old season. Of course it hasn’t been on the TV for a while. But they did this myth where it was a video of people shooting shrimp out of an air cannon, and they shot it through breadcrumbs and eggs and fire. And then in the end, the fake internet video, they fried shrimp through a cannon. And so the MythBusters were trying to say can we even cook a shrimp that way? And they set up forges that make swords, I don’t know, five of them, thousands of degrees. And they shot raw shrimp through them, thousands of degrees for, I don’t know, 10, 20 feet. And the shrimp was raw on the other end because heat is okay for a short period of time for just about anything. You can put your hand on a candle.

So I think that’s something to consider. That’s a great thing about DTF is because of the short time and temperature, just the tolerance of apparel is much greater and much less dangerous to messing things up versus sublimation or anything where you have to physically put heat on something for sometimes literally a minute, right?

Mike Angel:
Right, that’s correct.

Marc Vila:
Okay, great. So yeah, that was about 15 minutes on direct-to-film printing. And so what we’ll probably do is maybe even we’ll have this episode in full. I’m hoping what we’ll do is we’ll also for those watching or listening, I am planning on probably cutting it too. So maybe we just have this little 15 minute direct-to-film talk separately. So if you’re watching that and you’re curious about some of the mentions of selling online, then please be sure to go to customapparelstartups.com and look for the episode with Mike Angel where we talk about Shopify because there’s a whole longer section just about that. Just add that note at the end there. But thanks for joining us. We really appreciate it. I’m sure a bunch of people have learned a lot and are curious, and we hope to have you on again to talk about some more topics. Do you have any final thoughts or words or anything you wanted to get out before everyone hit stop?

Mike Angel:
Oh, I just encourage everyone to sell online, to make sure that your business is selling online, and to know that we’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting to help you fast track and get that done and really help your business.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it truly is. We mentioned a lot of reasons why, but I think ultimately the kicker in business is time is the number one, and then that’s everything I think really when it really comes down to it. So if somebody has to, just going through the example for a minute, if somebody’s got to fill out a form and bring it to somebody and that person has to bring it to somebody else who delivers it to you, and then you produce a shirt and you bring it back somewhere else and it goes there, sometimes people just don’t want to do it. Somebody’s just like, “I don’t have time to go to school and fill out the form. I don’t want to have that bad.”

And then also the time for your business that you have to get an email, reply to it, get it again, reply to it, finally get the order, deliver it. Send them a proof, mock-up, like you said, make sure they say yes. And now it’s like a week before the order even got placed and then the person just says, “You know what? I was getting a hat for a baseball game and it’s already passed. Season’s over, we lost. I don’t need it anymore.” So this just allows your customers to directly go. They can order. It’s easy, reduces ton of time for them. The mock-up’s already done. You get the order, it’s got the right logo in it, the right color, everything because the customer’s seen it and approved it, and you can just print it and bring it right to them.

Whether you deliver in person or mail it, that’s up to you. But there is 100% chance that somebody would not have placed an order with you versus them placing it online. So you will get more orders just for being online for the convenience, for those percentage of people who are just be, “Nah, nevermind. It’s too much work.” Because we all do that, right? How many times have you driven down the road and it’s on the left. The store is on the left side of the highway and you’re like, “Nevermind. I don’t really feel… I don’t want to cross traffic that bad to get an extra whatever. I’ll just not get it.” And then you don’t buy it. So it’s true of physical locations and virtual locations.

Well, anyway, thanks again.

Mike Angel:
Yeah, thank you.

Marc Vila:
Everybody out there, appreciate you listening. Please visit coldesi.com to check out everything that we mentioned, all the different pieces of equipment and all that stuff. We have all that stuff available to learn about. And check out ClickWear and the on-demand products if those are right for you too. And go to customapparelstartups.com where you can check out this episode online, and I’ll put in some notes and some links to the various things that we spoke about as well. So thanks, everybody, and have a good business.

 

 

In this episode of the CAS Podcast, we’re thrilled to welcome Mike Angel from ColDesi, the brilliant mind behind ClickWear and the ColDesi OnDemand services. Mike takes us on a deep dive into the world of selling online, particularly through Shopify, and how ClickWear is transforming the custom apparel business by streamlining product creation and order management. We’ll also explore the comprehensive solutions offered by ColDesi OnDemand, designed to support businesses in offering customized products without the hassle.

Shopify is a leading e-commerce platform that enables businesses of all sizes to set up their online stores and sell products. It’s known for its ease of use, scalability, and comprehensive features that cover everything from inventory management to payment processing, making it an ideal solution for entrepreneurs looking to start or grow their online sales.

ClickWear is a Shopify app developed by ColDesi that revolutionizes the custom apparel industry. It allows store owners to easily create and sell custom-decorated products online by simplifying the design and order fulfillment process. ClickWear streamlines operations, enabling efficient management of product customization and orders directly from the Shopify interface.

ClickWear: A Shopify App for the Custom Apparel Business

ColDesi OnDemand offers a robust solution for businesses looking to offer custom apparel and products without the need for inventory. This service provides the technology and support for on-demand production, from printing to shipping, allowing businesses to focus on design and sales while ColDesi handles the fulfillment. It’s a scalable solution that fits a range of business sizes and needs, from startups to established brands looking to expand their product offerings.

ColDesi OnDemand

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. And today, we have another special guest. We’re here to talk about online shopping and e-commerce, specifically centered around Shopify. And we’ve invited on Mike Angel here from ColDesi, so thank you and welcome to the show. Would you just give everybody just a quick summary of what you do here at ColDesi?

Mike Angel:
All right. Thank you for having me, Marc. My name is Mike Angel and I head on-demand business development for ColDesi, and on-demand means all things e-commerce and all things with volumes of little as one, if that makes sense. What we concentrate on with on-demand is being able to sell products, digital printed products online, and also be able to produce them efficiently. That includes e-commerce technology, order management technology, as well as equipment like DTF printers, which are phenomenal for on-demand types of businesses.

Marc Vila:
Great. So in short then, a small, medium, and large size businesses want, I just want to make sure I’m saying it differently, or sell customized products. And that might mean specifically, like you said, as little as one where an organization is ordering T-shirts that are going to have the names of everybody printed on them, so every employee. It could be an organization of 100 or 1,000 employees, and instead of name tags, they’re actually going to print the name on everybody’s shirt on the left chest. So you will help our customers develop systems to actually make that workflow happen efficiently and specifically, as you said, online.

Mike Angel:
That’s correct.

Marc Vila:
Okay.

Mike Angel:
That’s correct.

Marc Vila:
And then also as little as one. So if an organization, say, made custom headphones or something like that, and they wanted a customer to be able to go online and put a name or something like that or special art on a headphone, they could physically order that singular unit online and it outputs in a way that could be efficient to then produce and send to the customer.

Mike Angel:
That’s correct.

Marc Vila:
Okay, all right.

Mike Angel:
And we can automate that process all the way from the online store all the way to the production floor.

Marc Vila:
Okay. All right, great. I did a little bit of homework on this. Also, I’ve written a handful of articles about on-demand so I cheated a little bit, but I think it’s important to help folks understand who they’re talking to and listening to here. And the point of this podcast is really we’re going to focus on Shopify. I’d like to maybe start with, just to make everybody understands, listeners of this podcast out there, somebody you might be listening to who’s never been in this industry at all, this is their first. They’ve maybe owned other businesses, but nothing in this industry. Maybe they’ve never sold online. And there may be folks listening who have a ton of experience. So we’ll lighten it up in the beginning and then we’ll get smarter and deeper as we go along.

Shopify is what we’re going to talk about today, and Shopify is a tool to be able to sell online. It’s an online e-commerce platform where essentially somebody can sign up, get their website on the internet. You can add products and descriptions and choose from templates of how you want the website to look and say how you want to charge people with credit cards or PayPal or whatever it might be. And then hit a publish button and you have a store on the internet, and people can go online and interact with it. And Shopify is particularly popular because it’s just easy to use. You don’t have to have much money in your pocket to be able to actually open up an online store with that app.

Mike Angel:
That’s correct.

Marc Vila:
Right. And why else do you think that platform is really popular or a lot of folks in our industry choose to use it in the customization industry?

Mike Angel:
That’s a great question. Shopify is one of many platforms that a business can use to start up their own web store, but we’re working with Shopify first and we’re launching a product that we’re going to talk about called ClickWear. It’s an app for Shopify. But to answer your question, Shopify is a great platform in terms of the ability to easily start up a web store but also have robust features in the web store platform that can accommodate your growth. You might start off as a small business and get started. It’s easy to use, has great tools for you to sell products, great tools for you to market those products. It connects well with social media platforms and it can really grow with you quickly.

But Shopify also works for very large companies, huge, huge retail companies. They do this by adding a third-party application development to their platform. So we’re all familiar with apps for your phone and the term apps. Shopify allows outside developers to develop tools that can piggyback onto the Shopify store. That makes for a great platform for a startup business to grow all the way up to a huge multimillion-dollar business and anything in between. And it’s also very economical. I think they have a promotion right now that gives you a three months trial at a dollar a month to get you started.

Marc Vila:
Okay, all right.

Mike Angel:
And then moves into about $29 per month. So we feel that’s a fantastic platform to get started with some of the efforts that we’re doing to serve our customer base.

Marc Vila:
Okay, great. And transparency, we are not sponsored by Shopify or make any money. It’s just a tool that’s out there. And we talk about tools all the time on this podcast for any listeners out there, whether it’s CRM tools, email marketing tools, and all these are just tools in our belt that we all have experience with and used. And as you mentioned with Shopify, the cool thing about that product is its scalability. You can start at a dollar a month, just shoestring budget, and theoretically work up to millions of dollars a year on the same platform, which is cool. We don’t use Shopify for our online store here at ColDesi, on colmanandcompany.com, but we’ve created a different platform that’s probably not a startup platform that you’d work with with tons of other customization that you can do. But the app ability is a really cool thing on Shopify.

So the steps to setting up Shopify, as we mentioned before. You go online, you choose a template, and you sign up and then you say, “I want to start selling T-shirts.” So you write in the descriptions of your T-shirts and you start uploading pictures. And great when you’ve got 2, 3, 5 things you’re selling, but all of a sudden that scales up really fast. And what I mean by that is two products can easily turn into 2,000 products when you talk about different options and colors and logos and customers that you’re going to be working with. And a lot of that work is done not in Shopify but in an art app somewhere. So you would have to be using Photoshop or Canva or some illustrator, CorelDRAW, something like that to physically edit the art files that you’re going to be working with. So you may get a picture from a manufacturer that’s of a shirt and you’re selling a logo on it so you got to go into Photoshop or something like that and put the logo on it and then upload that to Shopify to sell online.

That’s no problem when you’re doing 10 of those. But you had recognized a problem for when you’re trying to go much larger than that. Can you maybe walk through the story of how that can scale up really fast and how much time that could potentially take?

Mike Angel:
Sure, yeah. That’s a great question. One of the challenges for not just startup businesses but many existing businesses that want to start selling online is not just choosing which web store platform to use, but in our industry, when it comes to decorating products, we have a lot of what we call variants in what we offer our end customers. And variants are things like colors. So you have a particular product, you have a T-shirt, and that T-shirt may come in, some of them come in 20 plus different colors. Not only do they come in different colors, but they come in different sizes and so forth.

Once you’ve chosen a web store platform, now you’ve got to create what we call digital assets. These are your product images. And when you’re creating your product images, it becomes a challenge in creating all of the different variants. If I want to create a forest green T-shirt for a school that I’m working with but their school colors are actually green, white, black, now I have three different color variants in a T-shirt that I need to create for them, create their graphics to put on those T-shirts, and then upload them to the web store. I’m using things like Photoshop to grab a product image. I have to edit that. I have to upload a graphic and superimpose it on top of the T-shirt to make this product image, to then upload every different size and variant color into the web store. And that process can become very challenging and time-consuming. So we recognize these challenges and these steps that you need to take to sell online, and we’ve actually worked on solutions to address that.

Marc Vila:
Okay, cool. So we’re going to talk about that solution then, but I want to do some variant math just for fun, right?

Mike Angel:
Okay.

Marc Vila:
Let’s say you mentioned the school had three colors, right?

Mike Angel:
Sure.

Marc Vila:
And then you’re also going to sell, maybe for sake of numbers, five or six different sports teams. And then each has a boys and a girls team. So you’ve got three variants for color times six variants for the number of sports times two variants for the girls and guys, which may have different styles of shirts or they may just have different logos even sometimes, right?

Mike Angel:
Correct, yeah.

Marc Vila:
So just in that one small school, you’ve got 36 different variants that you need to create in images just for that. And that’s how that math works. You do the number of colors times the number of options times the number of this. Then so as that number continues to grow, it gets to a pretty big number. And we sell blanks on colmanandcompany.com. We started off with, well, we’re just going to sell I think we started off with 100 was a number. We just said, “Let’s just start with a small number, easy to do. We’ll just pick 100 that’ll give some people some options and get a feel for how they like it.”

Well, like you said, some of these products had… And I’ll do the calculator again. So we chose the 100 products. Some of them had up to 30, 40 colors and some had 7 colors. So if we just average 20 or something like that, times 20 colors, times the number of sizes which was extra small up to some of them 5X. Let’s just even just say five sizes for each. We quickly went to 10,000 SKUs on our store-

Mike Angel:
Unbelievable.

Marc Vila:
… for 100 products just like in a snap. And we were like, “Oh, 100. Easy.” No, 100 turned out to be 10,000. So maybe the school and that example are a couple of not even extremes yet because we have almost 100,000 SKUs at this point. But one of the things to consider is that you get a school and you have to do 36 different Photoshop edits. Now, if you also may have a back of the shirt that’s being decorated, so now you’ve double that number.

Mike Angel:
So another variant.

Marc Vila:
It’s another variant so you times that, times two front and back. And then if they have, they could do a sleeve as well potentially. Then now you can add another one so now you’re times three on that variant, and then all of a sudden the teachers love it and they said, “Well, hey, the teachers want to have options for shirts too,” so now you have a whole another set. All of a sudden you could quickly jump from 5 to 10 variants to 36 to 360 variants for one customer, which means you’re in Photoshop or wherever, Canva, whatever, 360 times editing that photo.

And that is a problem that you would recognize that. Then all of a sudden just someone says, “The effort’s not worth it,” or, “I’m just not going to show the back of the shirt,” or, “I’m just not going to show all the colors online. I’ll just show the white one and then I’ll just let them choose green or black.” That just is you are lessening the experience for your customer because of the fact that how am I going to do 360 edits? And even if it only takes you 10 seconds to edit, which is absurdly fast, you have to save the file, upload the file, locate the file. All of those things are like five seconds, five seconds, five seconds times 360 times. It’s like you’ve got a week’s worth of work in editing and uploading files. So that’s the birthplace of ClickWear that you mentioned before.

I’d like to chat a little bit about that. And on the podcast, just for transparency, we’re put on by ColDesi. Both of us work for ColDesi in this particular episode, but we try not to make these a commercial. This is education, which I think is why the first X many minutes, 15 minutes, we started just really helping folks understand this online store problem. But now I want to dive into ClickWear. Let’s talk about it and of course tell all the great features about it and hopefully folks get interested. And then now that we’ve started a lightweight introduction, let’s dive into some of the deeper stuff and really help folks make a decision on how they can sell better. If they should sell online, how they could sell better online, and then how potentially ClickWear might be the solution for them. So maybe give us a summary of ClickWear, tell us what it does.

Mike Angel:
ClickWear is a Shopify app that addresses some of the challenges that we’re talking about, and it’s designed to meet the needs of the way that most of the community-based decoration business is done. And what I mean by that is we have, let’s say you’re a printer in your town and you print T-shirts and more than likely you’re addressing your immediate community with your services, and you have a relationship with that community. So you have a relationship with the local service companies like your plumbers, your electricians. You have a relationship with local schools and sports teams and so forth, and you’re already deciding through your current process or your new process if you’re out there starting new business and generating new business and talking amongst your community, you’re already generating your orders with that customer and you’re already talking about what it is you can deliver. You’re already talking about what it is that customer wants you to deliver for them. And now that you’ve established that person-to-person communication and you’ve made that sale, there isn’t an easy way for you to then have that customer purchase from you online.

Marc Vila:
Right. And so the challenge is, and this is old school versus new school challenges in ordering things, right? It’s no secret on this podcast that we tell everybody how do you make money, and it’s like, “Get some samples, throw them in your car. Get some business cards or flyers, throw them in your car. Drive around town, visit all the local shops. Go to baseball games, tell people what you do. Go to your kids’ baseball game, tell people what you do. Join the chamber of commerce. Go to luncheons for business owners.” That’s a great way to expand your business and reach potentially beyond your goals as a business owner in this industry. That’s a way to do it.

The problem is, as you mentioned there, so you talk to a, maybe there’s a real estate firm 15 miles from your shop and they are hiring. They’re hiring and firing people or new realtors who are coming in. And so they’re always ordering shirts. Maybe they even give T-shirts out, “Congratulations on your new home,” or something like that that they do. Who knows what they’re doing? But anyway, they’re ordering customized stuff. Well, every time they want to place a new order, they have to call you or email you that order, which is a great way to get mistakes in your orders because people will call while they’re driving. They forget to say something. They didn’t write a note down. We hear letters and words wrong all the time on the phone. And then same thing, email too. They’re going to email you something and they’re going to forget to include the sizes. “Hey, I need five more of these shirts.” “Okay, what size?” “This.” “Okay, what color?” “This.” Okay, now you’re back and forth there so.

Going online in this scenario, before, there’s a concept of selling online, meaning you’re going to try to get your business online, which is by advertising on Google or social media or creating a social media account that drives people to your store, which is one way. The other way that online sales is just a tool to make the job ordering easier, for one, on the end more accurate on the other. So you have your customers come through and that’s just what it is. You tell your customer, “Okay, great. Great to meet you. I’m glad. We got your first order all set. The next time you want to order, here’s another tool. You go to mystore.com and you just pick the sizes and colors you want. And then when you hit go, it comes to me and I just place the order.” So that’s a great reason to sell online, not necessarily because you’re trying to market online, which is different.

So that gets into this. Now, part of the solution we discussed was that, it’s what? It’s creating some of the art is a little bit of the frustration. Let’s just maybe gather, we can pick up from there. We’re a community-based business. We realize that selling online is important because it makes reordering and ordering again much easier for our customers. It also scales it, meaning that the person who orders the shirts for, say, a local school or something like that, can provide a link to parents and students to order online. It doesn’t have to be done necessarily through a paper form through the office or something like that. So maybe you’ll pick up from there, and how does the ClickWear app helping to create the store?

Mike Angel:
To summarize the challenges and the questions that we get are we’d love to sell online, and what are the steps to do so and how does that make my business more efficient? And the challenge that many folks were having were not just creating the product images and choosing what type of e-commerce platform to use, but also how to produce the orders efficiently.

We recognize that being able to not only make it easier for the customer to purchase from the decorator but also for the decorator to produce those orders efficiently needed to be tied together. So what we’ve done is we’ve created a tool that helps mock those products up quickly. It’s an app that connects to your Shopify store and it comes full with a catalog of the most popular products out in the industry, most importantly product images that are all consistent.

One of the things you mentioned earlier was that user experience and coming in on the site and having a nice looking site and having nice looking images. We’ve gone ahead and filled up a automatic catalog full of product images, front and backs of shirts, bags, caps, all sorts of things, and that will continue to grow. We’ll continue to add to that catalog. But the idea is that there are nice, clean images of products that you can then use the ClickWear tool to mock the products. So within the tool structure, you can choose a blank product, let’s say a T-shirt, and you can add your customer’s logo to the T-shirt. You can choose what color T-shirts in that variety of T-shirts you want to offer and the different sizes. And when you’re done mocking up your product and click add product to my Shopify store, it will then duplicate those images across all those different variants and all the different colors.

So we’re satisfying that first challenge of creating nice products at speed for those customers so that those end customers can access those products on that store. Then the art files that you’re actually using to mock the products and create those T-shirts, travel. It’s a term in the industry we call travel. Those art files travel with the product so that when that end customer, that school purchases that T-shirt, in your orders folder in Shopify, you’ll actually see the art file attached to it so that you can easily download it straight to your production floor, to your printer, to your art team or whomever is going to do the actual pressing and printing on the product. So it’s a great tool but more so a great process to meet the needs of a market that’s been underserved for quite some time.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, so that’s excellent. And I’d like to… I’m just a big fan of rewording things and saying them differently because I know I listen to a ton of podcasts and I’ll hear a guest come on who is in the weeds of a product. They’re talking about a piece of software or whatever, and they talk about it from this great high level. And then sometimes I’m like, “What did he say? What does that mean?” So I’m just a fan and I like it in a lot in podcasts when the host helps to bring it down a little bit.

So essentially what we’re saying is that you have a school that has a logo and you’re going to put that online so the school can order shirts and hoodies and all stuff like that. And there’s all the famous brands and styles that are out there. It’s available. The art’s already on ClickWear, so Port & Company, Hanes, Gildan, District, all these, you’re going to have shirts and hats and hoodies and stuff like that that the images are already there. And you literally drag in the logo and you put it where it would be on the shirt. And then when you hit save in so many words, it’ll populate it. So if you offer it in three colors, all of those images will come in all the colors. So the customer can see. They can click on green and see what the logo will look like on green, and white and then they’ll see what it looks like on white.

And all the images are meant to be for online stores. So they’re all consistent, the same size. The lighting is similar. They’re all been edited professionally designed for use on an online store. And then when the customer goes through the end and clicks buy, the art file that’s supposed to go on the shirt, the literal file is in the order. So whoever’s running the orders, whether you own your own business or you have employees, literally can click and grab the file and put it into the printer. And very, the shortest possible way of saying that, but literally take the file and put it into the printer so the right one goes on the shirt. Is that a pretty decent short version of that?

Mike Angel:
Sure, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. What I like about that, especially a couple of things I like about that, for one, all that variants stuff goes away which is really annoying to do. We’ve done that before on our online store. We had to deal with variants and so it’s really annoying, so I love that that’s taken care of. But also the other problem that I deal with in marketing and anybody who does marketing realizes is asset management. And anybody who creates custom apparel or T-shirts or mugs or anything is dealing with that asset management as well. And what I mean is your customer provides you a logo and that’s the logo that you print on things. And then your customer emails you and says, “Hey, we rebranded. Here’s the new version of our logo,” different font or color or something like that. Great, and you save it in a file somewhere.

Well, then you update the image online and everything looks right. The customer hits order. Well, whoever’s printing, they may go into the file folder that they normally go into, grab the logo that they normally grab, not necessarily realizing that they’ve grabbed the old version, print 100 shirts, ship them out, and then the customer says, “Why’d you send the old logo?” So I think that we solve this problem of the wrong file being printed too. Gosh, in marketing we deal with that all the time where it’s somebody will do a Photoshop to put something online and they use the wrong version of the logo. So managing that is a problem in and of itself, and this tool actually just solves that automatically.

Mike Angel:
It does. And traditionally in this industry, you try to make sure that that end customer authorizes a mock-up that you’ve made for them, and so that’s the process. But using an e-commerce platform and these types of tools speeds that process up too because you’re actually creating a virtual product. Your mock is your virtual product, and your customer can see that virtual product online and it’s a quick authorization. It saves you time and back and forth, and it’s really the essence of what on-demand is. You’re creating these virtual representations of your products.

Just because they’re digital doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They actually exist. Our file exists. The product image exists. You just haven’t ordered that blank in stock yet. So on-demand in its essence is the ability to have that virtual product, have your customer access that product, purchase it. You get the order no matter the quantity, and then you order those blanks on-demand. Maybe you have some stock on the shelf but you haven’t pre-printed it, but you’re fulfilling that order on-demand. And to get to a zero index inventory is every production team’s and inventory control team’s dream to minimize that inventory as best you can. And having a platform and having a process like this and truly embracing on-demand allows for that.

And so that’s what you want to happen is to have that product represented all your processes in line so when a customer purchases it, it cues your ordering of the blank, your rate of your art file, and increases your margins, increases your turn time, and increases the variety of things you can offer because now you reduce your minimum quantities. Maybe you’ve been a print shop that offers maybe your screen printer and your lowest minimum quantity is 12 or 24 pieces because you can’t set up your presses to knock out these smaller orders and you want to move to digitally printed platforms. Well, now you can. You can do that by having an on-demand process.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, you said a few things there that are really interesting to me. One was you mentioned about maybe an item you’ve never had in stock before or you don’t normally keep in stock. So if we want to talk about, let’s just say 10 years ago, not even that long ago, if you wanted to sell a new hat or a hoodie or a shirt or whatever it was and you wanted to put it online, the process would be you would order some, get them in, either take pictures and Photoshop on, or actually just physically make some and take pictures of the made product and then post that online.

Mike Angel:
Physically print it and take a picture of the finished product.

Marc Vila:
Right, which isn’t necessarily that hard but it sure has a lot of barriers between it. Do I want to sell that product? I have to take the time. I have to print. If you’re screen printing, for sure there’s a lot of steps in there. Even just in general, it’s a project. Now, with this type of product, you can actually experiment in, what, five minutes? You can run an experiment on your site to see if a particular product or style will be viable to your customers. Meaning that you could be in the ClickWear catalog and you could search for hats and say, “Look at that mesh back, trucker style cap. I wonder if the folks at this school that I work with are going to like that.”

Logo, slap, pick the three colors you’re going to offer, hit go, put it online, and then you can go into your email marketing platform if you have one. Or just honestly just send blank emails or texts with a link saying, “Hey, by the way, I’m now offering this. What do you guys think?” And someone can see a mock-up of that product that you spent minutes creating, and they could literally order one right there or at least give you feedback. “Oh yeah, thanks. I think the students are going to love this. I’ll go ahead and I’ll include it in the next newsletter.” And you didn’t have to go through ordering all of this stuff. You literally just went on there and just clicked a few buttons and it did it for you. And then when the orders come in, then that’s when you can go ahead and actually physically place your orders with the apparel supplier, which, what, most of them come in a day, right?

Yeah, so I love that process. It really just it allows you to… Since I’m in marketing, I really like running experiments on products and trying new things. And so it immediately crushes that barrier to be able to try that out. And then the second thing is you just have to go through that. You don’t necessarily have to order something every time and produce it and put it all together. I know that that’s got to be a frustration for people. So moving from that idea then, what are a few ideal customers for the ClickWear product? I gather there’s not just one, but can you name maybe a few examples of somebody who should probably investigate this a little bit more?

Mike Angel:
It’s really a tool to help any business that is selling a decorated product. Let’s just stick with printing, for example. So if you’re a business startup or existing that is selling products that have to be printed, be it with standard art files and logos, or even if it’s user-generated or personalized, a tool like this helps you create those virtual products so that you’re in that on-demand process and you can offer that to your customer base. And by doing so, you can offer a wider variety of products than you ever thought you could, a wider variety of products. So it can be, for example, a local-based print shop that again wants to go out to local schools and organizations within their community.

But I’ve been talking recently to a company that sells pet products nationally. They sell pet accessories, so little scarves and collars and all sorts of things. And they are an existing company with a big internet following already, and they want to be able to offer a wider variety of products. They don’t want to keep inventory of all the pre-printed products so they want to be able to have control of ordering blanks, blank scarves, and handkerchiefs and things for dogs, for example, is one of their big sellers. They’ll be able to have access to order the blanks on-demand and put up a wide variety of styles on their web store. And so this now helps them quickly create mocks and offer a wider variety of scarves with different types of artwork than they ever could before. So from an established online business to a small business, it really doesn’t matter. The tools are agnostic and the business model is on-demand and it helps you achieve that.

Marc Vila:
I like that then. So I never am a big fan of getting into specific prices on the podcast because I like the podcast to be good for years and economies and prices of things change. But it sounds to me like it’s affordable. If you’re saying a startup, is it a large investment for a startup to get going with this app? We already know that Shopify can start at, well, you said a special they run now, it’s like a buck a month. But generally speaking, under 50 bucks a month, you could have a pretty nice store going with that. What about this app? Is there a big startup cost? Can you just elaborate on that a little bit?

Mike Angel:
It’s a great question. We feel that we’ve done a good job at addressing a specific segment of the market. The technical term for the tool we’ve created, ClickWear is a configurator and OMS system. Really fancy, techy, geeky words, right?

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I love the words. I like big words.

Mike Angel:
Configurators is the ability to configure a product digitally. That’s creating it, choosing colors, adding a graphic image, and sizing and mocking it up. It’s called configuration. And OMS order management is what happens after it’s been purchased. How do you track your order, match up that art file to that product to be ordered? And there’s a whole workflow process involved.

Marc Vila:
Like checking off that it’s been completed and done.

Mike Angel:
Absolutely. Inventory control and as sophisticated as you want to get, these tools will help you do that, put in the order for you automatically to some of the blanks. Companies out there that sell the T-shirts, it’ll automate for you. So there’s a lot of sophistication there. And typically up until now, this is probably the fifth configurator that I’ve been involved with in the development process. Before it, we’re in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce. They were either for major manufacturers or major retailers.

And everyone’s pretty much familiar. If you’re online shopper, which 80 plus percent of the US population now buys something online or is comfortable buying something online, you’ve seen where you can design a T-shirt or personalize a product. So we’re all familiar with what actually configurators are, and they’ve been reserved for really top tier companies and retailers. And so they’re at the hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop these tools. But what we’ve done is we’ve concentrated on this specific market segment and we’ve made it very affordable. We’ve democratized these tools and for a small percentage transaction fee, which most of these tools work this way, where there’s a transaction fee involved in using the tool, which is great because you’re only investing in the tool when you’re selling.

Marc Vila:
Okay. So in so many words, you’re paying a very, very small, very, very small fee for just when the tool is only when tool is used.

Mike Angel:
That’s correct. That’s correct. So you’re creating all these wonderful products and if maybe they’re all experimental, but you don’t pay unless it’s actually purchased. And it’s a very small percentage so it’s something that can be worked into the pricing, which works out very well. So we think that’s an economical approach.

We’re also including it in some of the important equipment that helps with on-demand like DTF printers. There’s some great opportunities that the system is bundled in. And then we also have a consulting arm where for really true startups or businesses that need help getting it launched, we have a setup option where we’ll actually help you set everything up and help fast track your ability to use the app and the tool and actually create a workflow for yourself very quickly while you’re doing other things for your business, like setting it up, going and talking to customers. We can help you with fast-tracking of the use of the tools. So these are all options and very affordable and easy ways to get started and have a very powerful online business, even as a startup or even as an existing business pivoting into this for the first time.

Marc Vila:
So what’s cool about this is you could be a startup or maybe just the first time you’re ever actually selling online. Maybe you’re not a startup, but you’ve never truly had an online store. And you can have a configurator that you can start using immediately for a very low cost right in the beginning, just extremely low cost upfront, and be competing against a much larger competitor that custom-built a configurator 5, 10 years ago for $200,000.

Mike Angel:
That’s correct.

Marc Vila:
And you could potentially be using a tool that’s equal or maybe even better so it really flattens out the playing field. So a local shop can create a website where their local customers can easily order and buy and reduce the workload for everybody around, like I said earlier. Somebody doesn’t necessarily have to fill out a piece of paper, bring it to the front office of the school, and then somebody at the school has to pass it to the next person who emails you to order your shirts and go through that whole thing, which is a bunch of work for a lot of people. Plus handling the money, somebody’s got to get a check and then it goes through a whole system, gets lost. Who knows?

All of that can get crunched down into something very simple. You have a sophisticated tool that allows you to compete so somebody doesn’t necessarily feel like, “Oh, well. I’m just going to go to VistaPrint,” or something like that, which I don’t know anybody there. I’m sure they’re wonderful people at that organization. But if you’re a small business, sometimes you have to compete with these really large businesses and this flattens that out, which is really remarkable.

So what I’d like to do is give some folks a little call, the action if they’re interested in learning about the product. And then if you have a few more minutes, you mentioned DTF printing before. I’d like to just maybe just talk a little bit about that for a few minutes. If you already know everything there is, if you’re listening and everything there is to know about DTF printing and you want to be done now, fine, but we’ll keep it short just to get some of your expertise on that product since a lot about that too.

But you can go to coldesi.com and if you click on the top menu, you’ll find the area where you see stuff about Shopify and ClickWear and on-demand. If you fill out a form on one of those pages, you’ll probably talk directly to Mike here, if not one of his colleagues. And you can talk about ClickWear. You can talk about anything truly custom. So if you’re listening to this and you’ve got a reasonably sized business and you say, “Yeah, that Shopify app sounds cool, but I’m looking for this and this and this or just significantly more custom,” you can assist with that, right?

Mike Angel:
That’s correct.

Marc Vila:
So you could do all of that consulting and helping develop apps and configurators and all of that stuff that’s custom, or just help somebody get in the right direction for ClickWear as well, right? That’s a good summary?

Mike Angel:
Yeah, sure.

Marc Vila:
Okay. All right, good. So go to coldesi.com, check it out, fill out a form, live chat, talk to Mike or one of his colleagues over here at ColDesi and see if one of these tools can actually help your business grow. Those who are still sticking around, I just want to talk about DTF printing in 2020… There’s lots of 20s right now, right? So 2021, 2022 was really big. 2023 were really big jumps in the direct-to-film printing industry. And you’ve been in this industry 60 years or something like that?

Mike Angel:
Yeah, 572 years.

Marc Vila:
572 years. But in all seriousness, did you start in the ’90s? Or when did you start working in this industry?

Mike Angel:
In 1998.

Marc Vila:
1998, okay. So you’ve been in this industry about a decade longer than myself. And I feel like I know a lot so I’m throwing another decade of experience on that. I can only imagine all the things you’ve learned. And over the years, you’ve seen DTG printing come alive, embroidery machines evolve, white toner printing come in. But a lot of people are talking about how direct-to-film printing is different than a lot of those. And I’m just curious on what’s your opinion on is direct-to-film different than those and what is different about it?

Mike Angel:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So DTF, direct-to-film, is a game changer. I hate to use that term. Throughout the years, we’ve used that several times. But it truly is, and there are two things that are special about DTF. The first is it is its own thing in terms of the technical aspect of direct-to-film printing. In other words, the print itself. So it can be people try to compare it to vinyl or toner transfers or screen printing, but it truly is its own media medium. Medium?

Marc Vila:
Yeah, both.

Mike Angel:
Right?

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Because the media that it goes on is a specialty type of film, and the medium itself is actually what is being created is different than everything else.

Mike Angel:
Right. So technically, it’s a water-based pigment that has high washability. It has very vibrant look. The pigment can be profiled so it’s easily profiled to match customer color palettes. We’ve got 50 plus washes before you see degradation to the prints. You need a spectrophotometer to see it after 50 plus washes. We’ve had studies done at the Florida State University’s textile lab. It has a white ink backing which not only provides the opacity and gives the artwork pop, but provides the ability for the powdered adhesive to stick to. So basically what you have is a solidified ink, for lack of a better way to describe it. And that glue is what’s pressed on to any type of fabric.

So that is a combination that we haven’t seen before, to be able to take one printed piece of artwork and apply that same print across a wide variety of products. So anything, cotton, anything polyester. And that could go for apparel. It could go for just straight material. It could go for caps, soft-sided coolers. So you have your soft goods, backpacks. It’s unbelievable. It also has a low weld time, so it’s a very low time. You’re talking 7, 10 seconds worth of press time, and very low temperatures comparative to some of the other transfer systems. So at whether your cotton products, you’re up around 300 degrees to really get a good melt and weld and adhesion to the fabric. But if you’re on something a little more delicate like performance wear, which is very proper, you’re wearing a performance polo right now.

Marc Vila:
Miss that patches.

Mike Angel:
I’ll address that in a second why this is so significant, but you can then drop the temperature down at 270-ish, so there’s no dye migration or releasing from the substrate. And so right off the bat, technically you’ve got a beautiful print that’s stretchy, that feels good, and goes across a wide variety of products. And the transfers themselves don’t have a shelf life so you can pre-make some and store them without any issues as well. So very versatile.

The second thing that this all addresses is the ability to meet that on-demand process and philosophy we’ve been talking about. To be able to now profitably print one unit. That’s, to use the word again, game changer in the industry, to profitably be able to produce one unit. So you have a very low material cost as well. Material cost is around a half a cent per square inch. So a 10 by 10 piece of artwork’s going to run you at 50 cents or so, and you can produce it quickly. It can go across a wide variety of products.

And with that, you’re able to then sell as little as one product, hopefully through your web store. And the end customers will pay a premium for the ability to purchase just one for you because traditionally they haven’t been able to do that. You have minimum quantities, color requirements, how many color separations and all these requirements and setup fees and all sorts of things. But you can now produce as little as one unit profitably, get a premium for it, but also be able to scale with the same technology and produce many. So now you can produce redundant runs. So whether it’s 1 or whether it’s 1,000, you can do with the DTF system.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, and the setup time is pretty minimal for whether you’re doing 1 or 1,000. It’s literally going on a computer and typing in 1 or typing in 1,000 and hitting go.

Mike Angel:
True digital production.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And so you said a lot of great things there so a few things popped in my head. One, you compared to some other technologies. So popular the technology for decades now is sublimation printing. It’s a great way to create a transfer and store it for a period of time and then place it on a piece of apparel or hard good or something like that. The problem with sublimation goods is you’re very limited on the materials and the colors and the materials that you can work with. So a ton of people are doing that technology and then they tell customers no when they want a dark blue shirt with a white logo on it because you literally cannot do that. So then alternatively, they’ll be screen printed or vinyl cut it, which has been again, another technology for decades which are both great and they look good and they wash well and all that stuff because their technology has been around forever.

The challenge is what I have right now is a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-color logo. So for one, if a customer hands you this, you’re probably going to, if you’re doing one of those methods, your first instinct is probably to see if you can get them to reduce the number of colors because that’s more work for you. And you either have to charge them more for the work, do more work for less money than another customer, or convince them to do it in one color. Direct-to-film printing as a digital process, so it really doesn’t matter if it’s 1 color or 100, it’s the same amount of work. So that’s a wonderful change too to the business is the amount of colors and if there’s gradients or anything like that. For the most part you can just be, “Oh, sure. I can print that logo.”

And then we’ve got other technologies like DTG or white toner printing, which are digital processes that you don’t have to worry about colors. And the materials you’re going to print on, I don’t want to get too much in the weeds on those things but both of those are reasonably versatile to some degree. But the problem with those is just the time. So white toner printing and DTG printing, depending on what you’re printing, how large it is, et cetera, et cetera, can eat up a decent amount of time to get those printed. And it’s not a crazy amount of time, minutes, let’s just say, a few minutes, which is not that big of a deal, but times 100 is 300 minutes. That’s a decent amount of time to work.

Where on your direct-to-film printer, to do 300, you’re clicking print, it’s going through the process. You’re not having to do all your transfers one at a time at that point in time, you’re just going through the process and you’re doing other things in your shop while it’s printing 300 of these. And then when you’re done, you’re applying them to the shirts, like you said, 7 to 10 seconds at a time, versus other processes with either curing on DTG or on white toner, could be 30 seconds or 45 seconds or a minute or depending on what you’re printing, it’s a little different. So we can just say minimum, half the heat press time, and then you’re not doing a single garment at a time when you’re printing process. You’re printing on a roll. So that’s really cool things comparing to those technologies.

Then there’s screen print transfers, which I’m not going to claim to be a super dark expert on, but I’ve done them before. And I’ll say that when I had done screen print transfers before, this was before or right when I got or just before I got in the industry, I was selling some apparel and I would order screen print transfers. And I remember one thing with these was that if I touched them while they were too hot or tapped them with my heat press again, I could melt off a part of the transfer or damage it. And for one, direct-to-film does not do that. You could tap it with the heat press a bunch of times. If you had a wrinkle in the shirt, you can just iron it. You can just hit it again and it still holds up. Can you tell me a bit more about comparing it to screen print transfers and benefits or not?

Mike Angel:
Yeah. Screen print transfers are going to fall into the same category in terms of minimum requirements. You’re not going to be able to order one screen print transfer. You’ve got to order a batch of them. You’ve got a minimum quantity. And we’re also talking about screen print so there’s color separation.

Marc Vila:
And can you just break that down what that means for just a minute for anybody who might not know?

Mike Angel:
So for every color in a logo or piece of artwork, there needs to be a screen burnt. There needs to be a screen made. And so with that comes a cost factor. The more colors, the more the print’s going to cost you, and the more the minimum requirement is going to be because you have to set up a press to do so. And so it’s cost-prohibitive to be able to, again, sell online and meet the demands of the current customer base. This is what the customer is asking for. The customers these days have budgets or they don’t want to order a couple of hundred to meet a certain price point, or they want the ability to buy a wider variety of products at less quantities. That’s just the way it is across the industry. So that’s a major difference technically. You mentioned some of the difference in terms of technically, mechanically, the heat temperatures are different, the application process is a bit different and not as tolerant and easy as it is with DTF.

Marc Vila:
Right, right. I found the first time I did a direct-to-film transfer, I just like, “Wow, that was easy.” And I’ve done I feel like every type of technology out there. I’ve done just about all of them in the customization industry outside of a few. And maybe just the only stuff I haven’t done is probably laser or something like that, but that’s a machine doing all the work anyway. But anything that involves hands, I’ve pretty much touched all the different types of transfers. And all of them have their little quirks, but the first time I did direct-to-film, I was literally just like, closed it, I opened it, and I was like, “Wow, that was actually fricking super easy.”

And you mentioned the performance fabrics. One of the challenges with doing performance fabrics are they can, I’m just going to use a bunch of words, distort, discolor, burn, change the consistency of the fabric easy. So if you have to do sublimation which is really high temperature, or you have to put it under a heat press for a really long period of time, you can actually end up with a section of your shirt that looks a little bit different. So when you get to bring that temperature all the way down to, what, 270, 280, 290, depending, something within that range for 7, 8, 9 seconds, that really minimizes the chance of that happening.

The way I think about it, at least sometimes, if you had a plastic spatula and you dropped it in a pan for a second and picked it up, nothing’s going to happen to it. It’s designed to be able to handle that heat. You’ll just pick it up, everything’s fine. But if you drop that spatula on the pan and didn’t realize it and you let it sit in there for one minute, you’re going to have a spatula that is either completely melted or at minimum warped in out of shape that you’ll never get back into shape. And I think that’s the difference is that you could put a piece of apparel that is susceptible to heat over time.

And then I was watching something on TV last night, and I’ll finish with this example because I like it. So I was watching MythBusters. You’re familiar with the show?

Mike Angel:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
It was just old season. Of course it hasn’t been on the TV for a while. But they did this myth where it was a video of people shooting shrimp out of an air cannon, and they shot it through breadcrumbs and eggs and fire. And then in the end, the fake internet video, they fried shrimp through a cannon. And so the MythBusters were trying to say can we even cook a shrimp that way? And they set up forges that make swords, I don’t know, five of them, thousands of degrees. And they shot raw shrimp through them, thousands of degrees for, I don’t know, 10, 20 feet. And the shrimp was raw on the other end because heat is okay for a short period of time for just about anything. You can put your hand on a candle.

So I think that’s something to consider. That’s a great thing about DTF is because of the short time and temperature, just the tolerance of apparel is much greater and much less dangerous to messing things up versus sublimation or anything where you have to physically put heat on something for sometimes literally a minute, right?

Mike Angel:
Right, that’s correct.

Marc Vila:
Okay, great. So yeah, that was about 15 minutes on direct-to-film printing. And so what we’ll probably do is maybe even we’ll have this episode in full. I’m hoping what we’ll do is we’ll also for those watching or listening, I am planning on probably cutting it too. So maybe we just have this little 15 minute direct-to-film talk separately. So if you’re watching that and you’re curious about some of the mentions of selling online, then please be sure to go to customapparelstartups.com and look for the episode with Mike Angel where we talk about Shopify because there’s a whole longer section just about that. Just add that note at the end there. But thanks for joining us. We really appreciate it. I’m sure a bunch of people have learned a lot and are curious, and we hope to have you on again to talk about some more topics. Do you have any final thoughts or words or anything you wanted to get out before everyone hit stop?

Mike Angel:
Oh, I just encourage everyone to sell online, to make sure that your business is selling online, and to know that we’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting to help you fast track and get that done and really help your business.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it truly is. We mentioned a lot of reasons why, but I think ultimately the kicker in business is time is the number one, and then that’s everything I think really when it really comes down to it. So if somebody has to, just going through the example for a minute, if somebody’s got to fill out a form and bring it to somebody and that person has to bring it to somebody else who delivers it to you, and then you produce a shirt and you bring it back somewhere else and it goes there, sometimes people just don’t want to do it. Somebody’s just like, “I don’t have time to go to school and fill out the form. I don’t want to have that bad.”

And then also the time for your business that you have to get an email, reply to it, get it again, reply to it, finally get the order, deliver it. Send them a proof, mock-up, like you said, make sure they say yes. And now it’s like a week before the order even got placed and then the person just says, “You know what? I was getting a hat for a baseball game and it’s already passed. Season’s over, we lost. I don’t need it anymore.” So this just allows your customers to directly go. They can order. It’s easy, reduces ton of time for them. The mock-up’s already done. You get the order, it’s got the right logo in it, the right color, everything because the customer’s seen it and approved it, and you can just print it and bring it right to them.

Whether you deliver in person or mail it, that’s up to you. But there is 100% chance that somebody would not have placed an order with you versus them placing it online. So you will get more orders just for being online for the convenience, for those percentage of people who are just be, “Nah, nevermind. It’s too much work.” Because we all do that, right? How many times have you driven down the road and it’s on the left. The store is on the left side of the highway and you’re like, “Nevermind. I don’t really feel… I don’t want to cross traffic that bad to get an extra whatever. I’ll just not get it.” And then you don’t buy it. So it’s true of physical locations and virtual locations.

Well, anyway, thanks again.

Mike Angel:
Yeah, thank you.

Marc Vila:
Everybody out there, appreciate you listening. Please visit coldesi.com to check out everything that we mentioned, all the different pieces of equipment and all that stuff. We have all that stuff available to learn about. And check out ClickWear and the on-demand products if those are right for you too. And go to customapparelstartups.com where you can check out this episode online, and I’ll put in some notes and some links to the various things that we spoke about as well. So thanks, everybody, and have a good business.

Introduction

Small business owners in the customization industry are facing unprecedented challenges due to rising prices. This resource guide provides practical strategies to help your business thrive in a changing economic landscape.

Market Research and Competitive Analysis

• Research competitors and trends – Price shop around and see how you REALLY are in the market. Also ask about ‘hidden’ fees. Set up fees, art fees, delivery, etc.
  • Do you have a fee to set up my logo?
  • Do you deliver or do I pick up? Fees?
  • I am trying to budget this all out, what other costs should I expect to make sure I allocate the right money?
• Understand customer perception – ask other business owners you know if they have had price increases. How did they deal with them? How large were they?
• Define your pricing strategy
  • Do you want to be the price leader?

Keeping it Simple

• Avoid complex financial details.
  • Don’t break down the cost of your ink, paper, deliveries etc. This leaves room for holes in your pricing strategy. Just keep it simple – ‘my costs are up, my retail is up’
• Offer added value.
• Confident price change communication.

Transparency Matters

• Be open about price increases.
  • Consequences of non-transparency.
    • If you try to dance around the truth customers may see this as dishonesty.
    • Insights from Harvard Business Review.
    • “Call the action a price increase, not a price adjustment, a price change, or another euphemism. While this may seem like a small thing, euphemistic messaging can cause serious harm, fraying the relationship with loyal customers.” Many consumers are keenly aware of overall economic conditions, so when you tell your customers you’re raising prices, it just confirms their expectations, and most accept it.
• Use clear language.
• Postpone price increase for certain customers – let them know it’s coming, and why you are postponing for them.

Customer Satisfaction is #1

• Prioritize customer satisfaction first.
• Satisfied customers accept higher prices.
• Price-sensitive customers are likely to stay if satisfied. If they still won’t stay with higher prices, you have to decide if they are worth it.
  • e.g. a low maintenance customer may be worth keeping at a lower margin. However a customer that is constant trouble, no referrals, frequent returns, frequent complaints… might not be worth it.

Additional Pricing Strategies

• Target new customers – Go after more unique niches or higher end customers.
• Offer contract discounts – Can you get customers to commit to months or a year of service. e.g. make updated uniforms for their business every season, or update signs on storefront for each holiday.
• Create bundles – price of shirts is up, but if you do shirts AND hats you get a discount.
• Selective price increases – only price increase certain items. Maybe your low-price leading items stay the same, but your upsells increase.

Handling Customer Objections

• Address objections with confidence
• Brainstorm with your team or other business owners
• Practice the conversations
• Understand most customers will understand why this is happening

Conclusion

You empower your business when you control your prices. If you are racing to the bottom or let fear control your pricing, you will eventually start suffering consequences. Increasing pricing doesn’t mean you are greedy, you are doing your best to stay in business and reach your financial goals.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. My name is Marc Vila, and today we’re here to talk about that it’s time to charge more. Growing your business with higher prices.

And that’s what this podcast is going to be all about. It’s just going to be talking about why you should maybe charge more and how to do it while growing your business at the same time. One of the concerns of business owners are, “am I charging too much? My competition is undercutting me on price. How am I going to make the amount of money that I need to make while also keeping customers?” And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So let’s dive right into some of the details.

All right, so in this slide show here, really just talking about how in the customization industry, so T-shirt shops, sign shops, awards, whatever you’re doing, we’ve got rising prices that are all global things, right? Thread pricing is increasing, the materials that are used to make ink and toner and paper. All these things are going up and our prices are slowly increasing as a small business owner or a medium-sized business owner too. And how do you figure out what to do next? How do you actually make sure that you are maintaining the right profit margins so at the end of the day, you’re doing what your business should be doing? Making money, achieving your dreams, all that good stuff. So as the economy’s changed at the time of the recording of this podcast, we’ve been dealing with increasing prices over the past couple of years and we are here to help you kind of get past that and move on to a more profitable pricing structure and how to deal with that with your customers.

So the first thing we want to do is market research and competitive analysis. This is something that is widely overlooked. I’ve interviewed and spoke to tons of customization business owners, and I ask them, “how do you determine your pricing? What have you looked into your competition?” And most people just don’t do it. They’ve maybe heard something from some customers, they’ve maybe seen a brochure somewhere, but they haven’t really done a real structured competitive research. So the first thing is just to just price shop your competitors. Either do it yourself or ask somebody to do it. You can hire somebody to do this for you. If you look online, you can find places that will do this or honestly, just have a friend or family member do it. But call them up and ask them about a real world order, something that you would fulfill, something that your customers have asked for or would ask for. “I’d like 10 shirts front and back.” “I’d like 25 hats.” Whatever it might be.

When you’re doing this price shopping though, it’s important to understand what I think about as hidden fees. And this is one of the challenges that your customers face when shopping to you. And this is true of basically every industry in the world. We all know this. You call somewhere up, they tell you, “oh yeah, come on down, it’s $25 to do this event.” And then when you actually go to buy it, you find out that there’s a disposal fee or a setup fee or a credit card type of charge or a delivery fee. There’s fees on fees. And this is stuff that if you’ve bought concert tickets, if you’ve bought a car or if you’re buying custom T-shirts or signs, you find the same thing. So when you’re price shopping, ask about this stuff. “Okay, I actually just, I’m budgeting”, this is how I would say it.

“Thanks, your pricing’s great. I need to budget everything out and the folks that are going to approve the budget are pretty strict if I am way off. So I just need to make sure that I understand the complete pricing structure of this. Do you have a setup fee? What about the art that I’m going to give you or any fees to set that up? Are there any delivery fees or minimum type of fees or minimum size order?” Ask these questions explicitly. If you don’t, then what will happen is your customer and you are going to think that this T-shirt shop charges five bucks a shirt when you realize it’s 150 piece minimum and there’s a $50 setup fee and a $50 art fee, even if you bring your own logo. So this is really important to make sure that you ask about the hidden fees, the final cost, what’s included, what’s not included.

And then the last bit of this market research is just understanding how customers view the current pricing structure. So there are some things in this world that people think are just a really good deal. One of the things that I’m noticing now in my world is if you want just internet for your house or your business, you just want internet alone. You don’t need cable or any of these things. A lot of folks I talk to now, they just think internet’s pretty cheap. They’re like, dang, 50 bucks. I’m getting this really high speed up and down, the uptime’s really good. That’s something in my area at least that’s something I run into where people think the price is pretty good. Alternatively, people will complain about gas prices, that gas prices are really high, they feel really high.

And realistically these numbers may not be true to reality. They may not necessarily be actually valuable. Even the gas, I had someone complaining about gas prices the other day and I said, “how much do you spend a month on gas?” And “I don’t know, I don’t really drive a lot.” Okay, et cetera, et cetera. They spend like 40 bucks a month in gas. So they used to spend 20 a few years ago, now they spend 40. It’s not really a deal breaker in their life, but their perception is very negative on it. Meanwhile, when I asked them about the cable thing or the cable internet thing and they’re spending like 80 bucks a month when everyone else in the room was spending 50, they thought they were getting a fine deal. So the main point in that is that understand how customers view the pricing of this stuff. So ask other business owners, ask friends of yours, anybody you can.

Ask them about things in your industry and what they think. So if you have a friend of yours price shop, for example, and they call two or three shops and ask how much a sign or a shirt or something like that is ask them say, “what did you think about that pricing? Does that seem high higher than you expected? Lower?” I’d also ask your current customers, and we’ll get into talking about pricing conversations with them. But you could ask them, say, “Hey, in general when you’re buying customization stuff, I know you buy shirts from me, but your store also has signs and things like that. How do you feel about the overall prices of this stuff? Do you think it’s more expensive than it should be, less?” This will help to guide you in your direction on not only how you can price structure, but also how the conversation goes when you’re talking to your customers about increasing prices. So it’s going to give you a really great insight if you do these things.

The next thing is just this quote that we found here. “Price leadership is the dominant strategy which helps companies maximize profits through economies of scale.” It’s a bunch of fancy words and it sounds really cool, but the big thing about it is, the way I’m interpreting it for this is you want to be a leader in your pricing strategy. And Philip who made this quote may have been talking about being the lowest price or being the most profitable or whatever it is, but that doesn’t necessarily matter for this presentation. But what inspired me when I saw this was, if you are truly a leader in setting pricing, meaning that you know you’re pricing with proper structure, you’re pricing your goods with education, you are having good conversations with your customers about pricing, all of it is very thought out and meticulous and on purpose, you can be a leader in setting these prices for your business and also for kind of your local market or your market in general, which is really empowering for you.

So the next thing to talk about is just keeping it simple. Okay? So when you are talking about increasing your pricing, discussing this with your customers, the first thing is cost transparency, right? This is something where you get on the phone with your customer and you start saying, “well, the prices of the T-shirts went up and it cost more to ship them to me. And I’m also having to buy more ink to keep my prices down.” And you’re getting into all this stuff with them. When you give them two information, you’re potentially filling them with holes to shoot down while your prices are going up. So they’re going to say, “oh, well, oh, the shipping is too much? Maybe I can just get shirts locally and bring them to you.” Which is not what you want. You want to order from your wholesaler and mark those up.

So you don’t want to leave holes in your pricing strategy. So just for cost transparency, keep it simple and just tell your customers, “pricing is going up all across the board in my industry” and keep it like that. From operating the equipment to blanks and everything, pricing is going up. And then when we’re beginning in these thoughts and this conversation, we want to focus on value. So the thought that you want to do here is in your mind, you’re looking at numbers. You’ve got a spreadsheet, math, your calculator open, you’re doing margins. Everything is numbers, numbers, numbers. So in your head you’re programming yourself.

“I’m about to tell my customer it cost $100 and now it costs $120.” And you’re thinking about those two numbers. “Gosh, that’s 20% more”, anxiety in the conversation. Frustration, you’re so concerned about that $20 that you need to change your mindset to really be thinking about the value you’re going to provide and the value you provide to your customers. And we’ll talk about a little detail about value and customer satisfaction in a bit. But what you want to be thinking about consistently in this is highlighting what makes what you sell, what you offer, worth the price.

So as you’re talking about increasing pricing, I want you to think about all this stuff. “Yeah, prices have gone up, but I’ve got a direct to film printer. These other shops, they’re going to are still using screen printing. They can’t do the full color logos that I can do. I’ve got a great field of the shirts”, all these things you’re thinking about, or maybe you do white toner printing and you say, “well, I can do really small orders for these customers and I can deliver it to them like the same or next day.” So think about all these value things you can offer.

And then the next with keeping things simple, just confident communication. It’s important as you’re preparing for this, you’ve got written out and thought of how you’re going to communicate this in a confident way. You don’t want to come into it timidly. You don’t want to come into it scattered. “Pricing, I have to talk to you about something. It’s really bad news. There’s a lot of things going on, you know about, well, the thing with the president and the thing”, you’re going all over the place. You’re not full of confidence. It’s not simple at all. It’s all over the place and your customers are going to feel the same anxiety you have and that transfer of your anxiety to them is going to make them question whether or not they want to still do business with you. So you’ve got to have confident, simple communication.

So moving on, transparency. So you want to be open about price increases when it comes to your customers. You need to just literally tell them what’s going on when it happens, try not to surprise them. Find the communication in an open, in a good place when it’s appropriate to have that conversation. So if you know your customer is ordering in two weeks, they’re probably planning some work out. Don’t increase the price by just dropping them an invoice that’s higher and hope they don’t notice, right? That’s something that they probably will notice and they probably won’t like it and they’re going to go ahead and say something, right?

Now, this is not simple. So I’m going to explain the complexity in this because there’s a couple different things to consider. Let’s say you have an e-commerce store where you sell T-shirts and you now have gotten to the point where you’ve got a thousand products on your store, okay? Probably unrealistic to just email every single one of your e-commerce customers who probably have never bought from you before, half of them, and tell them that the prices of the T-shirts are going up, right?

The same thing’s going to happen in the grocery store. You’re not going to get a notice every time you walk in. “Milk’s gone up, eggs have gone up.” That is not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about transparency in customers that have repetitive orders, that consistently come back, are ordering typically the same type of things. And you want to increase the prices on those particular customers. So every month, you charge their credit card $500 and you provide them X product, and then now the price is going up to $550, 10% price increase.

You want to communicate that to them, just transparently do it. “Hey, costs have gone up. You know what’s going on in the world and economically, it’s not a surprise. I want to go ahead and let you know that I do have a price increase on the regular product that you order. You’re going to order it again in two weeks. It’s not a ridiculous amount of money, it’s only $50, but I just wanted to let you know.”

Now the second thing you could do with a little bit of transparency is let customers that are loyal potentially know ahead of time where maybe new customers might not get that price. And I’ll give you an example of this. So let’s just say you charge $500 for X package of goods, shirts, hats, branding, printed goods, signs, whatever it is, and this is a $500 package. Now you’re going to increase the price 10% to $550. New customers, you just quote them $550. You don’t have to tell them that prices increase. They don’t know anything about the past, we’re only talking about the future. And you can just be very transparent and simple about what your price is. “Here’s my price, no setup fees. It’s just $550 out the door done.” And they can evaluate that and you could provide all your value and all those things to them. Now, current customers, maybe you have a few customers that spend $500 a month every month, they’ve been doing it for years. You can contact them and delay the increase because of the value that they have provided you over time.

“Hey Mr. Customer, I want to let you know I got some news to deliver you in kind of a good way. So what we have is I do have a price increase coming up. It’s a 10% price increase on that package that you order from $500 to $550. Okay? Now this is due to rising costs, et cetera. However, because you’re such a good customer of mine, all new customers are getting that price going forward. But for you, I’m going to delay that until 2024, until next year. So for the next three months, you’ll pay the same low price that you have. But the beginning of next year, I just want to go ahead and let you know about that so you have time to adjust your budget.” This can be communicated and appreciated really well with your customers knowing that they are getting a little bit of a favor from you. And I’ll just make sure that that’s honest. I wouldn’t want to lie about that. I actually would want to do that if that was the truth.

Now, there are some consequences if you’re not transparent, if you try to dance around the truth, if you try to sneak things in and customers notice, they will feel lied to, cheated, you’re being sneaky. You just don’t want that reputation. You want to be the place where people go to, they trust, they consistently want to come back to. They know that if they call you up and they say, “Hey, I normally order those printed banners also, I’m looking for 500 mugs. Can you do that for me? How much are they? X dollar amount? Great.” They trust you. They know you don’t try to weasel them. They don’t feel the need to go around and necessarily shop around. “Hey, I know you always treat me well, you’re always honest with me, so I’m going to do that with you.”

When I was researching this and looking around at some different things, I noticed something that was from the Harvard Business Review and they’ve always got some good stuff over there, those folks at Harvard. Here’s a quote that I had found. “Call the action a price increase, not a price adjustment, not a price change or any other euphemisms. While this might seem like a small thing, euphemistic messages can cause serious harm, fraying the relationship with your loyal customers.” And I thought that lined up right with the previous note that I had made when I had found that I said, that’s exactly what I’m saying is that being transparent, being honest, don’t try to weasel it around. Just say it.

Customers are aware of economic conditions. They know what’s going on in the world. They buy gas and they know the price has gone up. They’ve seen their electrical bill go up, they’ve seen other goods that they buy go up, they know prices are going up. So be honest, be transparent, let them know what’s really going on, increase your prices and they’re going to get it. And most of them are going to accept it and we’ll talk a bit more about why some of them will accept it more than others.

And then the last is just kind of the same thing, but it’s a note that I put here and it’s in the notes from the podcast, but just use clear language. If you need to increase your prices, just say “the price has gone up a hundred bucks.” Just say “the price per shirt has gone up 10%, which is 50 cents or $5”, whatever the number is, just be transparent with that. Don’t try to say it in a weird way, so maybe they don’t notice. That might seem like a good smart way to get around things, but you’re dancing around dishonesty.

Just try to be pretty clear, “Hey, this package has gone up 10%. That means it’s an extra $50, it’s an extra $500 for you. And that’s what this price increase looks like. And I’m also looking to hold onto that price increase and keep that stable for all of next year. That’s my goal for this. So I’m just looking to do one in price increase for the next year and that’s it.” So there you go. Transparent, simple, clear. Just let them know what’s going on. Don’t dance around words too much.

All right, so now when you want to increase prices, customer satisfaction is number one. You almost need to, if you could go back in time and satisfy customers more, then it would be easier to go through and increase your prices. If you can’t, well, you can’t go back in time. If you can, you don’t even need to listen to this podcast. You should be doing other things.

But since you can’t go back in time, you want to go ahead and make sure that you’re doing things to satisfy customers. So maybe you want to increase prices, but you are not getting good reviews, you’re getting lots of complaints. Shore that stuff up first. Tighten that up first. Get happy customers. That’s number one. It’s going to make price increases very valuable for you and not a big deal for your customers. And it’s quite simple. You messed up on order A, you messed up on order B, you messed up on order C, order D increased your price. To me that just clearly, I just want to go try to potentially shop for somebody else, no matter what I’m buying. It doesn’t have to be the customization industry. It could be anything, right? It could be getting your car detailed, lawn service, anything.

If somebody’s not doing very well and then they increase their price, why stick with them? Maybe I can get a better price. I don’t know. So satisfied customers are loyal. If they feel valued, if they’re happy with the product and you say, “Hey, price has gone up 10%”, they’ll probably be just fine. Most of them will be. It’s happened all over the world. It happens everywhere every day. Now, some customers are highly price sensitive. We all have those, right? Every day they consider and they are concerned about price sensitivity. So identify them, consider who they are, what are they like? Are they a pain in the butt? Are they really easy to deal with? Very low maintenance. So what I would say is this, if you have a couple of price sensitive customers, maybe one of them is super low maintenance, right? They are some big corporate company, they send you an invoice or they send you a request in an email once a month, you fulfill that.

They pay on time, they never complain, they never do anything. They basically just send you money and you just send them things and that’s the end of the transaction every time. And you know they’re super price sensitive because they’re a big corporation, right? So if you increase prices, that person has to go up to their boss and their boss and get an approval and it’s a bunch of extra work and they’re probably going to end up having to shop you, right? Maybe you can delay the price update for those, right? You understand that customer, it’s not that big of a deal. And they are particularly low maintenance. So you can afford to go with a lower margin. Flip side, super price sensitive customer, very annoying, always complaining, always returns stuff and tells you to remake it. “Oh, this was a little crooked. Look at this piece, it’s chipped off” and they’re constantly complaining about stuff and you’re always having to remake things and fix things and put extra work into it.

You have to increase their price. You can’t afford to go lower margin on that type of customer. Increase the price, and they may be price sensitive and be bothered by that. And you just have to be transparent and honest and upfront with them. If they really do like you and they’re just a little bit of a pain in the neck, they’ll stick around. If they are going to leave you over that 10% price increase, they were inches away from leaving you anyway, right? So just understand those customers, those price sensitive ones, and also understand how to have a good conversation with them too, as mentioned before.

Another one is just kind of customer’s lifetime value when we’re talking about things. And if you have a customer who needs to stay at a tighter margin, but they’re reasonable to deal with, they don’t have to be the super low maintenance, but they’re reasonable to deal with, then well, how much are they worth over a year? Right? Okay, well this customer’s worth over one year, three years, five years. You look at that margin over time, I really feel I can stick it out with this customer another year without having to change things. And you can get other creative ways. Maybe you can offer them a different blank or a smaller prints or a different resolution to save yourself a money on ink or blanks, and maybe they’ll be okay with that too. So you can consider other ways for that, but consider the lifetime value of these customers.

So one of the last things here is just some additional pricing strategies. So for one, just try to sell up, target lucrative markets. If you are selling to a bottom tier price customer where they can’t afford much more, how can you move up? Can you go to a more prestigious type of business, right? If you’re working with one type of business that they operate on really low margins and they can’t afford to purchase expensive things, well, can you go up? Can you try to go to, if you sell to maybe some diners with really low pricing, can you try to sell to restaurant higher end restaurants, fine dining? Is there a potential you could do uniforms for them? So think about that.

Offer bulk discounts as another one. So offer to your customers, Hey, I have this price increase, but normally you order this much every month or every other month. If we can double those orders and maybe reduce the frequency, that’ll bring my costs down. So instead of doing a hundred items a month, we do 200 every other month. Maybe that’s a way for you to bring your costs down so you can order things more in bulk, whatever it might be, and help reduce their price.

And next is just offer a commitment. Hey, we’ve been doing this month to month for a while. Maybe I can keep your pricing the same if we can talk about doing a 12-month contract, so we know that every month I’m going to bill you this automatically, I’m going to deliver this item or these set of items automatically as well, and we’re going to do that for 12 months and we could review that again at the end of next year. So that’s a great way, and that’s very typical across the board for pricing everywhere is a long-term commitment means you could better plan out your future. There’s not a question of income and you can afford a little bit less of a margin.

The next one is creating product bundles. This one is simple. You should do this anyway, even if you’re not increasing pricing. This is just something you should do. People call up for shirts or they call up for signage for their store. “Hey, I also sell A, B, C products too, by the way. If you buy all of them, I have this one price for you. It’s a great deal. You actually save X percent. The pricing of the T-shirts is this, but if you buy shirts and hats and signs for the front of your shop every season, you go ahead and get this great deal.” And this just works great for upselling, increasing revenue in general.

And the last bit here is selective price hikes. So maybe you have a low cost item that brings people in the door consistently. It is a particular shirt with a print that you offer. Maybe you’re doing custom mugs and it’s your cheapest, simplest mug with a small logo. Whatever it is, this is like a low price leader for you. And maybe the margins tightened up a bit, but you don’t want to increase prices yet because gosh, so many people call you about that low price item and you upsell many of them. Maybe 75% of those people you end up selling more things to, or you don’t even sell that one. You consistently upgrade them to the better mug, like I’m drinking out of this red mug here. Maybe this is a dollar more than the white one. And you sell a bunch of those colored ones, right?

So you can potentially keep your low price item low or not increase it or increase it very little. And then your upsell items increase a bit more. So people walk in the door looking for item A, you talk to them about the benefits of items B and C, which are two upgrades, which you’ve increased the price of more than you have product A, and you know that 70% of those people are going to buy that upsell and you’re doing great. Further, it could just be certain equipment you have maybe embroidery. If you do a bunch of embroidery, you can afford to leave that the same without increasing those prices, but potentially stuff that involves ink, maybe your ink pricing went up and you have to do there. Or maybe your materials for doing vinyl printing and cutting has all been pretty stable, but T-shirt’s prices have gone up. So anything that’s a T-shirt, you maybe you need to increase the price a little bit. But anything that’s stickers, signs, all that, you don’t have to.

So be selective about that. You don’t have to necessarily increase everything. When you can keep it simple and just all prices are up 20%. That’s nice because you literally know what to increase everything. But sometimes that’s not the best strategy to go with. Really depends on your business and how complicated it is.

Now is just a few things about handling customer objections, right? So for one, you need to address objections with confidence. “I understand that prices have gone up in your business and this is just another price that’s gone up. I’m feeling the same thing. The cost of various things in my business have gone up. Margins are tighter everywhere, but I’m still going to deliver the great products. And in fact, what I’ve done to help with these price increases, I’m also offering this as a better service. I’ve tightened up my production so I actually can deliver things a couple of days faster for you now. I’m using a better quality garment. So I went away from the really cheap stuff that was the quality of that was reducing and the pricing was going up and I went to a little level up. So even though the price is a bit more for you, you’re actually getting a better product in the end.”

All of these different things you could do that, you go in it with great confidence, you address these things head-on and you’re not constantly apologizing to them. You shouldn’t be apologizing for trying to operate your business. You should be going confident and straightforward and just letting them know the facts, speaking simply, speaking with confidence, being very transparent and most of your customers will completely be okay with that.

One of the things you could do in handling customer objections is collaborating on responses. Actually brainstorm with your team if you have people that work with you, other small business owners that you collaborate with, people online. Here at ColDesi, we have owner groups of people who own businesses. And I love it when people go on there and they collaborate like this. These are the folks that consistently are successful. The people who collaborate, ask questions, study rather than the ones who just complain all the time, right? If you’re just complaining, you’re not getting anywhere, all you’re doing is venting. Don’t vent. I mean vent in businesses on occasion. Vent with your friends, right? Vent with your family maybe.

But when it comes to business, if you have other business owners around you talk to them, “Hey, I’m increasing my prices. What did you do? How did you tell your customers? How did they respond? What did you answer? When you answered that did it work? When it didn’t work, what did you say that when it didn’t work? Why do you think that was?” Have these conversations and share this with other business owners. Let them know what you’ve learned. Get some information from them. Write all this stuff down and physically kind of put down on a document. “These are the different things I would say. These are objections I expect to hear. This is how I can respond to them.” You’re building out a sales document for yourself, and you could do this in Microsoft Word, in a notepad, it doesn’t matter, but write all this stuff down this way when you get on the phone and a customer that’s maybe very aggressive is hitting you hard with an objection, you’ve got some answers right there ready to go, and you can speak confidently, transparently, quickly, all that.

And then the last on this is actually practicing that delivery. So you know what the objections are going to be, potentially. You’ve got some answers for them. Practice them. Do some role play with friends and family, other business owners. Make it fun. Do it over some coffee. You can make it a little bit of a joke, you can exaggerate a bit, but have fun. If somebody even knows some of your customers intimately, if they actually know this customer, both of you and you think you know how they would react, have that person role play being them. I mean, it can turn into definitely a fun team building thing for your business or a group of people, other CEOs or business owners that you work with. And it will actually help you when you practice this to do it in real life.

All right, so that wraps things up here on the podcast and really kind of leave it with the conclusion. When you control the prices of the business, you’re empowered. You’re the one in charge. This is your business. You are the one that’s making the decision. You control how much income you make, you control your success, how likely it is for you to stay in business, how likely it is to achieve your dreams, dreams grow to your business, to the size you want. You’re in control of all these things. Increasing your prices, being profitable, going after your dreams. That doesn’t make you greedy. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to go out of business because your prices went up.

All of these things are very alarmist. Those are fear things going off in your head. “What if I lose every customer? What if people think that I’m greedy? What if, what if, what if?” Right? All these ifs are just terrible for your business and they’re really bad for price increases because they will hit people super hard and fast where they won’t do anything. They’ll just delay it and delay it. And then they get to a point where there’s not enough money in the bank to keep going forward, or the business is just not profitable enough to motivate you. And you start saying, “I’m working 70 hours a week and I can’t even pay my bills.” So you don’t want to get to that point.

So if you’re a new business, great, because you can learn this lesson early. If you’re an existing business and you realize it is time to increase prices, go back through this stuff. Build out a plan and figure out what you can increase, how much of a change it’ll make in your margin over time. And then if you’re already at a point where you feel like you’re struggling a bit, I mean, go back and look at all of these numbers. Look at your customers, go back and listen to other podcasts and figure out the spots where you can increase your prices. You could be more successful and ultimately achieve the dream that you wanted when you started and started to grow this business.

So thank you for listening. My name is Marc Vila. I’m here at ColDesi. I’m the director of marketing at ColDesi. So go to ColDesi.com. If you haven’t been there before, you’re not familiar with who we are, you can check out all the different product lines we have and we have a ton more episodes. We’re nearing 200 as I’m recording this episode right here. So there’s a ton of information that goes back years, and some of those episodes that are years old are still super valuable information. So thank you very much for listening and have a good business.

 

 

When it comes to growing your customization business we often talk about ‘finding a niche.’ What is a product / customer that you can focus on? This could be new moms, or local small businesses or tourists. However, you will find a point where growing that business becomes harder. This is why you will find a candle company that starts selling soaps, or why Bath and Body works sells 99 different ways to make your house smell good.

Diversifying your product lines is a great way to level up your business and make more money.

1. You can sell to current customers
2. You can find a new customer base
3. You can become more stable (as one product line slows down, another might grow)

Types of business diversification

• Product diversification: you primarily sell clothing but you want to expand into other items that will create value for your customer like home goods and accessories
• Market diversification: you have a local business and start selling online or you open a new location across town
• Industry diversification: take you knowledge to a different industry or target a new niche
• Service diversification: you may only offer finished products, but may want to start doing training on how to make those products
• Merge or Acquire: a business that has a different product, service, market or industry

Why you would want to diversify:

• Want more revenue
• Core business is in decline or getting saturated.
• Less economic risk
• Increase competitiveness – offer a wider range of products to attract new customers and reach new markets that competitors can’t or don’t

Examples:

• Amazon used to be an online bookseller, then moved on to sell video games and other multi-media and before long, they sold computer electronics, software, homeware, toys, and more
• Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy in the 90’s and launched the iPod and iTunes software and a few years later the iPhone

Steps to Diversify:

• Do your research – have your customers suggested diversifying? Are they asking for more products or services? What can you do better than your competitors in your current or new markets? What type of diversification would suit your business?
• Assess your risks – while diversifying can help generate sales and increase your market share, you have to find a crucial balance between finding the time and resources to focus on the new venture without neglecting your core business. Diversifying with similar products in a familiar market may carry less risk than developing a brand new product for an unknown market, but both would create a safety net which will allow you to recover if one of your products or services fails.
• Audit your resources – what do you have and what do you need to invest in
• Plan – in many ways it is like starting a new business. You will need to understand your new market, your customers, competitors, and the new dynamics just as you would for any new business

What does your equipment do?

• You have an embroidery machine.
  1. Do you sell hats?
  2. Patches?
  3. Uniforms?
• You have a DigitalHeat FX printer?
  1. Ever used hard surface paper?
  2. Printed on cardstock?

What adjacent equipment you can add?

• If you have a a sublimation printer, adding a hat press is an easy upgrade
• If you do digitalheat fx, might be good to ad a sub printer or a cutter
• If you do embroidery, going to a cutter and press.

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. My name is Mark Vila. And today we’re here to talk about diversifying your business with Holly Wood. And the reason for this podcast today and the inspiration behind it is when you’re growing your customization business, we talk about things like finding a niche. We talk about what kind of customer should you focus on. It could be new moms or tourists or small businesses. And when you eventually find yourself getting to points where it’s harder to grow, it’s harder to expand, and a little bit of fear of where to start too. So we brought in Holly Wood who’s an expert on helping people start and grow their businesses.

So I’ll give you a brief introduction, Holly. Holly has been kind of a crafter, kind of side hustle type of a business for over a decade now. And then works over here at ColDesi and been with ColDesi about six or seven years. And then is recently the product manager of things like embroidery, white toner printers, and some other products as well. How did I hit that?

Holly Wood:
That was good.

Marc Vila:
Okay, because the first time we recorded this podcast, I got it wrong.

Holly Wood:
No, it’s all right.

Marc Vila:
So this is take two.

Holly Wood:
Take two.

Marc Vila:
The first time we had a huge technical difficulty, but I think that’s at the benefit of you, the listener out there because we’ve gone through this before. We’ve talked it through and we realized some things that we missed as well. So some really great information coming. And let’s go ahead and talk about when you were doing your research on this podcast, Holly, talk a little bit about what we mean by diversifying your business.

Holly Wood:
There’s a couple of different ways of diversion and maybe we can do the five different types. And then we can kind of go back and define each one.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Yeah.

Holly Wood:
Would you like that?

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that sounds good.

Holly Wood:
So the different types would be product diversion, market diversion, industry diversion. I’m saying diversion.

Marc Vila:
You’re just saying diversion. What word do you want to say instead?

Holly Wood:
Diversification.

Marc Vila:
Okay, good. All right. So product diversification.

Marc Vila:
Market diversification.

Holly Wood:
Industry diversification, service diversification, and then maybe a merger or an acquisition.

Marc Vila:
And the reason that somebody would want to do these things is really going to be because you’ve started your business. And this could be if you haven’t started your business yet, this is something that you should keep in mind. Or if you’re already in business, then this is huge for you. But you started your business and you’re working in some sort of a sector with some sort of a customer because you talk to folks all the time and they’ll say stuff like, “I’m a member of local moms’ group and I want to do stuff with bibs and custom bags and things that go on strollers.” And they have this great audience and they’re busy and they start making a good amount of money. And then you typically will reach a plateau in that market. You’ll say, “Listen, I’ve kind of feel like I’ve reached and have sold as much as I’m going to sell to these mom groups and their friends and their friends or friends and I have to figure out how to grow the business.” And then that’s why you kind of get into diversifying your business.

Holly Wood:
Right, because you might want to pick up other customers, but you don’t want to lose the customers that you already have. All that is to keep us more stable, right?

Marc Vila:
Right, right, right. And that’s part of this too is part of it is growth because you’d like to make more money. You’d like to grow your business, you would like to have new technology in your business. And part of it’s stability too. You find that you do wedding type of stuff. And it’s crazy busy this time of the year. When we’re filming this right now, it’s wedding season. Come a few months from now, wedding season’s really slow. So then your business would be slow during that point in time. So diversifying can help.

Holly Wood:
Speaking of, congratulations on yours.

Marc Vila:
Oh, thanks very much. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Just been a few weeks now.

Holly Wood:
I know.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, fresh.

Holly Wood:
Yeah, no, but I agree with you. There’s different times like sports seasons and then we’re getting into maybe the holiday season or whatever. I mean, you have different products, which is a really nice to bring us right into that for the product. And I feel like that’s maybe one of the easiest things to do is maybe you are already selling clothing, but you want to expand into home goods or something like that. So just along those same lines of that same customer base. But we’re just going to offer more things for them.

Marc Vila:
Right. Offer more things. And this is something that you see all the time in day-to-day life if you buy products from certain companies. So if somebody buys skincare products for a company, they’re going to have a new product line come up consistently. They have a face cream. They’re going to come up with an elbow cream. They just add things down the line. And it’s why their favorite coffee shop might start selling food at some point in time. It’s why your favorite donut shop might start selling bagels. So you diversify your products and then your current customer base may just buy more stuff or they buy stuff as a season changes or whatever that might be. Right.

Holly Wood:
And it might be as easy as they’re already asking for it.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Holly Wood:
Oh, I’m a coffee shop. You want bagels? I’ll start carrying bagels.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Holly Wood:
You want ice cream? I’ll start carrying ice cream.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, no, that’s fantastic. And an example to consider in this would be if you currently are just selling t-shirts, that’s mainly what you’re selling and you know have a group of customers that they could potentially want more products. And we could talk about how to do research and things like that later on. But more so it would be, well offer hats, offer signs, offer stickers. You can offer all these other things that go to the same customers.

Holly Wood:
And the cool part is most of your equipment, whether that’s embroidery, white toner printer, direct to film, a lot of those are already equipped to do lots of other things.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Holly Wood:
You just have to get the right product for the customer.

Marc Vila:
Right. And just learn how to do it or whatever that might be. So it’s out there. So now we can move into the next one, which you said was market diversification.

Holly Wood:
And that would be if I’m a local business, say. It would be selling to a different market. So maybe I take my market and I start selling it online, or maybe I go to another location across town. So basically just opening up my business to a different sector of the market, if that makes sense.

Marc Vila:
Right. And when we’re speaking about market, in this sense we’re talking about either a physical or a virtual place.

Holly Wood:
Correct.

Marc Vila:
So if you’re selling on Etsy, you should maybe think about creating a Facebook group that you can sell on Facebook. If you’re selling just in a particular area of town and maybe you have a handful of schools you work with or a handful of clubs you work with, expand to a different area of town.

Holly Wood:
Or even online, because online’s huge. If you have a successful store, why aren’t you selling online? I know there’s some things that you have to get set up in the background, but man, it’s a huge opportunity. People already like your stuff.

Marc Vila:
So you already have customers and it’s potential that your customers may not always be able to come to your store or they want to refer to their friends and family that may be out of town. So going from in-person to virtual could be a market diversification too. And I think that from the simplest standpoint, a good portion of people are selling small businesses. They’re usually selling within a certain set of zip codes or cities or even within just one zip code. And a simple way is really just to figure out how can you get one step further out? How can you get either into the next city or the next area of town? Here in Tampa Bay where we are, there’s dozens and dozens of little areas of town. There’s Carrollwood. And what do we call this area of town where we are? Do you know what name?

Holly Wood:
I usually say South Tampa.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, south Tampa. But even south Tampa, has a bunch of little areas in it.

Holly Wood:
Neighborhoods.

Marc Vila:
Neighborhoods.

Holly Wood:
Neighborhoods within.

Marc Vila:
Neighborhoods. And so you may be just selling within a couple of neighborhoods and it could be that you live in the suburbs and these are very named communities. So if you’re selling to a lot of people in one community, you could look to expand to another, join clubs in those areas, reach out to friends in those areas, advertise. You could advertise in either local print or just update your Facebook page or Google business profile and name the different areas. So here in Tampa we have Carrollwood and Town and Country and South Tampa as different areas.

Holly Wood:
Westchase.

Marc Vila:
Westchase. These are all in Tampa, but they’re little neighborhoods within Tampa that each one, I don’t know, probably has a million people in it or something. They’re actually huge.

Holly Wood:
But they kind of stay in your neighborhood though because those three miles to get outside of it may take you 15 to 20 minutes to drive. So maybe there’s other markets like that, that are, you know…

Marc Vila:
That are actually really close by. So you update your profile and list neighborhoods that you want to expand to, because this way when folks go to search online, they’ll find you. And also you can attend events, join clubs within those neighborhoods as well. So we’ve got product diversification and market diversification. And what’s next on our list?

Holly Wood:
Next one is industry. And I think the way we best described this last week was say you are marketing to a type of person that would like the same products. So say we’re already working with lawyers, then we have an embroidery machine and we’re doing their left chest and logos. But why not start servicing doctors too? Because a lot of those uniforms, the things that they like, the hats, the embroidery, a lot of those things are the same, but they’re in different industries.

Marc Vila:
And on the Custom Apparel Startups, I believe it was the last episode or the one before, Sarah Isom was on here and we talked about some things within marketing and one of the examples we used was somebody could be selling to doctor office, dentist office, and also golf clubs, like golf organizations. And how this works with the industry diversification is these are three different industries. Doctor and dentist could be considered very, very close. They both wear white coats and people wear scrubs. And having embroidered names or printed names or logos is typically important. It gives some authority when you see your doctor or dentist come in and it says their name or their company logo. It makes patients feel comfortable. Very classy. But at the same time, the golf clubs and organizations could be very, very related to that. You’re probably dealing with a very similar type of person because doctor, dentist, they’re going to typically dress nice. Golf is…

Holly Wood:
They might play golf.

Marc Vila:
They might play golf and they may very well may play golf. And in addition to that, it’s something that golf is known. When you play basketball, you wear shorts and a T-shirt. So that would be a great market if you’re going to sell shorts and T-shirts. But if you’re selling button-ups and golf shirts, polo shirts, things like that, those are going to be the same things that doctors and dentists wear. So it’s a very similar product you’re making for a different industry that’s very, very related. So I’d encourage you to look at what your customer base looks like now.

Holly Wood:
Another great example would be dance and cheer.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, dance and cheer. Ice skating. Ice skating. Yeah.

Holly Wood:
I forgot. We had another one too. But just same concept.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, they’re very, very similar to each other. So look at the industry that you work in now. And many folks will say, “Well, I don’t work in one industry. I work in a bunch of different little industries.” So I would look at some of your big customers or if you have two or three big customers that are in one industry, like you said, dance, maybe there’s a few dance studios that you make bags for and t-shirts for the parents and some other things like that. Well, you could say, “I have three customers that are like this. I wonder if I can find three more customers in a different industry.” So maybe ice skating. Ice skating is easy because they all go to very specific places, just like dance studios are very specific places. And you can go there and say, “Hey, here’s stuff that I make for a local dance. I can do similarly for ice skating.”

Holly Wood:
You’re probably doing parent gear too, with the kids. It’s kind of the same concept.

Marc Vila:
So it’s different. It’s maybe different. And the dance, maybe they don’t want anything warm, but in ice skating they do. So you’ll adjust the type of apparel, but the decorating, the style, and just the fact that dance and skate moms are just willing to spend a ton of money on their kids’ apparel. So keep it going. Okay, great. So what’s the next one that you’ve got there?

Holly Wood:
Service diversification. So say you offer finished products, but now you want to start maybe a training class or where people pay you for training. Or some of our other examples were maybe we had a bakery where people come in, but then we start offering delivery service. I can’t remember some of my other ideas.

Marc Vila:
You had mentioned about, was it your husband started doing or was thinking of doing something?

Holly Wood:
Yeah, so my husband, he’s a mortgage broker. He owns his own mortgage company and he goes out and teaches. He specialize in renovation financing. So he teaches his program to the realtors associations. So I would like for him to capitalize that and try to put that into a class where he can put it online and people can pay for it.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Holly Wood:
But he also does mortgages. So that’s him diversifying, basically not having all your eggs in one basket, right?

Marc Vila:
Yeah. One could say that selling a mortgage is offering a service. But separate from that there is a good that’s being given at the end, like money or a house. That is part of that transaction. And the service side of it is actually just the knowledge.

Holly Wood:
That he’s training the realtors on how to help them serve the program.

Marc Vila:
So I think that if you’re in the customization business where you do t-shirts or signs or anything like that, one of the ways you can use your knowledge is through brand consulting, right? That’s one. So what I see often here-

Holly Wood:
Oh yeah. Logos.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I look at support tickets. And I look at what comes through in ColDesi graphics, which is our graphics department where you can order custom graphics. So many times, just frankly, I’ll see terrible logos that they’re very, very outdated. They don’t look nice, they don’t make sense, they’re hard to read. And you as the customization business owner should recognize that. If you’re skilled, you would recognize, gosh, this logo just isn’t nice. You can offer as a service to do some brand identity improvements for your customers. So say, “Hey, I can take your logo and I can put it on a shirt for you. I’m happy to do it. It’s going to cost you X amount of dollars a piece. However, I do offer a level up service if you really want to kick it up a notch.” And you can show examples of others that you’ve done before and after.

This is a shirt before and after that it did for another customer and say, “So I offer a package.” It’s whatever amount of dollars, $500, a thousand dollars, whatever you think it’s worth for the time. “And we’ll go through and we’ll look at all of your logos. We’ll look at your colors and we’re going to redefine your brand. Come up with a new logo, new branding concept.” And even include in that you can offer other services and design letterhead, envelopes, thank you cards, business cards. These are all things you could do. And you don’t necessarily have to own the equipment.

Holly Wood:
Or you don’t even have to do it either. Places like ColDesi Graphics, we’ve got tons of logos made there.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Holly Wood:
So you could have someone else do it, but kind of pass through. So you look like a rockstar, but you didn’t actually do it.

Marc Vila:
You’re just offering the service. So you’re offering the service of your expertise of being somebody who knows about customizing things and how things should look great. And you use a service like ColDesi Graphics. You use services like online print services to actually order anything printed, if you want to get them pens or envelopes or something of that effect. And this whole package that you offer them, you can include finished goods or it’s just the consulting side of it. And there are just so many businesses out there that are going to come to you with a bad graphic or a bad logo that you can actually offer a service.

Holly Wood:
They just don’t know any better.

Marc Vila:
They don’t know any better. Or they don’t think about it, right?

Holly Wood:
Yeah. Because somebody did this for them 20 years ago and that’s all they’ve been using and they don’t realize that it’s outdated. And they could…

Marc Vila:
Mortgage companies, plumbers, electricians, landscaping, even dance studios and things like that. If they don’t spend some time updating their branding. And pick any, if you want to try to sell this to your customers a little bit, pick any major brand that they can think of. I mean, say, “Name the first brand that pops into top of your head.” Right?

Holly Wood:
Doritos is one for me.

Marc Vila:
Doritos, right? Google Doritos logos over time.

Holly Wood:
Back in the eighties, our logo’s different. Remember?

Marc Vila:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Holly Wood:
It was just orange and yellow.

Marc Vila:
And I was thinking of Coca-Cola was one. They’ve had tons. I mean every brand from Pizza Hut and Marlboro cigarettes, I mean every single major brand will have logo changes over time. And that’s to stay modern, to stay fresh and let their customers know, hey, we’re still the same company we’ve been, but we’re also evolving to be better and be with modern time. So there’s plenty of research you could do in how to sell that. One more service I just wanted to mention is if you do something like printing signs or graphics or anything like that, you can offer the service of helping them design their space.

Holly Wood:
Or installing. We talked about that too. That’s a great thing. Hey, I made this for you. I made this car app for you. I can also install it.

Marc Vila:
So some businesses will just… A friend of mine has a business and he just prints the signs and he does a lot of photos that go on walls in doctors and dentists.

Holly Wood:
It’s hard to install.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Exactly.

Holly Wood:
Sometimes.

Marc Vila:
And he just sells the product, right? He sells it. And these places have a facilities person that will install it and he just provides that and they figure out how to install it, which is fine. But an additional level up on his service would be, “Hey, what I can do is I can help you design it.” Service that you pay for. Make it, the physical product you sell. Secondary service, do the installation for you. So you have two options or three options even. It’s a hundred bucks for the sign. It’s a hundred bucks for the consultation. And then we’ll pick the signs and we’ll figure out how many you want. And then there’s upsell opportunities. And then the installation would be this. And you can offer your customers potentially three packages, the 200, 500, 900 for the three of these packages.

Holly Wood:
In some cases I would think the installation would even be the most expensive because it’s labor.

Marc Vila:
Absolutely. And again, these are all things you don’t necessarily have to do yourself. You can find somebody who’s good at doing that stuff, a contractor that you can pay and of course markup. Okay, great. So we have one more, which this one I find to be the most interesting. So tell us about this last one.

Holly Wood:
Just merge or acquire another business. So we had chatted about maybe you have a business and you either look at a business that’s maybe about to go out of business or retire. Let’s say they’re going to retire. And you may want to scoop them up. Maybe they offer the same products as you, or they may offer different products, but both of you are strong and you can come together to diversify yourself.

Marc Vila:
And I think that’s the best opportunity for a small business owner to really fast jump up, potentially gain equipment, customer base, reputation, all of these things.

Holly Wood:
When we did it here at ColDesi, I think it was a great example of Belquette. They are amazing engineers. But weren’t so good at the sales and marketing side. And we are excellent in our platforms across the internet and we’re able to reach a lot of people. So when we came together, it was the best of both worlds.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. And so that was a great one of merging where the folks at Belquette Technologies, they had made direct to garment printers before that were just cutting edge. And we were a company that was great at selling and training and supporting products. And the owners of that company really just wanted to engineer. That’s what they loved. So they-

Holly Wood:
They didn’t like that part of it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. They didn’t like that as much. That wasn’t their favorite thing to do. Their favorite thing to do was engineering and building and designing. So now they’re here at ColDesi engineering things like the vacuum platen for the G4 direct to garment printer. Just industry changing technology.

So a couple quick examples of that would be, you mentioned somebody retiring. So what I would say is in your area, if there are similar businesses as yours that have been around for a really long time, I would probably want to meet those folks. And if you walk in there and it’s a couple old timers that run a print shop and you just say, “Hey, I’ve got an embroidery business. I’m kind of a startup, but I’ve been growing and I don’t know if we could ever partner together or if you guys have any sort of retirement plan or anything like that.” But I’d be just open to the conversation of what if in the future maybe something could happen with this relationship where potentially they could sell you the business.
Or “You know what, it’d be great. We would love to retire, but not give up the business yet. What if you did all the work and we worked out some sort of an arrangement where we still get some money.”

And a friend of mine did that with a roofing industry. He didn’t have the cash in the bank to buy a business and he wasn’t going to take out a loan of that size to buy a business. But he made a deal with the owner of this company. And just over the course of time, they worked on a payment plan and they came to an arrangement that they were both happy. And now that was, gosh, that was 10 or 15 years ago.

Holly Wood:
And he was going to retire eventually, so he just kind of…

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that guy’s now retired. He’s fully retired. And my friend owns the business. And it was just a conversation. The guy said, “I’m thinking about closing this business one day.” And he said, “Well, what if I could buy it somehow? I don’t have any money though.” But I mean that’s a conversation that you have. So a look to potentially merge with businesses that are local that they don’t offer embroidery or you do.

Holly Wood:
Or maybe a sign business across town.

Marc Vila:
A sign business.

Holly Wood:
They’re getting requests for other types of printing and you’re getting requests for a lot of signage. Maybe find that person. Could be a young business that you just maybe want to merge with and merge your strengths.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, merge your strengths together. And also they may find that they do signs and trophies and their business has been slowing down. Online’s been killing us. Business has been slow. And you could say, “Listen, I am doing T-shirts and I can’t keep up. I’m wondering if there’s some sort of partnership we could build together.” And that could really grow your business. You can help each other. Now all of a sudden you’re selling the signs and awards to your T-shirt customers because you’re doing T-shirts for the dance as an example. And then they like to give out some sort of awards to all the kids at the end of the year.

Holly Wood:
And as you mentioned earlier, it could be cyclical. So the signs and awards may pick up at a different time of the year where your T-shirts may hit a different time as well.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s all great.

Holly Wood:
But all that gains more customers for each.

Marc Vila:
And now we’ve got maybe about five more minutes that we’re going to put into the podcast. So I’d like to just talk about real quick the steps to diversifying your business so we can kind of spend a minute on each. And then if you go to CustomApparelStartups.com and you find this episode on how to diversify your business with Holly Wood, then you’ll read a little bit more that we’ll put in there. So what are the four steps that you outlined for us?

Holly Wood:
I have do your research, assess your risk, audit your resources, and then plan.

Marc Vila:
Okay.

Holly Wood:
So under research, my notes here, just a few questions. Have your customers suggested diversifying? Are they asking for more products or services? What can you do better than your competitors in a current or new market? And what type of diversification would suit your business?

Marc Vila:
Okay. Yeah, that’s excellent. What I love are the first one you said, have your customers suggested something? You should sell hats. Why don’t you sell hats now? I mean, it could be various reasons. You don’t know how to do it. You don’t have the equipment. You tried before and failed. But if your customers are asking you to diversify, like, “Hey, we want hats too.” You’ve got an opportunity, so jump on it, learn how to do it, purchase a hat heat press, figure out how to get it done on your embroidery machine if you haven’t done it before. But listen to your customers because they will ask you for what they want you to diversify in. And then the other is similarly is you can just ask them. You can survey, do an email survey.

Holly Wood:
Yeah, that’s a great way to do it.

Marc Vila:
After a sale, say, “Hey, what other products might you buy?” And I’m just a fan of just being straight up honest about it. Just, “Hey, I’m thinking about diversifying my business. Not sure what else I want to bring on next. I’ve got a handful of ideas. Could you just take this. On this piece of paper, just check the ones you might be interested if I offered in the future.” And then if you can get 20 people to fill that out and you look at it and you’re like, gosh, 17 of these people said hats. I mean, you’ve got it.

Holly Wood:
I need to figure that out.

Marc Vila:
And then I think you also said what diversification suits your business. That’s a great one too. If you do shirts, hats obviously seems to go well together with that. I don’t know if I would go from shirts to awards. It might not, unless of course you’re in some sort of industry where shirts and awards are together a lot.

Holly Wood:
Like you just said, yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. So just figure out and just do your research by asking your customers, looking at your customer base, surveying people and figure out what else just seems to go well with your customer base. Now you said assessing your risks.

Holly Wood:
Which goes right into what you said about maybe you don’t want to go into trophies. Because diversifying can help generate your sales and increase your market, but you have to find the balance of that new market or diversification and not losing focus on what we’re already doing good. So you have to be careful with that. And then it may carry less risk, as we said, just doing T-shirts, then we’re going to go to hats or something like that versus going to a whole nother sector of awards or signs or something that’s completely different. So you just have to figure out what is the best risk, like you said. Maybe what people are asking for or-

Marc Vila:
Yeah. What people are asking for-

Holly Wood:
What the need is.

Marc Vila:
… is super low risk. If you have a white toner printer and you’re not doing anything with hard surfaces like mugs or ceramic or glass, metal signs, it’s pretty low risk to get some paper that does that. A hundred bucks or so. Get some product, some wooden signs that are blanks and make some for your customers if that fits your market. And that’s just reasonably low risk compared to immediately jumping into a new piece of technology or trying to get into a market that’s significantly different than what you do. That’s much higher risk, not only in the amount of money you’ll invest, but in time, effort, percentage of failure. If you have current customers and you just kind of try something new that they might buy, very low risk. You ask a bunch of people, you try to sell it, it works, you made money. It doesn’t work, you don’t do it anymore, and you’re not out that much.

Holly Wood:
Right. Right. It’s just something that didn’t work.

Marc Vila:
And then you said, audit your resources, which-

Holly Wood:
That one’s pretty easy.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Holly Wood:
What do you have now and what do you need to invest?

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Holly Wood:
Do I need to borrow money or do I have enough in the bank, or am I just adding a simple hat press to make hats and I already have it? That’s pretty easy.

Marc Vila:
And the resources would also be time. So maybe you don’t have a surplus of money yet, but you do have a bit of a surplus of time. So how can you grow your business? Mentioning adding hats. Well, I’ve done embroidery. I’ve only done shirts. I tried hats a little bit. I failed. I broke needles, so I gave up. Well, you have a surplus of time. Embroidery machines absolutely embroider hats. So you get on the phone with ColDesi, you figure out what you’re doing wrong. You watch some videos, you practice a bunch, buy some hats. It’s low risk to buy a couple dozen hats. And you spend that time, the resource that you have of time to learn how to do it. And now you have a new product.

Holly Wood:
And maybe that was back right before when you just started embroidering and everything was new. And now A, I know how to embroider, so now the hats aren’t going to be as big of a deal.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s excellent. And then the last one is just a plan, which I think is just essential. It doesn’t need to be formal. You don’t have to Google search how to write a business plan for adding a new product. You just kind of write out, I’m going to learn how to do hats first. How am I going to do that? I’m going to contact ColDesi. I’m going to go through my training videos. I’m going to buy hats to practice on. I’m going to get hats. I’m going to get my logos digitized for hats on purpose, and I’m going to go through that. Then I’m going to go and start talking to my customers about hats. I’m going to provide some free samples. Or maybe before that, you would build out a pricing sheet and you just kind of step by step say what you’re going to do. How are you going to do it? And then you can just start to follow that plan. And it doesn’t have to be hard. And if you’ve gone through and done your research and assessed your risks, and-

Holly Wood:
You did it one, like the first time. It’s much like doing a new business. So you’ve already done it once. Right.

Marc Vila:
You’ve already done it once before.

Holly Wood:
So it’s not that difficult.

Marc Vila:
Yes, exactly. That’s the less scary part. But so many folks kind of get stuck and I don’t know how to make more money. I’m not sure what else to do. I feel like I’ve tried everything. And that is, if you feel like you’re at this plateau and you either are not sure how to grow or what to do next, then I would recommend for one, taking some of the notes on this podcast and bringing it into real life. Go to CustomApparelStartups.com, read the notes that we put down in here, and just start writing down some ideas. Just start with just free thinking ideas. What else could I sell? What other markets could I get into? If I were to, what’s the risk?

Holly Wood:
And how can I advertise it? One of my favorite-

Marc Vila:
How can I advertise it? How can I market it?

Holly Wood:
… podcast that you did was saying just throw something in. If you’re doing a T-shirt, maybe throw in a coozie. Or maybe you just started embroidering hats and you just, I mean, hats are only three or $4. I mean you can get pretty good hats. Maybe you throw that in with a shirt. Oh, you do this too. So opening their eyes to I can do other things too.

Marc Vila:
Right, right. So that’s fantastic. Well, we went through a lot of information in a short period of time here, but I think it was really great. This is actually going to help you succeed if you do some of these things. So if you have questions about how to diversify your business more, or what type of equipment you should get, or what equipment you own may already do, then you can go to coldesi.com. You can reach out, live chat or call, talk to one of our pros. And you can just ask. Say, “Hey, listen, I’ve got a cutter. I’m trying to figure out how to grow my business. This is what I’m doing. What should I do next? What could I do next?” And we have folks that have those conversations every single day here that will help you out. So thanks for joining us and Custom Apparel Startups. Can’t wait for you to come back. And jump on ColDesi.com and talk to us about how we can help you diversify your business.

Holly Wood:
Yep. Thank you.

Marc Vila:
Thank you.

 

How do you choose the right t-shirt?

You are looking to start or grow your custom apparel business. There are a ton of challenges with choosing the right equipment, making sales, pricing your apparel and so much more. However, a topic not often discussed enough is the apparel you use.

Choosing the right blanks is a core part of your success. This is similar to a great chef. If you learn about great chefs, it’s not just about the best pans and recipes, but also about the best ingredients. More so, it’s about the best ingredients for their particular recipe.

The same thing applies to the custom apparel industry. You must pick the right apparel for your business. The idea of ‘what is the best t-shirt’ is a fallacy, just like the question of ‘what’s the best chocolate for a dessert’. It depends!

In this podcast we will discuss the idea of ‘the best shirt’ with an industry expert Mike Putnam. Mike has been in the apparel industry for over 30 years working in the apparel, sportswear and equipment industries.

Some of the questions we’ll answer in this episode include:

What is the best technology for your custom apparel business?

What type of T-shirts should you sell?

What problems should you expect?

How do you get past these problems?

Why is the idea of a ‘best’ shirt is a bit of a fallacy?

• Your process
• Your Technology
• Your customers’ needs (timeframe, color, quantity)
• The retail price you sell

What technology should you be printing with?

• Screen printing
• Direct to Film
• White Toner
• DTG
• Sublimation

Why do some shirts fail and others succeed in printing (even when they are the “same” material)?

How do you decide the best shirt for your business?

Marc Vila:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. My name is Mark Vila, and today we’re here to talk about the best T-shirt. Right? When you’re looking to start or grow your custom-apparel business, there’s a ton of challenges out there. Picking the right equipment. What are you going to sell to your customers?

We deal with a lot of phone calls here. Forums that we work with. Facebook groups that we run. Almost every day somebody is asking, “What’s the best technology? What’s the best T-shirt? What should I start making?” We’re going to talk about how that question is a bad question to ask.

The concept of the best technology or the best is a fallacy and that’s why we’ve brought in Mike Putnam. He’s been in the customization/apparel industry for over 30 years. Mike, welcome. Why don’t you tell us a minute on where you started and how you ended up here at ColDesi working with selling some of the latest technology in T-shirt printing?

Mike Putnam:
Sure. My name’s Mike Putnam. I started within the industry, geez, in 1990s or 1986, printing T-shirts over the summer for a local screen printer, Manatee Apparel. Two summers of screen printing followed by working at a wholesale distributor, Goodbye Sportswear in 1990, while I was going to college, I started picking orders. By the time I got into sales, I was making more working in sales than as an X-ray tech, so I went to apparel.

Goodbye was bought in ’99 by Alpha, Alpha bought by Alpha Broder. I left right around that time to go to TSC Apparel, who was Tultex as well and they’re now owned by S&S Activewear. But then went to TSF Apparel, Heritage Sportswear, Delta Apparel, which led me to ColDesi.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That is why when I thought of what’s the best shirt or what’s the best technology for printing on a shirt, I thought about you. Because you’ve been through, you were on the floor printing shirts to start.

Mike Putnam:
Irregulars. I started in irregulars. For nine years I sold irregulars and closeouts. It was the underbelly of the market, so you had to learn why it was irregular within the fabric before slub. Slub was an accidental invention.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Tell me about slub. What is that?

Mike Putnam:
Slub within the fabric, it’s designed to have a larger piece within the fabric to simulate a burnout print. It gives the fabric texture without necessarily the holes of it, so it’s just a different fashion and print. It’s almost like a destroyed cap. Those were an accident. Someone had destroyed a cap within the process and said, “I like that cap.” So they started making them destroyed. An accident.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I think that there’s probably a whole podcast we could do just on those concepts, like what are the different terms people should know and what’s the history of them? But today we’re going to focus on helping folks at the beginning of the understanding of picking the right shirt to either match your technology or picking the right technology to match your shirt.

The reason why we would say, what’s the best T-shirt or what’s the best technology is a fallacy, is it really depends on so many things. If we ask what’s the best T-shirt, maybe you could say like, “Why is the concept of what’s the best T-shirt for decorating or for customizing, why is that a bad question to ask?”

Mike Putnam:
It all comes down to, well, one personal preference. Not all comes down to but personal preference has a lot to play in that and also the process. You typically start in your closet with what is your favorite shirt as far as what the best. But as far as the best, the concept of best, you want the best platform for your print to rest on, so you get the longest wear out of that said print.

Shirts have a play in that. If the fibers stand up, they stand up within the print. It dulls the print. If the knit, if it’s a burnout, you have to print it differently or if it’s a polyester you have to print it differently. It just depends again on your process and personal preference.

Marc Vila:
Right. I would say for using two real-world examples. If your market is doing fishing, surfing, beach wear, all of that, that’s typically going to be people are going to want UPF shirts.

Mike Putnam:
It’s going to be big. It’s going to be a 30, a 40, a 50 and what do those mean? Technically all shirts are UPF, that’s why you have a farmer’s tan. There’s some varying difference of blocking within that process.

Marc Vila:
Your customer, if that’s your customer, might want more blocking because they don’t want to get sunburned.

Mike Putnam:
Correct. Sun related.

Marc Vila:
They might want long sleeve. Even though it’s outdoor hot they want long sleeve. They also want it a little bit lightweight. They want it to dry quickly. That is a very different shirt than say if you’re selling rock band concert tees.

Mike Putnam:
Truly.

Marc Vila:
It’s the opposite shirt.

Mike Putnam:
Completely.

Marc Vila:
Then in addition to that, the technology you’re going to print on needs to be much different, I would say, right?

Mike Putnam:
Certainly.

Marc Vila:
In those two examples, and I’ll try to be as specific as possible so you can give a real-world example just to explain why that concept is. One business you sell stuff for the beach and fishing, so everything is for on a boat, fishing rod in your hand or on the beach with your kids.

Then the other business is you sell to a small rock band type of a venue. It’s a venue that they have small bands come in, probably never more than a 100 or 200 people in the building. They want to have merch that they can sell every single time one of these bands comes through.

Mike Putnam:
Merch is king.

Marc Vila:
Is that right? What would you say about the difference in those technologies for printing, what would you print with, and what type of shirt would you use?

Mike Putnam:
Oh, certainly. On the fishing market with polyesters, you’re either going to be sublimating those fabrics with light colors. It’s going to be a white, a pastel yellow, blue, green, silver, something within those markets that that sublimation print can go on. Sublimation is an out-gassing of the ink basically, that let’s say stains the shirt or re-dyes the shirt. It becomes part of the fabric. Within that, so sublimation or some type of light, typically you would see a screen print within that process. Something that’s going to withstand the elements.

On the rock-band side, you’re looking for more of an intricate print, typically. A lot of times it’s one color. You’re not getting a lot of buildup within those shirts. A lot of times you see burnout shirts, you see the specialty prints within those. Basically you’re not looking for buildup. You want no hand, a water-based feel, or it’s just a single print where it’s a soft hand feel. Something where you’re getting the cheaper side of you’re looking for a higher volume.

Marc Vila:
All right. You may be talking about cotton.

Mike Putnam:
Correct. Typically it’s a cotton shirt. In rock-band style it’s typically either a cotton shirt but times have changed. I mean, the introduction of CVC fabric, which is Chief Value Cotton, you’ll see some type of blend. A 60/40, a 75, some type of blend within the fabric.

And then tri-blends. Those are a little higher priced, but with smaller venues, they’re typically more minded on, I want that person to wear this shirt all the time. Not necessarily get a shirt just because it’s Aerosmith and I got to have it on whatever shirt it’s on. Typically, people buy shirts based on what’s printed on them because they love the print and then they wear it more because they love the shirt.

Marc Vila:
Right. A great point. On that, you’re probably looking at dark colors too. Right?

Mike Putnam:
Historically.

Marc Vila:
Historically.

Mike Putnam:
Black would be the most prominent and that’s-

Marc Vila:
Black would be the most prominent. Right.

Mike Putnam:
For concerts, black and white. You have a stash of black and white and you can print practically anything. With those venues, the smaller the venue it’s more about on demand. Those change on a weekly basis. You’re not going to typically have reaction time to set up. I mean, most bands have merch people or that are selling that already or creating that already. It’s in place but name-dropped with venue is important typically.

Marc Vila:
Right. I guess, less about the actual business structure because that’s probably is true, but more so the concept of what the print is. in this example, and the reason why it’s juxtaposed is for the small venue, rock type of stuff, even if these bands don’t travel, they’re only local-

Mike Putnam:
Or control their own merch nowadays. You’re controlling your own merch and your music is organic, the same with your merch.

Marc Vila:
That merch for those may be direct-to-garment printed with a soft hand for the small runs, for the ability to do intricate artwork. The ability to do something digital maybe with a lot of colors. They want to do something with just a rock rabbit playing a crazy color guitar.

Mike Putnam:
Sometimes just in-the-garage simplistic discharge. Where it’s a single pass on a screen and then it’s a cure process within, and that’s controllable by an individual.

Marc Vila:
You’re saying, so we may be looking at screen printing or direct-to-garment printing on the one, and on the other side we will be looking at say sublimation. Sublimating on light colored polyesters that are lightweight, moisture wicking, high UPF and the other side-

Mike Putnam:
Typically tropical colors.

Marc Vila:
Tropical colors. On the other side we’re looking at dark, direct to garment or screen printing or even heat-transfer vinyl, and that’s a good definition of that of why it’s so different. If someone comes in and says, “Hey, I’m starting a T-shirt business. What’s the best I should have?” There was a lot of things we unpacked with two very, very specific examples that not only was the technology different but the T-shirt was different too.

Mike Putnam:
It’s part of why I love this industry. There’s so many pockets of what can drive a business. As a salesperson you would build the concert-venue time, World Series and sports playoff time. You would just build that through the year and find those customers that tailored to that particular market.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. This is also something that I love about this industry too, is that there’s the idea of what’s the best. When I think about what’s the best I-

Mike Putnam:
Good, better best. You always hear-

Marc Vila:
That’s definitely a-

Mike Putnam:
…”Give me a good, better, best.”

Marc Vila:
That’s definitely a great marketing tool-

Mike Putnam:
Subjective.

Marc Vila:
…and very subjective. I find that it’s so specific everywhere. One example I thought of was like, I’ve been watching Chef’s Table. Have you seen this show, Chef’s Table?

Mike Putnam:
I have.

Marc Vila:
They are hardcore into the ingredients. The chefs, they know how to cook. They’ve got great recipes. They know how to plate up a design so it looks so cool, it’s like art on a plate. But they will travel across the world to find the right flavor of mint that they’re trying to hit.

Mike Putnam:
Like the truffle for instance.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, and the right type and the right style and the right notes and it’s so specific. The ingredient is much like the T-shirt, right? It’s that there is no best-

Mike Putnam:
It can change the outcome.

Marc Vila:
It changes the outcome. Right, exactly. A great example of that, actually going into cooking would be sugar, so sugar and cookies. If you have refined white sugar and then on the other side of the spectrum, maybe you say you would have dark brown sugar. The amount of I believe molasses in that is different. Now they’re both sugar. They both are made from cane. They’re both very sweet. You cannot say which one is better for a cookie.

Mike Putnam:
Sometimes you’re mixing both of them at the same time.

Marc Vila:
Sometimes you’re mixing both of them together. It changes the outcome because a dark brown is going to create probably a much chewier cookie. If you eliminate brown sugar and just use white, it’s probably going to be a much drier, more cake type of a cookie. The same as with this T-shirt market too. The more of a certain material you have in there, the type of dye that’s used is going to effective the outcome.

Mike Putnam:
It can even affect the outcome of how something’s pressed after the fact.

Marc Vila:
Right, and that’s what I wanted to ask about. You work a lot in direct-to-film printing and helping folks start and grow their businesses with direct-to-film printers. Now, what are some things that have to do with T-shirts? I’ll be very broad so you can go with it, but T-shirts, dyes, coloring. How does that affect how somebody might choose the right apparel for direct-to-film printing?

Mike Putnam:
Every print that you make is really a test. You want to test your fabrics regardless, and especially with some of the newer tech. With transfers, you may have something called a hot peel, but not all fabrics hot peel. You could have a forest green and the same shirt and a black in the same shirt and the forest green won’t hot peel and the black will hot peel.

Marc Vila:
why is that?

Mike Putnam:
Some of that’s within the acidity of the dye or within the manufacturing process typically the dye is preventing it from, it’s either biting or it’s not releasing one way or the other. Sometimes with acidity or pH within the process, I’ve had sweatshirts that you could literally hold the sweatshirt and put your hand right through the fabric, because within the process the pH was off and those were highly decorated. We had to credit back, it was a large Hooter’s order, 9,000 shirts of just the pH was off within the process. You don’t know it until it’s post-decoration.

Marc Vila:
Right. This is something that I think that is under-studied and under-appreciated on how these are so different. I will see, especially folks new to the industry, get so frustrated on, “Why won’t this transfer stick to this shirt? Why is it peeling up? I’ve wasted a hundred bucks in paper. My customer is upset.” As you mentioned, almost every transfer is a test and it’s the dye makes a difference. I mean, it’s not even just not all cotton’s cotton and not all polyster’s the same.

Mike Putnam:
Some processes are also more forgiving than the other.

Marc Vila:
Okay, good. What do you think might be something that’s very forgiving and something that’s going to be a lot less forgiving as far as processes go?

Mike Putnam:
DTG and needing cotton shirts, much more forgiving. That’s more about the platform and you can control that within your process. Even if you used an entry level, a basic shirt, you can still put the pretreat on and press it to give it a surface of printing to improve that print over time.

Marc Vila:
What’s a technology that you might find or a concept that is going to be much less forgiving, where you’ve imagined a customer would have to test a lot more?

Mike Putnam:
I would say it would come in between the DFX process it’s a time and temp.

Marc Vila:
White-toner printing.

Mike Putnam:
White-toner printing. If you adhere to the process, it is much easier within the process but again, it’s a time and temp. If you’re combating a platen on the pallet, if you’re not taking an infrared gun and shooting your platen, you could be off somewhere. The pressure could be off. There’s just having the right equipment in those cases is paramount to the process.

Marc Vila:
Right. Okay. You gave two examples and what I see about those two examples are something I’ve talked about in the past, which is I think I consider there’s chemically decorating things. There is decorating things through adhesion and decorating things mechanically. Those are the three ways I personally define decorating things. When you’re decorating things with DTG, for example, I’d probably describe this as more of a chemical decoration and maybe a little bit mechanical.

Mike Putnam:
Some bonding.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, a little bit mechanical. You’re putting down pretreat, which is soaking into the apparel. You’re putting down ink, which is reacting with the pretreat and congealing. Or I don’t know the right word but it’s biting together and it’s like the fabric and the ink bite into each other like spilling glue on a carpet. You’re not just going to get it out.

Mike Putnam:
It’s a no-hand feel that’s part of the garment, and that’s what you’re looking for with that process.

Marc Vila:
And so there’s a degree of forgiveness in that because you’re putting shoving things into the shirt, same, similar with sublimation. Now white toner similar to heat-transfer vinyl is an adhesion process.

Mike Putnam:
Polymer. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
It’s glue.

Mike Putnam:
It sits on top of.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it sits on top of, it’s like glue. You’ve got in so many words, glue or adhesion and heat-transfer vinyl’s the same. That is solid at room temperature. You get it hot. It softens. It grabs onto the shirt, and then when it cools down it hardens again. Not completely hard but it becomes more solid again, and then it now gripped onto the shirt. The acidity in the dye. The way the weave of the shirt is how-

Mike Putnam:
The fabric content.

Marc Vila:
The fabric content.

Mike Putnam:
A 60/40. A tri-blend or how it holds heat within the process.

Marc Vila:
Right. All affect that differently and as something that you’re going to adhere to. I remember early on I was messing with heat-transfer vinyl because we were testing our Triton vinyl, so I was just putting it on everything. I was just, how does it work? How does it look?

Mike Putnam:
I love single color, white heat-transfer vinyl. I can’t tell you how many logo shirts I go through.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it’s great. Right? Well, I got some basketball shorts and it wouldn’t stick at all, not at all. It was like as if the glue didn’t exist and I tried all different colors vinyl. Eventually I got to a gold vinyl that stuck to it.

I talked to the manufacturer and I’m talking to this, and then it ends up that there was a high degree of acrylic. Right? The acrylic material in there was not compatible with adhesives because it was designed to resist staining and bacteria, all these things. It had all of this stuff designed to resist anything sticking to it, which is why the glue wouldn’t stick to it, in so many words.

However, the manufacturer said that the gold, in order to achieve the gold reflectiveness, they used a completely different adhesive then I think gold, silver, and another one I think were very-

Mike Putnam:
The metallics.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, the metallics were a completely different adhesive. That adhesive was not susceptible to the blocking characteristics of that short. If you’re brand new to the industry, how frustrated are you? But that’s the point of the testing and understanding all this stuff.

Mike Putnam:
Poly inherently, poly has to be treated to be moisture-wicking. Poly is aquaphobic, it repels water. You have to treat it for it to be moisture-wicking.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Then now that we’re talking about treating, we’re talking about chemicals, heat, physical treating. Sometimes they take these-

Mike Putnam:
For the wash cycle.

Marc Vila:
…they stretch and pull.

Mike Putnam:
The enzyme wash or there’s many washes within. You can have the garment-dye process or the type of water that they’re using within. There’s so many variables that are the outcome of a T-shirt that have bearing on what you’re printing or how you’re printing it or delivering it or shipping it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, and if you know, there’s another thing about runs and batches too. Right? Because if you’ve remodeled your house or if you’ve painted you know that… My neighbor just mentioned this to me. He goes, “If that Sherman Williams paint you’re going to buy,” he goes, “I don’t recommend going to a different store. Go to the same store because every machine could be slightly calibrated different and your tint will be a little bit off.” He said, “If you think you’re going to run out, go to the same store and mix those a little bit together.”

Mike Putnam:
Thank you. I’m getting ready to paint my house and I have my old paint.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s what he said because he said, “That can slightly differ, and if you just go from one to the other you’ll notice.” The same thing if you order tile or carpet

Mike Putnam:
That I’ve seen.

Marc Vila:
That it will change.

Mike Putnam:
Within sizes I see that. Sometimes you get your shirts and you have a full size run kids all the way up, but you may have four or five different colors to contend with.

Marc Vila:
Yes. You may have where the mediums react differently.

Mike Putnam:
Yes, even after being heated.

Marc Vila:
Yeah and why? Well, because all of these were made in a factory, and then in this place in the world where the cotton comes from, there was a typhoon. That prevented cotton production, paused in that area. So they had to get the cotton from a different area of the world, which is still a cotton plant, but we know the diversification, diversity of animals and plants on earth. That cotton is slightly different in characteristics. It didn’t accept the dye the same way so they had to increase I don’t know what. What do I know about dyes, but the pH or the acidity and the dye.

Mike Putnam:
It’s a science. It’s a direct science for sure.

Marc Vila:
Now they got the color to match but now on a chemical level, that shirt is slightly different and then you throw pretreat on it and it comes out different. We should definitely have another podcast just to talk deeper into this stuff, but the moral of the story is for picking the best shirt so far, and we’ll cover a couple more things. But one is, you have to know your preference, your customer’s preference. What your market wants and the technology you’re using and making sure it works together. Then the second moral is that you’ve got to test all this stuff. If you’ve not worked with something before, order extras, test it first.

Mike Putnam:
At least one extra.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Show it to your customer.

Mike Putnam:
Sometimes that can simply be a suggestion piece of you tested something. They had a large logo. You put it to a pocket print and you threw it on a shirt to test it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Keep extra shirts that you have to test again later and then-

Mike Putnam:
Or if something happens to that shirt after the fact, so you have a shirt that you can wash it and see if it really does that. I printed them, but wash mine and see if it does the same thing.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. See if you can replicate issues and then further helping, when you do that, you can help educate your customer, why. They say, “I want this green or this red.” Then you have to explain, “Well okay, if we’re doing red, red has a particular property where the dye in the shirt can come through through technology. No matter what technology I use, there’s going to be a degree where it actually changes.

Mike Putnam:
Dye migration. The fabled dye migration.

Marc Vila:
Dye migration. That there’s plenty of technologies that have blocking parameters but even still, over time that dye wants to change things. It wants to move free.

Mike Putnam:
You heat up past 330 degrees and the dyes will reactivate.

Marc Vila:
The dyes will reactivate and for a certain color or something like that.

Mike Putnam:
It could go through a dryer, an industrial dryer that gets above a certain temp and it can come out pink.

Marc Vila:
Right, mess it up. You might want to educate your customer if you know, and you know because you’ve tested. You’ve said, “A customer wants red. Let me see what happens.” You order some, you get it done and maybe you don’t order the full amount yet. Or you’ve done plenty of testing ahead of time where you’ve got that shirt in the back room ready to test again. And you grab a square of that shirt and you put your customer’s logo on it. It looks great, fine.

Another scenario is it doesn’t look great. You realize, “Hey, I’m already seeing some issues with this, with the technology that I use.” You go to your customer and you just say, “Hey, I’ve got a couple ideas for you. The white in your logo, let’s change it to black or let’s not do the red shirt. Let’s do a black shirt or a white shirt.”

You explain to them why and they may say, “That didn’t happen before. That wasn’t this.” Then you just have to explain, “Every scenario is different. The technology I print with. The type of shirt you want. Those shirts you were showing me before were printed in the nineties. I can’t tell you what dye or shirt that was. That material doesn’t even exist in this world anymore, that’s why.”

“Also, okay, well before when your business was huge and you printed them in the nineties, you were printing a 1,000 at a time at a screen print shop and they were doing something specific to make that work. Now your business is much different. You have a ton of virtual employees, so you only want 30 shirts. I’m going to be printing those with white-toner print technology for a short run because you’re not going to want to pay the screen-print price for that anywhere because the setup’s too expensive-

Mike Putnam:
Set up charges, correct.

Marc Vila:
“…so because of that we have to make a change.” You’ve got to educate your customer. We have five more minutes I’d like to discuss, and I think this would just be a fun exercise to just put you on the spot.

I’m going to name some technologies. And then because what somebody is going to be curious about listening to this podcast, this very well is going to be their intro to the industry. This maybe they googled and they found us and they’re learning. Other folks are in the industry and maybe they do vinyl now or they do embroidery and they want to know, what am I going to do next? Then you have folks who maybe have been in the industry for a long time and they know everything. They know more than us, but they’re trying to-

Mike Putnam:
I’m always learning.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, always. Right, exactly. That’s why they’re listening because they’re always learning and they said, “Okay, well here’s other people who’ve been in the industry for a long Time.” This is an in-your-opinion thing, but I want to name some technologies and maybe you can name some industries that would be, or some properties on why somebody would want to choose that technology.

For example, I would say, “Sublimation.” You’d say, “Great for the fishing and outdoor apparel.” we’ll start off at probably the oldest and most popular in screen printing. What business might be good to choose to go that way versus something else?

Mike Putnam:
high volume. High output. Something where it’s the same print, a lot of reps.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Same print, a lot of reps and I would say low-color counts too. Right?

Mike Putnam:
Truly. It’s very basic prints. Typically, you have to get a specialty printer for a four-color process to make it photo-realistic. It’s harder to register screens. When you find people that do that, I mean hold on to those screen printers, they’re valuable. It’s a dying breed. It’s hard technology to teach and then maintain employees.

Marc Vila:
And master. Then backing up on that one would be direct to film. It’s very accepted in screen printing and becoming more and more because of the high production. What are some positive benefits of direct to film?

Mike Putnam:
That’s that on-demand business. Something where you don’t have to carry inventory or you’re doing a lot of name drops. Or you’re pressing on poly or don’t have an idea of what substrates or fabrics you’re going to be printing on. It’s just a little more versatile, a little more forgiving.

Marc Vila:
You can do high volume and you can do digital, so you can do-

Mike Putnam:
Only as fast as how fast you can press, and teaching someone how to heat press is different than teaching someone how to screen print.

Marc Vila:
Right. Significantly easier.

Mike Putnam:
Significantly.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, like a morning versus a month.

Mike Putnam:
True.

Marc Vila:
Now, okay, so direct to film is it’s great for full digital. It’s great for variable data, meaning name-drops or something like that.

Mike Putnam:
Names and numbers without… It goes after the vinyl industry without needing to weed. You can pretty much set your prints up, run the prints. You can nest it or not nest it just depending on… The larger format gets you into just a higher output.

Marc Vila:
Both of the technologies mentioned so far, doing a decent amount of production. You’re not going to do one-off on those.

Mike Putnam:
Typically.

Marc Vila:
Now we can talk about one-off. We’ve got white-toner printing technology.

Mike Putnam:
Very versatile. For me, white toner it’s like having the club in the bag. You’re not going to go into the beach with your driver. You need something that’s just a little more versatile. If I’m doing a lot of hard goods, I have to have a white toner for that on-demand aspect. For those one-off shirts, it’s a very quick process. Or if I’m not in the office and I need something that’s little to no maintenance, that white-toner printer, it’s a versatile tool.

Marc Vila:
White toner is a versatility, short, medium run and it doesn’t need to be operated or maintained, so you could do something where you’re not in the office all the time.

Mike Putnam:
The footprint overall is it’s very accommodating to an office with a heat press and the printer. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean a basic-size table, any basic size. Almost literally any basic-size table outside of a bistro table can handle that whole setup, which is not the same as the other technology we mentioned. Now DTG, let’s talk about that one for a minute. What are strengths on that?

Mike Putnam:
I love the one-off capabilities of DTGs. If you’re a fan of a no-hand feel. You want something as close to water base. No hand. No buildup on. That’s the strong suit of you get some beautiful photo-realistic prints. It is a one-off market. Look, it’s a hundred percent cotton, but typically those people are very eco-friendly, so cotton has a great appeal. Polyester for a long time had a stigmatism about it as far as it’s manufactured or synthetic.

Marc Vila:
I mean I think it’s a petroleum based product?

Mike Putnam:
It is. That’s where the natural fibers have a hundred percent cotton.

Marc Vila:
Bamboo too, you can do with DTG?

Mike Putnam:
With DTG, yes. When DTG was born, it was born out of that eco, anti-poly world.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, because it’s you’re using a very little amount of ink. There’s the waste is very little compared to-

Mike Putnam:
It’s a creative technology. If you’re passionate about what you’re putting on and it’s a wonderful technology for creation.

Marc Vila:
Just super-premium print. Very soft. Tons of colors, and you can achieve the most beautiful print on a T-shirt, period.

Mike Putnam:
You want something feathered in without the hand, you want it to wash, that’s where you’re going to get.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Great. Then the last one is sublimation, which actually we kind of covered, so I can go through that quick. But we talked about sublimation being zero hand or feel. Versatility is another one with that because you can do the mugs and coasters and mouse pads and shirts and all that. Right?

Mike Putnam:
I love the hard-good aspect and the entry level of sublimation is the appeal there. You can have a very nice printer, entry level, under three grand and easily have printable product and running the market.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. For a couple of thousand dollars on sublimation, you have something that can create the most premium product that you’ll buy anywhere.

Mike Putnam:
That’s the high end but my number was a high end. You can go low end. That’s just to maximize the print simply from… But you can go, it’s the easiest technology probably to get into outside of a vinyl. Vinyl will probably be my other, and that’s a viable industry in itself. Having the cutter and being able to put vinyl creatively, multicolor prints, it can get you up and running to the point that you grow your business.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. No, it’s great and vinyl was another one. I didn’t even put that on the list. I should have but yeah, I mean that’s another one great for versatility and for ease to entry. Well, we’ve covered a lot of stuff on this podcast today and there’s a lot more to talk about. Michael will definitely be back on again because there’s so much more to be had about this conversation.

But I think the next step is hopefully you realize that there’s a lot to learn. And if you’re getting frustrated in decorating, you realize that it’s more complex than just cotton or poly or white or black. If you’ve got questions about what’s the best technology? What’s the best shirt? All of that, go to ColDesi.com. You can live chat with one of our pros. You may very well get Mike on the phone if you’re going to talk about DTF a lot. Right? That’s a lot of the conversations you’re having today, so expert on that and all the other technologies and we’ll help to guide you through it.

If you’re not sure where to go next or you’re frustrated with technology that you’re using and you’re trying to figure out why. You can talk to us at ColDesi, and the folks here will help to explain the reason why you’re getting failure on this. The reason why the person you outsource to who has a DTG printer can’t provide you those fishing shirts is because the technology doesn’t do it. That education might help you realize that getting a sublimation system yourself is the next move.

Mike Putnam:
True.

Marc Vila:
Thank you again. We’re going to wrap up today and look forward to the next episode of Custom Apparel Startups with Mike Putnam coming soon. There’s so much we’ve got to talk about, man.

Mike Putnam:
Oh can of worms.

Marc Vila:
There’s so much so I can’t wait.

Mike Putnam:
Open the can of worms.

Marc Vila:
Thanks for joining us, everybody out there. Thanks for listening and have a good business.

Starting A Side Business And Growing To Full Time

Everyone is looking for a way to make more money, achieve financial independence, and enjoy the work they do. One of the ways people accomplish this is by starting a side hustle, and potentially growing it to a full-time gig.

But how do you do this successfully?   If you are brand new, how do you get started? If you already have a side hustle, how do you take it full time?

In this episode we are joined by Amir Bavi, a ColDesi employee and customization business owner. Amir has taken the journey from side business to full time and back around. It’s all about YOUR personal journey and we are here to help.

Here are the steps to starting and growing your side business.

You have an idea, so what’s next?

Put it in writing

• Consider WHO your customer is
• Consider WHAT you will sell them
• Determine HOW profitable your products are
• Pick WHERE you will do the work
• Schedule WHEN you will do the side hustle work
• Write down WHY You are doing this (and never forget it!)

ther topics covered in this episode:

• What are the steps to getting started?
• What should you watch out for?
• Once you get started, how can you make sure you don’t grow too fast or slow?
• How do you know when you are ready to go full time?
• How do you stay motivated?
• Did you ever have a time when you wanted to give up?
• #1 Tips for success

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. My name is Marc Vila. Today we’re going to be talking about starting a side business and growing it to full-time. And the reason why we have this episode, there are so many people are out there and they want to make more money. They want to have some financial independence. They’re looking for just something on the side for some play money, whatever it might be, or they just want to get out of the grind. They work for the man, and you no longer want to do that. How do you do that successfully? How do you get started? How do you decide where do you want to be and grow? So on this episode we’ve got Amir Bavi. Did I pronounce that correct?

Amir Bavi:
Yup. That is correct.

Marc Vila:
I didn’t even ask you.

Amir Bavi:
No, that’s correct.

Marc Vila:
Bad job on me. But we’ve got Amir Bavi here and he works at ColDesi. He’s got a side hustle business that he’s run. He’s had a full-time business he’s run. He’s grew up in this customization industry, and I’ll let him talk about that throughout the episode. But you’ve got all this experience in starting, growing, changing, and now advising people on the right direction to go that I thought we have to share this with a lot more people. So hopefully if you’re out there listening, maybe you’re just trying to get started and you don’t know where to go or you’re running a little side business now and you want to figure out how you can level it up. We’ve got some steps that you can actionably take in this podcast to help you get going. So why don’t you just tell us a little bit about what you have done in the past and then a little bit about what you do now, just so everyone kind of understand.

Amir Bavi:
Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you for having me here today. Yeah, so I have a little bit over 20 years experience in the sign and printing business. Started off in the sign business basically since 2014. Been dealing with apparel and that’s a big part of what we do. Like you said, I’ve started with doing it as a side gig, working a full-time job, selling shirts at the trunk of my car on paydays, all the way to having the full-time business where it was my main source of income. And then recently coming here to ColDesi. This is nice because it keeps me in the industry, but I still have the ability to do it and I still do my business at the same time too.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. No, that’s great. And what my favorite part about kind of your journey, and we spoke about this a bit before we started recording. But you started doing it on the side because you wanted the hustle and the money and then you decided to go full-time and it wasn’t as fun for you full-time. You preferred it the other way so you went back. I was saying that that’s the beauty in the time and place that we live in here in the U.S. where anybody can start a side business, anyone can start a business, anyone can be successful, and then you can go all or nothing and everywhere in between. So you could have a part-time job and a pretty 20 plus hour a week side business that’s almost not even a side business anymore. It’s like one part-time job and another, and every combination.

So I have a friend who’s had a vinyl cutter for probably a decade now, and he’s gone through all that. He’s like, “Right now I maybe work two hours a month.” And he’s like, “That’s about it.” And he’s like, “Honestly, the money I make with that is like we go out for one awesome meal together,” his wife and I. He’s like, “And I love it like that.” And then of course all the way to the other side. We have people who just on the Custom Apparel Startups Facebook group at the end of last year, right before Christmas, someone had said that they had finally turned in their full-time job badge to be able to take this business full-time because that was their dream. So whatever it is, we’re going to hear to help to get you through it. And now you spend a lot of time advising people on the phone helping them to get started, and that was part of the inspiration of this podcast. What are some of the common things that you hear from folks when they’re trying to get started and they don’t know what to do?

Amir Bavi:
Well, one of the biggest ones that I hear is from a lot of people who are either just looking to get started, whether you have a Cricut machine and you’re doing the small HTV vinyl to get started, even if you’re only doing it for yourself. A lot of people I talk to, they do it for their friends and their family members. No intentions of starting it as a business and it kind of grows. One thing I always recommend to people is always try something before you jump fully into it. There’s a lot of people who do it strictly as a passion project. They’ll do stuff for their friends, their family members, and they’ll make extra money, revenue coming in from it. Then you have the spectrum, the other side where you can take it full-time and it’ll grow fast. I mean, you’ll never work a job to have the ability to make the money you can make in this industry. It’s very common to be able to do two, $300 an hour.

You’re never going to go do that in your average day-to-day grind working for somebody. And that’s not even really working a lot of hours or anything like this. That’s bare minimum production. The nice thing is like you said, everybody has an option, but as far as people, the most things I hear is just people wanting to get started and they’re scared to get started.

Marc Vila:
Right. And that’s like the big thing is you’re going to invest in, because you can get a Cricut and it is just like slow dirt and you’re doing a sheet at a time. And it’s cool when you’re doing 12 tank tops for bridesmaids, something like that, bachelorette party. But then as soon as somebody says, we want 12 tank tops, 12 t-shirts, 12 mugs, a sign, and all of a sudden you’ve got a hundred piece order, you turn that Cricut on at six o’clock at night on a Friday and you are going till three o’clock in the morning and you’re not done, by the way.

Amir Bavi:
It’s worse when you get people that ask you for the large jobs and you’re like, there’s no way I can handle this. I’ve heard that quite a bit where people will do the one-offs here and there, a couple shirts here and there, but then they’ll get people asking, “Hey, can you do a hundred shirts for my business?” And they’re like, “No, I can’t touch it because think about all the money you’re missing out on it.” So having the right equipment definitely helps elevate you, especially these days. There’s no better time to start because you have more options now than ever for ways to get started in the industry.

Marc Vila:
Right. And that’s just a great point is finding the right way to start. So folks decide, well, I know I don’t want to do that Cricut thing, not to pick on it, it’s a great hobby machine for fun, but you try to step it into a business, it’s a challenge. So they call us and they start talking about that. Next thing you know they’re like, do I want to invest a couple hundred bucks in financing this? Is this the right move for me? Well, how am I going to even get my first customers? Well, what if I can’t make the payment? All these things go through the head. So one of the best ways to help determine if and when you’re ready and to show that you can do it is going through some of the steps we’ll talk about in this podcast and then we’ll go into just a little bit of Q&A.

I kind of think of when you want to start a business, the best thing you can do, we’ve talked about this a ton of times in the podcast, is that you have to write some things down. You need a business plan. And that doesn’t mean you need to Google search how do I write a business plan. I mean, you can, but waste of time unless you’re going to investor or something. You just need to say who, what, when, where, why and write those things down. So I wrote those. I’ll literally just going to read them out to make it quick. So who, who’s your customer? I mean, do you agree that you probably should have an ideal place to start for your first customers? What are some examples that you think of? How would you get your first 10 orders?

Amir Bavi:
So one thing that I talk to a lot of people about is always utilizing your own little book of business. A good mentor of mine always told me growing up is utilize your own network. And what I mean by that for people is if you have friends that are business owners, if you have kids in sports, whether it’s cheer, football, anything along those lines. If you belong to a church organization. I’ve heard all different scenarios. But just understanding even if you have little kids, there’s always something going on. Understand who you want to sell to, even if it’s only doing stuff for yourself. If you buy a Cricut or if you buy a machine to want to do small projects, okay. Well, if you’re doing stuff for your kids, why can’t you do it for other kids? So just kind of understanding the items you want to do. There’s hundreds of items that you can make as far as custom products go. So one of the biggest ones I would recommend is starting with what you want to sell. And then that will help take you to who you’re going to sell to.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s great. Actually, just did a podcast recently where we talked about you have to find a place to start, and it’s either with who or what. And so I think that’s a perfect that you mentioned that because we’ll go into what next. But you have to decide who is it? Well, I am a member of a couple of clubs or my kids are in sports, or I have a really big community that I’m very, very active in. I work with the HOA or something like that in this giant community. So I’ve got an audience that I can speak to. You can go to those folks. And then it’s the what. Do you want to sell t-shirts? Do you want to sell mugs, signs, hats, custom graphics? Whatever it is, you have to figure out what. And that’s the next one is what do you want to sell them? And there’s plenty of things you could do to research the what, but in my opinion, the simplest thing is if you have an immediate like or passion for something.

Amir Bavi:
Yeah, absolutely. Because when you enjoy something, it makes it a lot better. Like we were talking earlier before the podcast is I personally enjoy the business more as a side hustle than as a full-time gig because I enjoy it for the passion of it. I enjoy going and knocking out a few shirts here and there doing it. It’s not something that I want to do all day every day long, but it’s nice to be able to make extra couple hundred bucks here and there. So I enjoy it more for that side avenue aspect. But once again, find what you like. If you’re big into let’s say hats and you love hats, well, focus on hats markets. There’s companies that are very successful doing nothing but selling just hats. Not saying you can’t expand into other products, but if you find something that you like. If you’re not a fan of, let’s just say cups, you’re not a big fan of doing custom cups. Well, you wouldn’t want to go start your business starting doing something that you’re not really a fan of.

If you like doing custom shirts, putting your own sayings, start by doing your own stuff, wearing it out. People will see it and then it just kind of builds from there. But absolutely do something that you enjoy, that way, especially when you’re doing something as a side hustle or a side job, you don’t want to do something you don’t enjoy. You want to do something you enjoy. Because especially if you work all day and let’s say you’re not really too happy in your day job, you want to come home and do something you enjoy to get the passion to be able to grow, to do it full-time to where you can do something you enjoy. If you don’t enjoy it, it’s kind of hard to find the passion in something that you don’t enjoy.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s something that is often advice that we describe is that you have to think of, do you actually have a passion for doing something? So if you have a passion for creating graphic arts and you also like t-shirts, you’re just a fan of different… Some people own no t-shirts, right? And other people have a closet full. I have a friend that I’ve only seen them wear t-shirts. He has tons of cool ones from all over the world. It’s a passion for him. So if you’ve got that passion for a particular product, it’s a super easy choice to make. You can start to sell that product and make money. So we’ve kind of got the who and what. And as you mentioned, the simplest answer to who right from the beginning is just the network you’re in. So if you do have a hobby passion like motorcycles or cars and you go to events or clubs or sports, something like that that you attend or you play in some sort of a dodgeball team or something like that.

So those are immediately whos you can go to. If you don’t really have that yet, because plenty of people are just busy working and then when they work, they hang out with their friends. Their hobbies is maybe fishing alone on Sunday morning, they’re not with a group of people. Well then your network is just literally your friends and family. You text, email, call everyone you know and just say, Hey, by the way, I do this now. If you know anybody, right?

Amir Bavi:
Absolutely. But we’re also in a social media day and age where you have access to people where you would have to call, text and take the time to spend hours reaching out to people. A lot of times it’s one post on social media where people can see it. One thing I recommend is even if you’re doing it as a side business, grow a business page. Start a free business page. Post pictures of all the work that you do. That way people can see what it is. You’ll be surprised, people will stumble upon you. You have lots of free avenues as far as social media advertising. You can go in local Facebook groups and promote. I belong to a lot of local groups for people looking for recommendations for custom items. So a lot of times you can just scroll on social media and find people looking for work. That’s a lot of times how I find my work.

People like, hey, I’m looking for shirts for a family reunion, you can comment. I like to message people directly and say, listen, if you need help, I can help you. Here’s some samples of my work. Let me know if you would like a quote or let me know if I can help. And you’ll be surprised how many people are like, yeah, absolutely. It grows very fast. One thing I always like to tell people, when people order shirts or even custom items in general, it’s very rare that they order one. A lot of times people focus on the one shirt like okay, they’re going to want one shirt. In my experience, most people buy four, five, six. Let’s say if they’re doing a trip to a theme park with the family, they all want shirts. If it’s a birthday, if it’s a family reunion. And you’ll get larger orders, you’ll be surprised for 25, 50, a hundred shirts, even larger orders.

Sometimes they’ll even go into the thousands, which obviously depending on how you’re doing them, you might not want to do a thousand shirts. But it’s at least nice to know that it’s not always about the one shirt. Because if you had to rely on just selling one shirt at a time, yes, it would seem very daunting and overwhelming. But a lot of times if one customer orders one job, that one job will pay for that machine for the whole month doing 10 shirts.

Marc Vila:
And that’s a remarkable thing. That’s definitely one of the reasons that I’ve always been passionate about this business is the who you’re going to sell to is as far as starting, being able to make, say a machine payment to be able to say, how can I make $250 a month? Whatever your number is for whatever you’re going to buy is going to be different. But we need to pick a number. So I’m going to say the word 250. So 250. And if you can profit a hundred bucks an order, that’s two and a half orders.

Amir Bavi:
Well, I have a simple formula if it could help sell.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, please.

Amir Bavi:
I use this when I talk with people. So an average custom t-shirts range in price from, I’ve seen them as cheap as $15 all the way up to 35, $40. I like to say the general is around a 15 to $20 bar, 15 to $25 range. You figure your average cost of production is always going to vary on how you do it. But safe to say, normally around $5 is your cost all in if you’re producing it yourself. So you have an idea of, okay, if the shirt and the transfer will cost me say $5 and I can sell it for 20, I know my profit margin is $15 a shirt. So now it’s easier to say, okay, well if my payments, let’s say $300 a month, I need to do 20 shirts profit to be able to pay for that machine. That covers my expense for my shirts supplies, and it covers the machine profit. So it says, okay, can I afford this?

Let’s say you’re doing vinyl and you’re having a Cricut and you’re doing 50 to a hundred shirts a month and you’re like, oh, I can’t afford this machine. Well, in reality, the time you’re going to save will allow you to not only be able to pay for that machine, but allow you to grow your business. Because a lot of times people’s limitations on growth is not so much the ability of turning away jobs, it’s the time to produce it, especially if it’s a side hustle.

Marc Vila:
Right. Time is actually part of this. So we talk about who, what, when, where and why. Who, what, when is actually next. So when are you going to do the work I think is something to ask yourself as part of getting started. So who are you going to sell to? What are you going to sell them? And just for sake of example, we could just say, I’m just going to start with friends and family and I’m going to sell them t-shirts. Right? And that means that the next time they go to Disney together family or four, they’re going to be there for three days. They want a shirt for each day for the family to match. Four, 12 shirts. I mean, that’s kind of who you’re going to sell to. And then business referrals, you have friends who are business owners. So you’re going to sell to your network of friends. What you’re going to sell them? T-shirts. So when? When are you going to do it? This is an important thing to answer is to kind of block out times.

Amir Bavi:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
So are you going to do it after work on certain days of the week, on weekends? Do you have any recommendations or thoughts on how somebody can block out time like that?

Amir Bavi:
Build a routine. First off, always get in habit. So the right thing is, there’s no right or wrong answer. Everybody, if you’re doing as a side hustle, when I started mine, look, I had kids, I had a full-time job. It was hard to say, okay, I’m going to dedicate this time. But for me, I had a newborn at the time. So luckily I dedicated my nighttime. I’m more of a late night person. So after I did the family time, did my work, got everything taken care of, I would try to block out two to three hours. Whether it’s media, design work, production, whatever the case is, there’s multiple aspects of it. But just really finding what works for your time. Some people work overnights. So maybe doing nights doesn’t work for them, but they do want to come home, take a nap, and then before they go to work, do it.

Or maybe they come home, they’re still wound up, got some energy, do it. Work whatever what’s best for you, try to block out at least an hour a day. And it doesn’t have to be every day. Even if it’s three times a week. If you don’t have any jobs to do, go on social media, build your presence a little bit, post some pictures, find some articles even, even find designs. Even if you’re not a designer, there’s a lot of people that can utilize sites to buy artwork. A lot of people want to get started, but they’re like, look, I don’t have any graphic ability. These days, you don’t even need to. I know so many people that buy pre-made stock artwork and they resell it, whether through an online website, social media, or just through local friends and family members. I mean, I’m sure everybody has looked into custom shirt at some point in their life. The who is everybody.

I mean, potentially everybody is your customer. Not saying everyone will end up being your customer, but potentially everyone’s going to need your service at some point or the other. Whether it’s for an event coming up, a business they want to start. That’s a big one right now. Everybody wants to start their own business. This is a great way to get into it. But even if you have other friends looking to do the same, it’s a great segue to help them. You can build your clientele list. And personally, I always recommend to people, focus on your business owners. Business owners are great because the beautiful thing about a business owner is they’re going to keep ordering shirts on a regular basis. Family trip shirt, it’s great to sell, but chances are they’re not going to come back every single month and keep ordering shirts. And a lot of it is going to figure out who your customer is.

If you like that business aspect of it where you’re getting the constant orders on a regular basis, great. Other people, they like to do the one-off custom stuff because you’re always going to make more money on the smaller ones and twos than you will on the 25s and 30s.

Marc Vila:
Right. Because if it’s a family of four type of shirt and each one’s going to be a little different, it’s a little more time and effort and therefore you charge more for that. You said something great about an hour a day. One of the things that I’ve read in the past from other experts and we’ve talked about in the podcast is say a lot in a very reasonable amount of time every week. So you’re going to say, I can do six hours a week reasonably. So what does that mean? And then put it on, literally put it on your calendar. So you’re going to say, okay, Mondays are rough at my full-time job, I’m going to want to come home and spend time with the family, watch my show and go to bed. So you’re not going to do it Monday. Tuesday, I can do an hour after work. Wednesday is actually a little bit different because wife is going to dance with the girls and I’m usually home alone for a couple hours. Sometimes I go, sometimes I don’t.

I can definitely block off two hours on Wednesday. And then Sunday, I’m an early riser. I’m not, but in this fake story, somebody is. I’m an early riser. Before we go to church, we go to church at nine. I’m up at five and everyone’s asleep till eight. So Sunday morning from 5:30 to 7:30, two hours. You just found your six hours, put that in your calendar and that’s your work time. If you work five, six, seven hours a week on your side hustle and you reach out to your network of folks, your who, and you know what you’re going to sell them, t-shirts, mugs, whatever it’s going to be, without a doubt, in a extremely short period of time, not only will you be making your machine payment, but you’ll be finding that money to pay for the vacation, like the play money.

Because like you said, some people just want side hustle for play money. It’s like I’m going to work a little extra harder and then I’m going to take that money, I’m going to go on vacation. I’m going to buy parts for the race car, whatever your thing is.

Amir Bavi:
I’m guilty of that. Listen, this used to be our Disney money.

Marc Vila:
Okay, good. So we’ve got who, what. Where I think is a simple and obvious one, but it’s a question you should write down. Like, where are you going to put the machine, your heat press? Where are you going to run it? It’s an important thing. Are you going to do this out of your house in a spare bedroom? Are you literally going to set it up in the dining room? Are you going to do it in your garage? Can the equipment you’re running work well in a garage? If you’re in the main, the garage might not be a place you want to work in January, unless it’s heated or something like that. So the where is important. Or do you have a space where you can work? Maybe a friend of yours owns a mechanic shop and they have a back office they’re willing to let you use, maybe even for free.

So picking a space in your own personal space. And then if you’re not sure where you can work it in your space, then reach out to your network and find out. Do you have friends that are business owners? Do they have a spot they’re willing to let you to use for a period of time? Hey, can I start my business in that back office that you never use? Would you be willing to let me use that for three months for free? I mean, they’re your friend, you just ask. What do they say? They just say, insurance, I can’t. Okay, cool. I get it. Let me ask the next person. Maybe your grandma still lives in the house where the whole family was there and just three empty bedrooms. So there’s always a space, but you do have to consider where. When you started, where did you do it?

Amir Bavi:
So when I first started in my house, I used my garage and I had an extra spare bedroom that I had my computers and my equipment set up in the bedroom. Obviously depending on if it’s AC or your climate, we’re in Florida so it gets kind of hot and the garage isn’t really the most ideal place to leave computers and electronic equipment. But I left my heat press there. So I would do all my work inside the house. And then in the evening time, especially once everyone went to sleep, that’s where I like to do all my production in my garage. It was nice because I didn’t have to worry about waking up my baby or anything along those lines. But definitely doing it at home, especially if you’re doing it as a side hustle, I recommend… You don’t got to worry about expenses and oh, let me go find a location. Look, find a little spot.

Even if you have a small equipment, find a spot in your bedroom. Even if you got to rig something or do it, it doesn’t take up a lot of space, but just start doing it. And the reason why it’s better to have it in your own space is when you have it, let’s say you put it in a body shop, right? Let’s say maybe you don’t have full access to the shop, that you need to go knock out shirts right now, you’re up, you want to go get it done, but now you got to go rely on somebody else. That’s why it’s always better to have control. Not saying that if it grows. There’s times, even right now, I have a setup in my house. But at my dad’s house, he has more open space than I do. So majority of the equipment’s there.

So if I have something rushed that I need done now, I have the ability here. But if something a little bit bigger and I have a little bit more time, then it’s nice having the other space. But even if you have another space, make them a little bit of extra money and then keep the stuff in your house. Keep a little, even a Cricut or something small. Just if someone comes in through and needs something real fast, you ain’t got to go drive to go knock it out real quick. It was nice where if I’m sitting at home on Sunday, someone can call me, Hey, I need two quick shirts, can you knock it out? Less than an hour, you can have them done, signed, sealed, delivered.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s excellent. So great point about using the space that you live in to start because you can, it’s like working out from home versus going to the gym. A lot of people quit the gym because you’ve got to put on something acceptable to wear in public, drive there, park, find your locker, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then unwind all of that. When you work out at home, you wake up in the morning, work out, go in the shower, get ready, go to work. So it allows you to do it, right. And so that’s something really to be considered. I’ve talked to a bunch of different people about how they got started in their home. And yes, some folks have the spare bedroom, which is great. Other folks, they don’t have that space. All the bedrooms are filled, all the rooms are filled.

I talked to one person. Two example specific that I thought were funny but just interesting. One of them had their heat press and their printer on a back wall in the dining room and they literally just covered it with a furniture cover or something. They just put a furniture cover over it and put it in the back corner. It wasn’t really that noticeable. They put plants in front, I forget, I think they put plants in front of it. So it was hidden and you wouldn’t super notice it, but it was definitely right smack in the middle of like you walked into the house and it was right there to the right. They’re just like, we put this nice decorative covers on it, put a plant in front of it and just nobody ever even asks.

Amir Bavi:
See, I would’ve been the opposite. I personally would’ve had it out in the open so everybody saw it so they ask you.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s a great point.

Amir Bavi:
If people see it, they ask. You know?

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Great point too. That was another one was they got a fold out white table and they said, we put it in the corner. Again, I think it was a dining room or a living room, and they put it in the corner and it was near window so they could open up the window and get a breeze while they work and stuff like that. And they just left it there and it was just there. It was part of their house. And they said people would come over, they’d ask about it, they’d invite friends over and be like, “Hey, you want to have a couple beers and make a shirt?” “Heck yeah.” “Come on over.” And be like, “What do I need to bring?” It would just be like, “Oh, just go to Walmart and just pick a blank shirt you like.” And they’d come over, they’d bring their own shirt and you’d make stuff for fun.

And then it just turned into advertising because they would leave, they’d go to their neighbor’s house. “Oh my gosh, that shirt is so funny. Where did you make it?” “Oh, my buddy makes shirts. I literally went to his house and we had beers on Friday and I made three shirts.” “No way. Actually, I need shirts because I’ve got a landscaping business and I could actually use some shirts. Does he do that for…” “Yeah, he does it for a living.” Boom, business. So all of that works out. And so you could do it in the spare bedroom, you could put it somewhere in the house and hide it or you could put it right out in the open. Just do what works for you. But all of those are extremely viable options.

Amir Bavi:
The important thing is just to do something.

Marc Vila:
Right. Do something.

Amir Bavi:
I mean, just do something. I mean, to get started. Even luckily I had this space at the time when I started to have a spare bedroom to dedicate to it. But even my dad many, many years ago when he started, he started out. I still remember him starting out of our dining room. So there’s nothing wrong with starting in a dining room. I’ve literally seen people that put it in their master bedroom, they’ll put it literally next to their nightstand.

Marc Vila:
I’ve heard of that too.

Amir Bavi:
They’ll put their vinyl cutter there and that way they have their own little, that’s the only space they have in their room, but it’s still enough to work.

Marc Vila:
And the bedroom is one that’s interesting because the kids don’t go in there because it’s the master bedroom. It’s like it’s the parent space. So we could easily put stuff in there and we know the kids aren’t going to fiddle with it. And part of the point of all this is again going back to no matter who you are, no, the bedroom is a sacred place for me. It’s just for sleeping. I don’t want to put… Great, then you put it somewhere else. Just do what you like. You liked it out in the open because it was a way to advertise. Someone else didn’t like it because they like their house to be a little more prim and proper. So they decided to hide it. So it’s just great. But the point really is just you have to pick where. You should write it down, plan it, and then look at some of the basics.

Do I have power there? Do I have plugs on that wall that I want to put it in? If I don’t, can the machine I’m going to operate work with an extension cord? You should ask. If it won’t, how much is it going to cost to put an outlet there? Or can you do it yourself? I needed power in my house outside. I added the power. I looked it up, I consulted with somebody, I found out how to do it correctly and by code and I just added a power box. It wasn’t that hard. Took me a couple hours and I didn’t have to spend much money. So you figure that out and then just consider the space in general. If there’s going to be a heat press in there, is it tucked in a corner? Is it going to get super hot? If it is, are you in a climate that you could open up a window in there? If you can’t, how are you going to get a little ventilation? So consider maybe, all right, well, I’m going to have a heat press in here, it’s a small room, it’s going to get hot. I’m going to go to Walmart and buy a fan that I can put to blow some of the air out out of this room, whatever it might be. Just consider it and write it down.

Amir Bavi:
The one thing that I’ll say is to remember there’s no right or wrong. Just what works for one person doesn’t mean it’s going to work for everybody. One of the things that I feel is sometimes even if you’re looking at starting to get into the apparel business, and maybe you have a friend who does it, and you go and you see their production. Maybe they have a really nice setup. You don’t have to start there. Some of the most successful people start off with nothing and start from ground up. And sometimes it’s more enjoyable that way, being able to do it. But whether you like it in your dining room, your bedroom, your garage, whatever the case is. And plus, there’s some people that have detached garages or storage sheds that they put it in and they turn them into their whole little craft studios. Whatever works.

The important thing is I wouldn’t go so crazy trying to build out a whole space and putting all this money into it before you actually just do it. Buy the equipment, set it up, make your money. Later on, you can always grow and move it to a different spot in your house. Maybe you don’t have a lot of room, but you know what? The bedroom was the only place that you could put it and that’s the only place that really made sense for the time being. Okay, well great, you start there. And then later on, maybe you either move or you open a shop if you grow into another location or whatever the case may be, the options are really endless. The important thing that I always try to tell people is don’t get wrapped up in what somebody else does. Focus on yourself and what you want to do. Because your goals and someone else’s goals might be different.

There’s a lot of people who just want to do this to put an extra $500,000 in their pocket a month. They love their job. Whether you’re a teacher, a nurse, you love your passion, you just want to supplement some income. I hear especially a lot for teachers. I mean, we do obviously with a lot of teachers because when you’re in a job to where obviously during your school year you’re consumed, you have reasons to do it. But come summertime, you have all this open time. So instead of having to go find a part-time job doing all the stuff, you can go do it from the luxury of your home. And to be honest with you, for some people, it frees up the ability to, let’s say you want to go on vacation. If you want to live the life that you couldn’t do with your day job, having the extra income, having the extra money and stuff like this will help you not only in your own life but help you grow the business.

Because I always like to tell people, especially if you get into doing it as a passion and you want to grow it, always allocate a small percentage to put back into the business. You have to reinvest. I always like to tell people, try to put 10% back into your business. Even if you don’t use it right now, when you need more supplies or when you see that new machine that just came out that you have to have, at least you’re on track for it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s great. We’re a little over halfway through the podcast and I think we nailed the starting it, and you have a great segue there talking about growing it. So I’m going to finish with the why and then let’s go into growth a little bit. Because some of the folks listening here may be in the middle of all of these things, they may already be doing this and they’re trying to figure out, well, how do I get to the next level up? So hopefully if you’re just getting started, you’ve got an inspiration of the steps to make and the things to write down to help you get past that hump and actually go for it. And then if you’re currently doing it on the side, hopefully you’ve picked up a couple things to help you expand that side hustle or reorganize it.

I know plenty of people with side hustles that they’ve never written down the hours that they work. It’s a scramble every week. Maybe you’ve just been inspired to put some time in the calendar. So the last though, who, what, where, when. Why is a big one. You have to remember why you’re doing it. Are you doing it to make the extra thousand bucks a month? Are you doing it because you want to have Disney vacation money? Are you doing it because you want to have your own business and you could stop working for the man? Are you doing it because you have kids and you want to build a business that you can pass to them one day that you’re like, listen, I want to build this up. And in 20 years, I want to be able to have a business that’s now my son and daughter’s business.

So you have to consider what your reason is for wanting to do it. And you should write that down and never forget it. Because you’re going to hit bumps, fears, upset customers, something’s going to break. You’re going to turn on your machine one day and it’s going to say error and you’re going to be like, oh my gosh, I have a job to do. And now you’re on the phone with support trying to help figure it out. I’m like, things are going to happen. And if you always have your why, whether it’s in your head, written down. If it’s for Disney vacations, you’ve got a freaking picture of Mickey stuck up behind your machine. Every time you’re frustrated, you look up and you see that picture, the family picture of last year at Disney and you’re like, the kids are going again this summer, that’s why I’m doing this.

Or you picture if you want to buy a boat, you put your boat up there. I mean, that’s the thing they say successful people they do all the time is they write down what they want to do. They make affirmations, they remind themselves of what that are. So if you want the boat and the goal is like, listen, if I’m going to buy the boat, I need five grand to put down. Put a picture of the boat and have a chart with a graph that you’re putting the lines of that money that you’ve been saving up. And when you’re at 2,000 bucks and you hit a bump, you’re like, I’m halfway there almost.

Amir Bavi:
And I like to break it down. I’m a numbers guy so I like to break it down even a little bit further than that. So if you want to buy a boat and you know you need 5,000 and you know how much money you’re making, you should have an idea. Okay, if you’re making $10 a shirt and you need 5,000, okay, I need to sell 500 shirts to get this boat and make it more targeted. But I agree with that. I used to be a sales trainer for a company many years ago. I used to tell people all the time, a lot of times motivation lacks because people don’t know what they want. As far as even goals or whether it’s possession or more free time. But I used to tell people, visualize what it is. I don’t care. I remember a lady I dealt with who was having a tough time. She wanted to buy a new car. So I told her, flip through magazines, find the picture of the car that she wants and stick it right at her desk. And you’ll be surprised, it does motivate people more because when you actually see it and once you start putting numbers and association with it, it no longer becomes a dream. It’s now the goal.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, so that’s great. I think that the why is that, well, two things. One, everything you just said, but then the fear, you have fear and then the answer to that why. And they are always going to fight each other constantly. The fear of failure, the fear of getting started, the fear of what if I don’t make enough money and I don’t make the payment on this thing. What if I convert this area of my house and set it all up and that it just doesn’t work. That fear is always going to be how am I going to deal with customers? Whatever your fears are, they’re always going to get in the way of the reason why you want to do it. So you have to make sure that that why beats the fear every time. I want to take my kids in this vacation every year. So yeah, it’s a little scary to do this. Yeah, it’s scary to do that. But I know if I do this and I put the five hours a week in on the side hustle and all this stuff, that I’m going to make that money and we’re going to go every year. And in fact, we’re probably going to make, and in reality, you’re probably going to make enough money that you’re not just going to Disney, you’re doing the Disney cruise.

Amir Bavi:
You’re doing everything.

Marc Vila:
You’re staying at the nicer hotel because you didn’t even realize that when you pushed this, you could do so much more than you did. So I think that goes into the second half of this podcast. Or second, third, third, third, whatever.

Amir Bavi:
Now one thing I would like to add to that though too, and this is to be honest, I think this is the most important thing. All the luxuries are nice and it’s great having the extra money, but the number one thing is we live in a day and age where you just never know what can happen. And the nice thing about this, having the ability to work from home or for yourself, let’s say you’re working a job and the company you work for decides to shut down or lays off, at least by building this, you’re not totally in a position where you’re stuck. What am I going to do? I’ve known many people that have actually got the push to go full-time from either losing a job or having something happen or maybe a family emergency and you got to move. The nice thing about this is you can take this equipment anywhere.

So even if something happens where maybe you’re in a state and you want to move in a year or two years and you’re like, oh, I want to wait. Why wait? You can start now. You can move your equipment. Even if you built customers, you can still ship. We’re in a shipping day and age, so it’s not even like you’re going to lose that potential customer. But the reason why I say that is just because obviously we hear about it all day long on the news and stuff about how many companies are laying off and stuff. And a lot of the people, it’s nice to have that control, be able to make that money because there’s also a lot of abilities. I know we’re going to talk about it probably more in the next section, but we’re just talking about starting right now. It’s even easier to grow the business once you started. There’s so many avenues to go to.

Marc Vila:
Let’s talk about that a bit, right?

Amir Bavi:
Sure.

Marc Vila:
So at this point in time, we’re like 30 so minutes into the episode and we’ve really nailed down how you’re getting started and how you’re stabilizing that starting because you know where you’re going to do it, who you’re going to sell to, all this stuff. Now let’s fast-forward to a point where you’re working five hours a week maybe and you hit the goal. You wanted to make whatever the number is, you wanted to make $2,000 a month, a thousand dollars a month, three grand a month, and now you hit that and you want to grow the business. But you feel a bit stuck, because listen, with the time I’ve allotted, this is as much production as I can do. My orders are backed up two weeks, so I can’t sell more. I’m already kind of like if I sell more, I just get backed up further and eventually that doesn’t work. So how do you grow once you’re at that point?

Amir Bavi:
That’s one of the challenges. That’s like a growing pain that you encounter. Because you will hit times where you’ll be so busy. One of the best tips I can give with that is when you give your timeframes or your deadlines, especially if you’re working another job, don’t be so quick under the gun. Don’t be like, oh yeah, I’ll give it to you in a day or two. Give yourself time. If you know you’re busy, communicate that with your existing customers. That way you keep your existing customers happy. But if you’re in a point where you have dedicated time that you allowed and you exceeded that time and you’re still busy, now it’s time to start saying, okay, well look, how can I add a few more hours? If you’re only looking for a side hustle and you only want to make, let’s say $500,000 a month and you’re fine, that’s all you want to do, you don’t want to do anything else, then keep doing your business and make yourself selective.

The people who want to come to you, they’ll deal with you. They’ll wait your timeframe and that’s just how it is. If they don’t want to wait, then they can go somewhere else. But when you’re in that field where your level of production’s expanded, you can’t fill in no more work. So now it’s time to grow, obviously. So you can either grow by adding more an extra hour or two a day or a couple hours a week to it. Not saying, okay, I had a busy month, let me go quit my job now to go pursue this full-time. But you still want to definitely take the steps. But I can tell you, if you are at a point where you have enough business to keep you busy, find the extra hour or two a day. Even if it’s a weekend, a day off, even if you get a little bit less sleep, do it because those are going to be the growth that helps you get to that full-time.

Especially if that’s what you wanted to do, because it is not going to come easy. I’ll tell you from experience, you’re going to have those late nights where you’re working until early hours in the morning to get the job done. Especially if you’re working a full-time job, if you’re busy. But at the end of the day, it’s rewarding, it’s refreshing. Because if you’re bringing in that much more, you’re doing something right because you’re obviously making money. Now, if you’re on the right track, then especially if you keep growing at a fast pace, then obviously there’s going to come a point where you’re going to have to look past maybe your full-time job and weigh the pros and cons to see, am I making more money doing it for myself? Sometimes it could be as little as maybe going part-time in your full-time job and then pursuing this because it generates more revenue. Or maybe even you hate your full-time job and you want to go find a different part-time job and you have this as a supplement.

Marc Vila:
You hit on a few things. So I’ll kind of summarize some thoughts that you had there. I have another one to add that we spoke about. But for one is if you’re doing five hours a week, I mean, let’s get a calculator. So we could just talk about some super simple math. If you’re doing five hours a week and you can find one more, that’s 20% more time that you’re putting about in there. So if you can find two more hours, that percentage amount of work you’re putting in there is actually a good amount because you figured if you’re putting in 20 hours a month and you bump that up to 28, that’s a pretty significant amount of work that you could do. That can directly reflect the income that you make, right?

So a little bit more time. I would recommend that when you’re doing this, have the discussion with your significant other about it. Figure out what you’re going to cut out. I mean, there are simple things in life you can cut out that you really don’t need that you spend your time doing. Are there stupid TV shows you watch that you didn’t really need to watch? No, I’m just going to cut that out. Or some of the stuff I could work while I watch the show. I just watch sports so I don’t have to be hyper-focused for three hours. I can be working while the game is on, or I could put the game on just like the radio or something like that. So you can find a little bit of time. The other is, I was going to say is getting some folks to help you as your spouse or your son or daughter or a friend of yours or your friend’s son or daughter, your nephew. Can someone help you?

Amir Bavi:
And I recommend, especially if you have kids, kids are a great help for that because you’re teaching them a skill, you’re giving them the ability. My son, he’s nine, almost 10. I want to teach him into doing it because he sees my dad, he sees myself doing it, so he has interest for seeing it. But I always tell him, it’s like even for kids, kids have such a wild imagination. You can help even start a business for your kid at a young age, whether they like doing designs and stuff like that. A lot of people we talk to, kids these days want to start their own t-shirt business and stuff. And so it’s a great way to spend time with your kids. You’re educating them and teaching them. I know me personally, I hope my kids want to get more into it when they get a little bit older. But especially if you have a teenager, if you’re making money, give them a chance to make a little bit of money by helping you. Give them a chance, but let them see it. Because especially at that point, if you have the ability to make money, it’s good to teach a kid to say, Hey listen, you have more options than just going and working for somebody.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s great. And so bringing someone else in is great. Especially like you mentioned kids and there’s all this littlest things you could do. Let’s say one thing that came to mind is we always recommend do things for your customer after, like write a thank you note, things like that. You can have your kid do that. Maybe they’re only seven, they can write at this point in time. Have your kid write the thank you note. People are going to open that up and melt. Like thanks, this is me and my dad’s business. We appreciate your business, Bobby, whatever. And put that in there. And now you’ve taken maybe the thank you notes wasn’t that much time. Maybe only spent 30 minutes a week writing notes and put them in envelopes. But if your kid help you, they think it’s fun. They love spending the time with you.

And then every once in a while, they get to hand that to an adult and the adult’s going to open it and know they wrote it. They’re going to get the instant rewards out of that. So there’s all these little things you could do. Like you said, teenagers, hey, you want to make a hundred bucks? Saturday morning from 7:00 AM to 10, come in the living room with me, we’re going to work for three hours. You’re going to make a hundred bucks. And then when you go out on Saturday night with your friends to the movies, popcorn, stuff’s on you. You’re the hero.

Amir Bavi:
That’s it. If you have the ability to make the money, don’t come to me to ask me for the money.

Marc Vila:
Right. And then of course, you reward them in your own way. And then further, friends, neighbors, nephews, nieces, your spouse, anybody who can help you out is just a great way to do it. You can reward them with anything. You could pay them, of course, for helping you out. Maybe they just help you out a little bit on the side because they’re a part of your family. They’re just going to do it anyway. They just want to do it. They don’t want anything back because they’re reaping all the other rewards with it. So work on getting help. And then the next for growth that I have would be what are things that you’re doing that you don’t have to do, that you can pay someone else to do? Invoicing, graphics. Maybe even we talked before about you have an embroidery machine. Well, any job under 24 pieces you’re going to do. But if somebody comes for a hundred, you have a local shop that has a lot more machines that you can outsource to work too. You make a little bit less money on it, but you’ve also not spent the time. So now you’ve taken out that hundred piece order was going to eat up. I mean, let’s just say two weeks because you’re only working five hours.

It basically eats up two weeks worth of time. Well, you outsourced it, maybe you made half the money. But now you only spent maybe one hour dealing with that outsource job. Now you’ve got nine hours to grow the business, do more of those small jobs. And it may come to the point where 30% of your work you’re outsourcing, and that 30% right there is that much more growth you have because again, you’re only working five, seven hours a week.

Amir Bavi:
I’m a big fan of outsourcing on a lot of aspects like we talked about. And just because some people’s production, if you get an order for a thousand shirts, realistically to do it yourself would be next to impossible. The amount of time and energy you would take versus sending it to someone else. Yes, you make a little bit less money, but you’re making money for basically and essentially doing nothing. But that money can help you grow your business existing. One other thing to touch on besides this point is also looking at your equipment. Different equipment can produce different outputs. So maybe you’re starting with the smaller machine where you can only do 10 to 20 shirts an hour. Where if you are having volume on a regular basis, you might want to look at maybe the next step up.

Because now instead of doing 10 to 20 shirts an hour, now you can do 30 to 40 shirts an hour. And it could be as little as something adding another heat press, buying another machine, adding another process to it. And even if you don’t, like let’s say you’re in a job where you really don’t have a lot of extra time or your life’s very demanding. Sometimes it’s not always about finding more time and it’s just finding how to use the existing time you have a little bit more efficiently.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s great. A lot of folks come to this realization and that’s where they go from, they have a vinyl cutter and they move up to a digital printer. Or they have a hobby cutter and move up to a professional cutter. Or they have a digital printer and decide to buy extra heat presses or a larger printer or a different piece of equipment. And that’s the key right there too is that is in so many words, that’s more labor. That’s equivalent almost to hiring labor is that if you have a cutter and you’re using that and it’s eating up all of your time, well, if you buy a digital printer, you’re going to find that the same exact shirt takes about eight seconds to print on the digital toner printer like a digital heat effects machine. Where on the cutter, that was between cutting and weeding was maybe 15 minutes a shirt on some of that.

I mean, some definitely could be that. Where it was literally 10 seconds on the printer. So you’ve significantly increased your output. And then now you’ve also moved to digital so you’ve actually created a new product you couldn’t do before, because now you can print a picture of a dog or a cat or a baby where you couldn’t do that. So you’ve produced faster and you’ve increased your product line, what you can actually offer.

Amir Bavi:
Absolutely. So if you’re doing vinyl, and let’s say you’re doing five to 10 shirts an hour, but you go to a digital printer where you’re doing 25, 30 shirts an hour. Well, if you had a hundred shirts to do, if they were taking you, let’s say even you were fast and you’re doing 10 shirts an hour, you got 10 hours of production. If you can cut 10 hours of production down to three, think about how much more money. You’re still making the same amount of profit in the job. You’re just using your time more efficiently. And especially as the business grows, that’s what’s going to be important. Because even if you don’t outsource and you do everything in house, having the right machines is what makes all the difference. Because when you look at these bigger shops that you’re outsourcing this stuff to, the biggest thing that you’re paying them for is their equipment.

Marc Vila:
Right. Because they have the ability, they have five embroidery machines where you have one, right?

Amir Bavi:
Exactly.

Marc Vila:
And some of that, that leap is actually, and somebody listening to this right now is probably they have one piece of equipment, they’re doing all this stuff and they’re having a hard time growing. Well, the leap you took to get that first machine is much scarier than the leap to get the second machine. So it’s like if you already have customers and you’re already making a thousand bucks a month and you’re like, how am I going to grow? Well, what if you invested in a piece of equipment that yeah, costs you a few hundred bucks a month in the risk, but you significantly increased your output. Now all of a sudden you’re doing some of the job in vinyl, some of them digital print. You’re running two machines at once and heat pressing in between the stuff.

Well, how many hours did you put, just like you said, you put seven hours back in your pocket. You’re going on those Facebook groups and you’re trolling for more business, you’re attending a networking event, you join the local chamber of commerce and you go to the luncheon every month now. You do all these things you couldn’t do before because you bought that time back and that will then grow the business. And it’s a lot less scarier than that initial jump. So if you’re in business now and you’re trying to figure out how do I grow it, I feel like I’m stuck. If you feel you’re stuck in production, then you have to reduce that production. Whether it’s by paying someone to help you, getting help from your kids or family, buying another piece of equipment, something like that. That is a big thing to help you step up your growth.

Amir Bavi:
To be able to grow a business, you need growth. I mean, it sounds stupid, but it’s true though. And how you grow is by equipment. Especially for apparel, there’s so many different types of pieces of equipment that you can go and build into. Whether you start at a cutter, you go to a white toner printer. Let’s say you expand so much from there, you go to a DTG next. There’s so many different options. Keep in mind, labor is expensive. So a lot of times it’s cheaper to spend the two, $300 a month for a finance payment than it is to pay an employee 500, a thousand dollars, even if it’s a friend or family member. It sounds overwhelming at time, but when you start breaking it down, because even with some equipment, people go into sticker shock sometimes. But the thing to realize, what’s expensive to one person is cheap to somebody else.

If you’re used to a Cricut where you’re spending a couple hundred dollars and then you go to your next step, you might be looking at a couple thousand dollars. But then if you look at some of the larger companies, they’re buying a couple hundred thousand dollar machines. So everything is a progression. You got to start somewhere. But understand the larger machines, the larger the volume, the more you grow your business. That’s what you want. You don’t want to just buy one machine, okay, I’m going to run this machine till it dies and this is all it is. Okay, I can’t afford. If you’re doing embroidery and your machine’s running all day long or while you’re working and you can’t afford to fill up any more time, then it’s time to start maybe looking at another machine if you can’t add more time to it.

Marc Vila:
Right. Yeah, that’s that. Because then you double your production immediately. Well, great. So another thing to talk about this with growth and going, we mentioned earlier, you mentioned about maybe you take your full-time job and go part-time. This is not an easy question, but how do you know when that time is right? For you, when would you be able to make the jump?

Amir Bavi:
So I’ll tell you, this was one of the toughest ones. When I left my full-time job the first time to go with my business directly, that was a scary thing. I had some personal family stuff that come up that kind of drew me away. So all the signs were leading to it. And I’ll tell you, it was very scary. I mean, even to this day, looking back at that, it’s tough because it’s never really, is there a right time? There’s really no such thing as the right time.

Marc Vila:
It’s like having a baby.

Amir Bavi:
Exactly. It’s risk and reward. I’m a firm believer that in business, scared money don’t make money. So you have to take some risk. If you’re just waiting for it just to come fall in your lap and let everything just go through easily, you’re never really going to get anywhere. Growth sometimes is uncomfortable, but as far as finding out when the time is right, so I did not do this, but I wish I did. I will say really just understanding, your side hustle has to exceed your monthly income from your day job. And you would want to have that at least on a three to six month regular basis before you even start looking at anything. And the next thing that I would do is I would work to build at least a six-month savings. That way you have something to fall back on. When I did it, I kind of did it brash and it was like, all right, you know what, I’m just going to go with it. I was busy, I had good clients. And luckily it kept me afloat, but it was a struggle. If I had to go back and do it again, I would definitely reevaluate things.

Marc Vila:
Right. Mark Stephenson, the co-host of this podcast for a long time, and now part-time co-host. He had a thing that he would talk about a lot about being so many months rich or so many months wealthy. He would say, if you wanted to do this, well, put that money back into your business. Take that money, that side hustle money. You wanted to have a thousand bucks a month to play with, now you’re making $2,000 a month. Well, take that thousand and you put it aside because you say, I want to build that nest egg enough to where I’ve got a chunk of money. And then you say, okay, I’ve got three months worth of rent. I got three months worth of this. I got this. I’m not going to quit my full-time because I’m going to go part-time, whether it’s there or get a different part-time job so I’m still going to have money, but I’ve also got a safety net. And that makes the jump a little bit less scary.

So I think the steps would be making sure that you’ve got some stability in your business, make sure that you’ve saved some money aside and you’ve got it for when, because business income is a wave. When you have a job with a salary, 40 hours a week flat, every paycheck’s the same. But with business, you’re going to have busier months and slower months. So this will help you to stabilize that. And then I think the last bit is just make sure your mind’s right. Make sure you’re confident, you feel good, your family’s on board and you’re ready to do it. That you feel, I think, I don’t know if you have to feel so confident because like you said, you never get there. There’s never a perfect time. But you have to be in the right mindset to say, I’m going to do it. I can do it.

How do I know I can do it? Business has been steady for six months. I’ve got X month, a month worth of savings that I’ve put into it. I’ve turned away business that I knew I could have taken if I had more of the time. I’ve checked all these boxes, family’s on board, I got a buddy who said he’s willing to help me out because he has a side hustle too and we can work together. You’ve got all these things checked and you’re like, there’s safety net. Go for it. All right.

Amir Bavi:
One thing I would add to that too is while you’re setting everything up before you would go full-time is build your connections at the same time. Sometimes it’s just going around to your area. Let’s say if you have an embroidery machine, you’re small, you’re starting it from your home, go to local embroidery shops. You don’t even have to tell them you own a machine. Sometimes it’s just walking into them, seeing how they have it set up, get an idea, get an idea of what they charge even. But the reason why is if you build a relationship with somebody, for me, with a lot of my vendors that I deal with that if I subcontract something out or send something out, you want to go deal with the people. So find local people. Don’t try to find people online. Go try to find local people where you can build a relationship. Hey, listen, I have a small embroidering machine. Every now and then I get larger orders. Hey, can we work something out to where I can send you these larger orders? Obviously you have more equipment. There’s a lot of people who do wholesale contract work, and that’s their whole business is just doing work for other people.

Marc Vila:
Yup. And the reverse you could say, and by the way, if you got little onesie-twosies that you don’t want to do and you want to throw them my way, I’d like to have a little give and take partnership here. And they’ll say, yeah, every once in a while someone comes in and they want one shirt and I’m just not going to do it because I’m just not set up for that. I would have to charge them this setup fee and this, and this. Nobody wants to spend $80 on a single shirt. And you say, I would do that because I’m a little time wealthy now.

Amir Bavi:
That’s it.

Marc Vila:
So I don’t mind putting and making a little bit less per hour because I’m getting started. So those are great relationships to build. So we’re about ready to wrap this up. Maybe any closing advice for somebody, for I guess two pieces of advice. One would be somebody who is almost ready to start. So what advice would you give them to help them know that they can do it? And then maybe the second is that somebody who’s been going for a while and they want to grow, what’s a nice piece of advice to help them grow? So start and then grow.

Amir Bavi:
So to start, the first thing I would say is obviously start, try something. Even if you’re looking at getting started, if you have no ability, let’s say you don’t really understand the graphic side of the business, you think you would like doing custom t-shirts, but maybe you’re not even too technical savvy. There’s ways to start into this business where you can purchase even just a heat press and you can start with buying transfers from other companies or other suppliers. Works out best if you can find local. That way you don’t have to pay for shipping. If you get a rush job, you can still accommodate it. But really just understanding your options. If you’re not savvy in that regard, start buying it. Buy the heat press, buy the shirts, just buy pre-made samples. You can build a whole business just off of clip art and standard pre-made designs.

But you want to start somewhere. If you have interest in vinyl cutting, or if you’re more hands on and you want to be more into it, start with the Cricut machine. Do a little bit, get familiar with it. Once you get the basic understandings down, everyone’s going to start at a different point. Start where you’re comfortable. Some people start in, they’re like, look, I got a little bit of money, I want to skip to start a little bit better than most people. I want to start maybe at a white toner system so I don’t have to deal with the weeding and the headaches. A lot of times people will do research on it. They’ll be like, look, I don’t want to weed. I don’t want to deal with this. So if you’re that person and you have the money that can afford to substantiate maybe a little bit of growth, look for a better machine.

Find the machine that works best for you, whether it’s a heat press, vinyl cutter, white toner system, whatever’s within your limitations. Just start somewhere. Once you start, then grow it slowly. Don’t go out and spend all your money, your life savings to buy equipment and hope that the sales are going to come. Selling is easy. The jobs will come with it, but if you don’t start, you’re never going to go.

Marc Vila:
Right. I mean, the advice is actually do it, which is the hardest thing is to actually do it. Like they say, there’s all these stats. I’m like the percentage of businesses that fail and the percentage of businesses that are successful and the percentage of people who make a ton of money. But the largest percentage that nobody ever talks about are the trillions of ideas that never get started. That’s the biggest percentage of people. This is something that’s funny that I’ve heard all the business moguls talk about and people who do advice and life advisors and all that stuff, everyone says, you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket. You can’t make more money if you don’t do something to do it. You can’t have a successful business if you don’t start. The general rule of thumb is the bigger place you can start, the faster growth you can get to.

So if you can start with, say, a nice white toner system, yes, you’re going to start off with a monthly payment, a few hundred bucks a month right out of the gate. But you’re in reasonably, maybe not high production, but you’re in reasonably high production right out of the gate, especially compared to someone who spent 300 bucks on a hobby machine. So you are going to be able to grow faster because you could do a 50 short order and not be up till two o’clock, three o’clock in the morning. On the flip side, if you literally can’t do the larger machine, if it’s just not in the cards but you can do a heat press, do the heat press because at least you’re starting. Maybe it’s slower growth, maybe it takes you a little bit longer to get to that thousand bucks a month you want to make for the side hustle, but you get there.

And then you get there and you say, now the only excuse for me not getting the white toner printer is myself because you have the money. So then you do that. So wherever you can start, do it. And then the second part of that question is growth. Now that you’re making a bit of money every week, and we talked about time and help and all that stuff, but if you want to really hurdle past that plateau, what’s just the piece of advice you want to leave for this one?

Amir Bavi:
So for this one, I would honestly say really just, it is kind of a couple pieces. One, know your business, know where you want to grow to. If you started and you’re like, Hey, look, I’m doing good. I hit my goals where I’m at. You need to have your next progression. Where am I going from here? If I’m taking this to my full-time, what does my full-time apparel shop or what does my full-time business look like? What am I actually working towards in that regard? Because if you don’t have a vision, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s hard to have a clear path. Just like we say, write it down. You write it down just so you have a clear recognition of it and a path to how to do it.

One of the things I would say is if you’re in business and you’re growing, especially if you run into struggles. Because I’ll tell you one thing, in business, you’re always going to have challenges. I used to want to quit almost every day it seems like. It seems like almost every day something would come up. It’s like, oh my God, I just wish I had my job. I just wish I had my job. I don’t want to deal with the headache. But you know what I learned? That comes with growth. So if you’re ever getting to those positions where you’re questioning growing too fast or having too much work, look at equipment. Equipment is the key to growth. Going from machine that does from 10 to 25 to 50 shirts an hour, because labor’s very expensive in this. I can promise you that any machine will cost cheaper than hiring somebody to do the work.

So if you can at least have the machine that will do majority of the work, and literally there’s machines where you’ll go from five to 10 shirts an hour to 25 to 35 shirts an hour to 40 to 50 shirts an hour. So having the right equipment makes all the difference in the job. If you have a Cricut and you’re doing two, 300 shirts a month, you got to reevaluate that because your time and effort and everything going in there. To be honest, technology changes a lot. There’s people that may have start, got into this five, 10 years ago, they’ve been doing the same method, but the technology constantly changes. Looking at some of the newer things that just come out. And the nice thing is these days, it’s easier than ever. You have DTF transfers that people can buy. Even the DFX systems. You have so many different options that you can get into the industry.

So if you’re already in it and you’re growing and you’re looking to expand, really look at your equipment on how you’re doing it. Your finished product to your customer is going to play a big part of it, but just understanding your time. So many people I talk to that do 10 to 20 shirt or 10 shirts an hour and they go to 25, 50 shirts an hour, it’s like, oh my God, I have so much time now. It’s like I can actually do stuff. Because the problem is you forget sometimes all the other stuff that comes with the business too, because you still have paperwork that you have to do, admin, ordering supplies. So it’s more than just producing the shirts.

Marc Vila:
Sales, customer service, admin, taxes, all these things.

Amir Bavi:
That’s it.

Marc Vila:
And I think that to add on to that, the piece of advice I would give would be one of the biggest travesties in this business are folks that have a hard time differentiating between the cost of things versus the value of their time. So they say, I’m not going to buy another heat press. It’s like two grand. It’s like, well, every week you are spending an extra five hours, whatever it is, doing this extra work. That’s your time. That is worth a lot of money. That $2,000, yes, it’s an upfront cost or financing it. It’s like 50, 60, 70 bucks a month to finance something like that, whatever. You’re like, gosh, but look at all that money. And it’s like, well, what if you had that five hours a week back? What would you do with it? It could just be spend more time with your family. It could be grow the business. It could be go and sell more.

It could be focusing on developing a new product that you want to grow. So many folks will get bogged down and say graphics and they will, I spend an hour and a half working on this graphic. Well, we have ColDesi Graphics as a surface, as a service. That could have cost you like 30 bucks, right? And it’s like, yes, it costs you $30, and yes, maybe the job was only a $200 job. And you’re like, dang, that’s a big chunk of the money. Well, you’re trying to grow your business. If you spent that hour and a half messing with a graphic because you’re not a graphics pro, and instead you spent 30 bucks and it’s done and ready to print, that is maybe five, 10 minutes worth of work that you put into ordering online, getting it and reviewing it.

And then that hour, you did something else. We talked about, you just went on in the Facebook group that you’re in, and you just looked for business. You texted some friends. You picked up the phone and you called a buddy who owns a business. Hey, I haven’t talked to you in a while. How you been? How’s your business? Hey, guess what? I did it too. I started the business. You have an hour long, you go out to lunch with that person, whatever it is. You network, sell, build. And so often, folks will look at that dollar amount and they don’t assign any value to their own time. But if you really think about it, take all the revenue you generated. So pick three months worth of time. How many hours did you put into it? How much revenue did you generate? And divide it. Look at that number. For one, that’s currently what your time is worth.

So let’s just say it’s low. It’s like 25 bucks an hour, right? Well, okay, that’s more than a part-time job you’d ever get, right? Part-time jobs don’t pay 25 bucks an hour. Well, what could you do to make that worth more money? Right? Well, if you got that second heat press, how many hours would that have cut it down by? Would it cut the hours down by 20%? Add 20% to that? You just upgraded yourself from being worth 25 bucks an hour to 30 bucks an hour in a snap. And then all of a sudden you start to see the value in that investment. Okay, well, I’m working 20 hours, 20 hours times five bucks, and all of a sudden it starts adding up. You’re like, gosh, I’m paying off that heat press in two months. Why did I not do this sooner?

Amir Bavi:
You’ll be surprised at the amount of people you talk to that will spend good money on a machine. And then it’s like they’ll come back a month or two later and be like, oh yeah, the machine’s paid. It’s like you just bought it. Got busy.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, got busy.

Amir Bavi:
I remember, I had a guy that I sold a machine to and the guy had more jobs. The guy had 80 jobs come in beforehand. We don’t recommend that. It’s like, dude. He’s like, man, these orders keep coming in. It’s like you haven’t even gotten the machine yet. So it can grow fast. I definitely agree with that. But also knowing that as far as time goes, one thing that I like to touch on is making sure you’re charging the right thing. It’s very easy to say, okay, my cost is this. It’s only taking me a few minutes to do the shirt, so I’ll only charge a couple dollars for my time. It’s only taking me a couple of minutes. You don’t want to do that. If you charge $20 a shirt, you should charge $20 a shirt regardless. Regardless if it costs you three or $5, whatever it does, you should still make money because we’re in business to make money. A lot of that is when you charge, understand that customers are not only paying for your knowledge and your know-how, but they’re paying for your equipment at the same time.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, they’re paying for the machine. They’re paying for the thing they can’t do. They’re paying for the customer service you’re going to deliver to them. All of that. Well, we’ve had a great episode. We probably went a little long on time, but there was so much information. And the thing I’ll just finish with as kind of last thought is mindset. You and I have had this conversation and the energy I got out of it was just super positive mindset. You’ve got this. You’ve got a great energy. You can feel it. I mean, the first time that I spoke to you, I was like, this guy’s getting on the podcast because you have this good energy and this mindset that inside you may be fighting battles, but outside you’re just like, listen, I’m going to do it. I’m going to try it. I’m going to take the risk. I’m going to go for it.

And that’s what you need to do as a business owner is you need to say yes, you’ve got anxiety about starting it, you’re concerned about growing, you’re not sure what your next steps are going to be, but the thing in the front is going for it and having a positive mindset. I will tell you that basically statistically, 95% of people that complain all the time about their business go online to complain, go into forums to say something negative, talk negatively to their friends and family about the business or their job are not as successful as the folks who are like you that just come out and say, I’m going to do it. I’m going to try it, and say positive things about it. And yes, like you said, every day I was ready to quit, but you never did because you kept the right mindset going forward.

Even though I’m sure it wasn’t perfect, but you show that energy. So if you’re out there and you are constantly negative and complaining and saying you can’t figure something out so you’re ready to throw it out the window, you got to erase that stuff. It’s up to you to erase that stuff out of your mind. Because you can hold on to that or you can just say, yes, it’s going to be hard. Today was a rough day, the machine gave me three, four errors. I couldn’t figure out why. Support didn’t know. And then finally the next day we got it figured out together and they’re up and running like that. Yeah, that sucked, but I’m moving on, or I can complain about it for the next 10 days and waste all that energy rather than going up to a potential customer and shaking their hand and being like, you ready to make some awesome shirts?

Amir Bavi:
I agree a hundred percent because first off, people don’t want to do negativity. But if you have all that time and energy to spend complaining and all the reasons why you can’t do it, that’s the reason why you’re not succeeding. Because people who are busy are so busy figuring the solutions to the problems than they are worrying about what the problems are. One of my favorite quotes is I believe it’s a Henry Ford quote where it says, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”

Marc Vila:
There you go. No, that’s true. I think that’s a great place to wrap up. And if after listening to this you think you can start, you think you can grow, you can go to the next level, whatever that next level is, then it’s up to you to do it. You absolutely can because we see just thousands of people doing it all the time. And if you’re still unsure after listening to all this and you have a lot more questions, pick up the phone. You can call. You can go to coldesi.com. You can live chat with one of our pros. You can pick up the phone and call somebody and say, I listened to this podcast. I feel like I’m 80% there. I’m stuck on one, two or three. Can you help me understand this? And everyone you talk to will be able to help you get past that hump and figure out what you need. Whether it’s, Hey, you just need to hit go, because sometimes that’s all it is. Or it’s just, yeah, here’s some advice, here’s this. Just apply for financing because you’re concerned that you can’t get approved for a loan, have you tried? So there’s all of these things that are just a conversation away. So thank you so much for joining us.

Amir Bavi:
Thank you for having me.

Marc Vila:
Go ahead and go to coldesi.com if you’re curious about the type of equipment or anything else that we have to offer to help you start or grow your business. Amir Bavi is probably going to be somebody, or potentially going to be somebody right on the phone that you talk to. So you’ve heard his voice and you know where you can go for some advice directly with Amir, but also all of your colleagues. You have an amazing group of people around you. So there’s tons of people to help you at that or experts in different lines of equipment. And maybe Amir is the expert in the one you’re looking at, or maybe it’s somebody else. But we’re here to help. So thanks for listening and have a good business.

Amir Bavi:
Thank you.

 

 

Many small business owners get into their business with an idea, rather than a full plan. You want to make t-shirts or print signs. You know it’s profitable and you’ve already got some referral business. It’s not that hard to make some money and get overwhelmed with business. What IS hard is growing your business to achieve your dreams and goals.

One of the first steps to understanding how to create a great marketing plan (that will lead to success) is understanding the 4 Ps of marketing. In so many words, it’s understanding your businesses goals, so you can make truly educated marketing decisions.

So, what are the next steps for your marketing?

• Should you start a TikTok?
• Should you do local paid advertising?
• Would doing Google ads be a good idea?
• Is renting a booth at a farmers market going to be profitable?
• Is hiring a marketing firm/person the right move?

Anyone who tells you they have the answer to these questions is wrong. None of these can be answered correctly without knowing your 4 Ps. So let’s get to them!

All Marketing revolves around the 4 Ps:

Product:

The number of products categories, product lines and variations your company sells.
For example:

• Product Categories: Workwear, Signage
• Product Lines:
  • Workwear
  • Men’s Workwear
  • Women’s Workwear
  • Signage
  • Printed Graphic Decorative
  • Indoor Signs
• Product Variations:
  • Workwear
  • Women’s Short Sleeve t-shirt
  • Women’s Long Sleeve t-shirt
  • Women’s Polo
  • Hats (One)
  • Signage
  • Room Names / Braille
  • Restrooms
  • Directories
  • Maps
  • Instructions (wash hands)
• How a product is presented or packaged and served
• How will your customer place their order?
  • ecom, call in, email, in-person.
• How will your customer get their product?
  • Personal delivery, by mail, customer pick up.
• Do you install or instruct?

Price:

• What is the fair market rate of each item sold?
• How do customers pay? Can they pay online? Deposits? Pay in full?

Promotion:

• What channels are you currently utilizing?
  • New business: Nothing because your business hasn’t started.
  • Existing business: Google My Business? Social Media? Word of Mouth? YouTube? Paid Advertising?
• What channels are you capable of utilizing?
  • Can build a website? Can you hire someone to build one?
  • Can you afford a paid advertising budget?
  • Are there live events you can attend?
  • Do you have a personality for social media/YouTube?

Place:

• Are your products sold online? In store? 3rd party?
• Do customers need to be local?
• Are your products only sold with your physical presence? (e.g., signs)
• Is there anywhere you won’t / can’t sell?

BONUS

Once you have 4Ps then you need to look at your demographics

• What is the face of your customer or their profile / avatar?
  • e.g., local small business owners – Dentists, Drs, Pharmacy, Interior Designers, Real Estate, Golf Course

Now that you have the 4Ps and your Demographics. You can start answering questions:

• Should you start a TikTok?
• Should you do local paid advertising?
• Would doing Google ads be a good idea?
• Is renting a booth at a farmers market going to be profitable?

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello and welcome to episode 189 of The Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. My name is Marc Vila, and today, we have a fantastic guest with us, Sara Isom. So welcome to the podcast.

Sara Isom:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Marc Vila:
Thank you. So Sara works on the marketing team over here at ColDesi. She’s a marketing manager over here. And the topic that we’re going to discuss today are the four Ps of marketing, okay? So why don’t you tell us a little bit about why you need to know about the four Ps and then we’ll get into what the Ps are after that.

Sara Isom:
So the four Ps represent the, I’d say, format of any marketing-based strategy. In order to understand how your marketing structure should be built, you need to answer the questions under each of the Ps. Once we have the answers, we have set our foundation to building out a true marketing strategy. So while tactics and channels can change constantly for marketing, this remains the same. Understanding these Ps will help you gain the knowledge, the information and the foresight to build a strategic strategy for your marketing.

Marc Vila:
Okay, great, great. So to bring that back, to layman term it, is that somebody is going to ask you, “Should you open up a TikTok account?” or you might ask somebody, “Should I open up a TikTok account? Should I bring my business to TikTok?” And there’s some other things I wrote down here, “Should you do local paid advertising? Should you do Google Ads? Should you rent a booth at a farmers’ market?” So in general, all of these are great marketing ideas for the customization business, just as a general standpoint. So being on social media, yes. Having a website, going to local farmers’ markets, these are all great ideas, but when it comes down to your business, actually figuring out if it’s right for you depends on the answers and the information within your four Ps of marketing.

And I love relating things to the real world, right? So I like to barbecue grill. It’s one of the things I like to do. I’ve got a bunch of little hobbies and that’s one of them. And somebody would say, a friend of mine had said, “I was thinking about making a brisket,” right? And I knew about what they had in their yard. And I just said, “You can’t do it with what you have. You don’t want to do it with what you have. Here’s an alternative recipe that’s pretty close with the tools that you have.” So somebody would say, “What’s the best barbecue you could make?” And somebody’s answer might be brisket, right? Well, not for his backyard. You just had a gas grill with nothing else and that’s not really something that’s known to be done. A smoked brisket is not really something you’re going to do in a gas grill.

Sara Isom:
And maybe one day, but not today.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, Not today. Yeah, not today, not with the tools that you have. So that’s what this is about, is, should you start a TikTok and start doing things for your business on there? Well, I don’t know what tools you have. I don’t know what is in your business space to really properly answer that. So if anybody comes to you in your business and doesn’t know much about it and tells you, “You should be doing this,” or, “Why aren’t you doing that?” you always have to remember that they may or may not know those four Ps of your business and the advice might not be sound or the suggestion might not be the best one. So you’ve got to do what’s right exactly for your business and it’s going to revolve all around what these four Ps are.

So why don’t we dive into those? We’ll describe what these four Ps are, help you to figure out the answers for yourself and it’d be great if you put these into a Word document or an Excel or something like that, so you can start to track this information for yourself. And then at the end of it, with some examples, we can actually answer some of the questions we brought up in the beginning. So why don’t you tell us the first P in the four Ps?

Sara Isom:
All right, so you will see in the real world the Ps are represented, usually the first P and these aren’t always in the same order, would be product. And it’s the information surrounding the product that you have and that’s product or service. So this would be represented by the overall product, product lines and variations of those products. So really getting to know the product or products that you are selling. That could be what the product is, what does it do, how does it serve the public, but then even breaking it down further into what does your product represent and what represents it. So what is the product? What are the categories? What are the individual lines?

I think an example that I usually give is a bakery and representing the different product categories would be something like cookies, cupcakes and donuts and breaking it down by product line. If I was looking at donuts, it might be cream-filled versus a different kind of donut. I don’t even know donuts, donut holes, right? And you can break it further down into the variations of donut holes. So really understanding that knowledge. Also representing within this product element is the packaging, how things are carried out, can a product be delivered. Understanding all of these, and a lot of it seems operational, gives the marketing or the person that’s either on the marketing team, if you have a team, if there’s an individual doing it within your company, it gives us an understanding of where we fit into the mix, what is needed from marketing in order to service these products, the product lines and so forth.

Marc Vila:
Okay. So in our industry, we’re typically going to be in apparel, promotional goods, customized goods, anything like that, so from science to wall art to T-shirts and everything in between. So if we were to break down your product categories in this example, potentially your business could focus on workwear and signage. Maybe you mainly are working in healthcare and you have a few other areas that you work in. So I made some notes based on the example that you provided or based on your description, I made an example. How about that?

Sara Isom:
Mm-hmm.

Marc Vila:
Okay, so for one, we are not getting going to get into a debate of whether a donut hole is a donut, okay? But I’ve imagined that there’s some sort of debate there. So we have product lines or product categories. So if you’re going to define your story, this fictional story, the categories would be workwear and signage, right? That’s the two things they do. They’ve got a UV printer that they print all different types of signage on and then they have mostly workwear that they’re doing. So potentially they’re doing scrubs, they’re doing polo shirts, hats, jackets, things like that. And like I said, mostly medical and potentially in some other areas that have a similar clientele.

On the workwear, now you’ve got product lines, right? So you’ve got your workwear. You do men’s and women’s workwear. That’s just simple. You just offer two different categories. You have men/unisex and then you’ve got women’s cuts for the people who like that. And then the second product line you would have would be signage. And in your signage, maybe you do printed graphics that are images of doctors or images of landscapes and then you also do other types of indoor signage as well. Now the next step below that, and if you have your categories or product lines and you have your variations, so in your workwear, we have women’s short sleeve, women’s long sleeve, women’s polos, hats. And then you have all of that broken down. You can imagine all of the different product lines you have under workwear and the same for signage, right?

Signage, you may have room names with braille printed on them. You’ve got restroom signs, directories maps, instructional things like in the bathroom, it says, “Wash your hands.” So it’s important for your business to go through that first P, even though it may seem really obvious and simple I would say, but you should break down. What are the categories you have, what product lines are under those categories and what are all the variations? And you may not have to define, and I don’t know, and you can tell me if you do, but should you define every variation? Because I feel like, in apparel and promotions, it can get … How deep do you go? Because you don’t necessarily want to say T-shirts and then have every single color listed down because some T-shirts have 40 variations. So where do you start and stop there?

Sara Isom:
Well, you get as detailed as you possibly can. And that’s honestly to understand what it is your marketing will be supporting. If you miss one variation, then you might not support that in your marketing efforts. If we’re talking about red, white, blue and green T-shirts and I never mentioned blue anywhere, then I’ve just left that out of all forms of marketing and promotion, which would be terrible to do in the case of anything that you’re trying to sell. So defining things specifically, even mapping them out, you’re going to have to have that somewhere and why not have it out there in the open so that all of your marketing can influence every variation possible because you’re going to need it.

Marc Vila:
Right. So if you may want to be doing some promotion around like pink ribbons, if you don’t necessarily list or remember or recall or tell somebody you offer lines of pink apparel, they may not consider that in the marketing.

Sara Isom:
And you’ve just missed out on the entire month of October celebrating Breast Cancer Awareness.

Marc Vila:
Right, right. And so in this plan where you were breaking down everything, what if you did actually link to products that you sell? So it wasn’t available that not necessarily you physically put in your Excel sheet every color because that does change over time too. They’re going to, apparel manufacturers, add and remove colors all the time. So what if you maybe linked to the shirts that you sell, so it could be dynamic in your Excel spreadsheet or something like that?

Sara Isom:
Oh, that’s absolutely doable. It’s just more of answering the question for marketing in order to get the understanding of what’s available. When you market it, you market it, but you don’t want to then be blamed for not marketing something that’s on the list. You might not market everything on the list.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Sara Isom:
But you don’t want to miss out on marketing, if that makes sense.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that makes sense. And in the beginning of your small business, this may all be you, right?

Sara Isom:
Yes, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
You may doing it all by yourself.

Sara Isom:
And it sounds like it’s incredibly tedious, but in the same sense, it is already part of operations. You have the list somewhere. You know what you are selling. So it’s just making sure that you understand that when it comes to all things marketing. Because again if you’re selling online like a lot of businesses do, you want to make sure you have every variation because not everyone wants the same thing. There’s uniqueness out there. And then also understanding that you might have variations that you want to do in the future and it’s great to map those out, because the bigger you get, the more product lines you’ll bring on, the more variations and the more money you can potentially make from bringing on multiple variations or product lines.

Marc Vila:
So when you’re defining your product then, theoretically could actually map out the core products that you sell now, right? If we look at apparel manufacturers, blank manufacturers, anything like that, even if you’re selling promotional pens, there are just so many variations out there. There’s really too much for you to truly sell to your customer. There’s books alone of just pens, a whole book of pens and to hand that to your customer can be pretty overwhelming. And the same thing with T-shirts and everything like that. So most of the time, small business owners and people starting up and getting successful pick the lines that they carry. This works with the decorating method that I do. This works with technology that I have these. I like the finished product. I know how much I can sell it for. The type of customer that I sell to likes this.

So for example, if we’re using the example we just mentioned here and you’re going to offer polo-button-up-style shirts, right? Well, if most of your customers are going to be in medical and then maybe some of them work in outdoors like golf, we say, so you have dentists, doctors, psychologists, maybe some golf courses and trainers. If this is a real estate agent … If this is most of your customer range, you’re going to want to pick apparel that suits that, right? So a polo shirt that is probably resistant to sweat and staining probably is good for all these folks. Because real estate and golf, they’re outside. They bump into things that are dirty. And medical, of course, there’s tons of dirty stuff happening there.

So something that’s stain resistance is probably good. You’re probably not going to want something that’s a really thin fabric, that’s cotton, that has no stain resistance, and as soon as the white bumps up to something, you have a stain, all right? So these are the thought processes that you go through and you create your product lines and you get as detailed as reasonably possible. And then maybe the suggestion we said earlier, you can link to these products somewhere, so you can reference them yourselves. And as you grow, it would be great if you brought on an employee to help you market or sell or you decided to do some work with an agency or a freelance marketer that you’ve got something you can hand them right away and you could say, “I put together my four Ps of marketing here a while back and I just updated them for you. Take a look.” And then this gives, whoever’s going to do that sales and marketing, a great opportunity to completely understand what you have to offer.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Okay. And then you mentioned about how a package is presented and served to the customer, which is another thing I wrote some notes on here. So this actually is particularly interesting because it’s important to write it down even though it’s so obvious to you, but how is your customer going to place their order? Are you doing an ecommerce store? Are you doing things via email? Are you selling via a forum or Facebook group? Is everything in person because this is going to definitely change the types of marketing you do? And a really good example would be, if almost everything is in person, the service you offer is you go to these offices and you visit them every month or every week and you take orders for new employees, for people who need replacement apparel, you also help them with their signage, so you’re actually doing a little bit of design like, “Hey, that wall’s blank over there. Maybe we should put something there. What do you think about that?”

So if that’s the case, then some sort of marketing plan that when you show up there, you’ve got a booklet to share or you’re wearing one of the examples, “Hey, by the way, what I’m wearing here, this is a brand new product line that we have. It comes in all these different colors. Here’s a little booklet of it,” that might be an important piece of marketing or sales for you. Compared to somebody who is selling online, having a sample book, it’s relatively useless to them, right?

Sara Isom:
Absolutely. And even we can go as far as if people are coming to you, then you need to brand your company externally and internally in the business. So that could be the difference between if you live in the northern states, then you’re going to need to get an outdoor rug when they enter the building, so it represents a comfort level. Your building might need to be cleaned up on the inside. Things might need to be branded. You might need those pens to walk away with. Whereas if everything’s digital, then you need a very nice strategy from an email standpoint to make sure that you’re doing those personal touches in the customer journey. You need to have that built out.

I use an example of, again, the bakery and the difference between the dine-in and the carry-out. If somebody dines in, you might want a perfectly branded paper plate for them to use or a napkin that establishes the brand of the bakery. Whereas if they carry out, you might want imprinted boxes with the bakery information and even how to get in contact with the bakery. So it’s different obviously for this world and the products within it, but it’s really the same. It’s like, “How are you going to continue to brand yourself?”

Marc Vila:
Right, right. That’s great and it’s a great point, because if you’re delivering the product via mail, do you want to have a fancy colored box that it comes in? Do you want to have special packaging? Do you want stickers to come in the box with it?

Sara Isom:
A handwritten note.

Marc Vila:
A handwritten note. These are all great things. Where if you’re delivering and setting up and doing everything in person, you may decide that, “Well, what if I got a clothing rack that I can bring and I literally bring it and unpack it outside of the car and then hang stuff on it where people can try on samples?” And then when you deliver the product, maybe you don’t necessarily need a box and paper and stickers and all of these things because you’re going to hand something to the person. Maybe use a baggie or maybe just the shirt by itself is just fine.

And then further, talking about signage, if you’re installing the sign yourself, you don’t have to deliver it in any way. As long as it travels safely with you and you’re going to probably bring your own hardware and know where to put it and the finished product is up on the wall versus if you’re mailing it to them or just giving them the sign, do you want to provide hardware or not, instructions on how to hang it up? How is it going to get delivered properly? How is that going to look?

Sara Isom:
But that delivery and setup, that’s huge because you want to make sure if it’s you or if it’s someone that you work with or that works for you. You need to make sure that they’re branded, that their customer service is on point with your brand, so that again we’re creating that customer journey. So those people that are getting the install are getting the quality that you want your company to represent.

Marc Vila:
Right. Well, because anybody wearing some sort of a one-piece overalls, you can just go in any building and start installing things and nobody’s pretty much going to stop you, right? If you just have a one-suit thing with a name tag on it. The reason I know this is because I’ve watched a lot of movies.

Sara Isom:
Well, and I trust men in overalls.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, see, exactly. So in the movies all the time, if you want to install a secret camera somewhere, you just put on the overall or I don’t know what you call the one-piece mechanic type of uniform. I don’t know the word for that. Somebody does, yelling it out there, but if you have a name tag, you can just walk in anywhere. But the point is because they look like they belong there, they look good. You mentioned customer service being friendly. So these are all things are in part important if you’re hanging up signage and there’s marketing opportunities along that way. When they come, they could deliver a final invoice, but with that could come a postcard or a coupon or a way to get referrals, something like that.

So there’s a lot to be said there. Maybe even if you have printed signage with graphics, for example, that you hang up to decorate places, maybe there’s some sort of a marketing program where you say, “Hey, if I could put my logo tiny in the bottom corner, you get 10% off,” right? There’s a million marketing and opportunities, but you’re not going to think about those or be in the right mindset or be able to share that with a marketing agency or a marketing person unless they really understand all of these things down to how it’s delivered, how it’s ordered, what products you’re selling, all of that.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Okay, so now that we’ve got product, the next P we have is price. So that sounds pretty simple, right?

Sara Isom:
Yeah. Again, it sounds simple and it is in a way. So of course, price, it’s the cost of the product. And really what you’re looking at is, what is the fair market value? What are your competitors selling the product or service for? And then what is your target audience like buying this product or service at an average rate? Understanding, “Will you be able to offer any sort of discounts? Will you have payment options? Do people pay upfront? Do they pay in installments?” Understanding the entirety of the pricing of any product or service within your company is really what we’re getting at here.

Marc Vila:
And I think that there’s something to be said. By the way, I don’t think that’s your email that’s going off. I think that’s on your computer, is it?

Sara Isom:
No.

Marc Vila:
No? That’s not where the sound is coming from.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, I don’t have sound.

Marc Vila:
Oh, I didn’t think I did either. Well, anyway, maybe it’s another room. If you’re hearing that, maybe actually it is your email out there listening. Maybe it is. I think I’m muted here. Oh, it’s coming through my headphones. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. That sound’s not coming from my headphones though. All right, so price, there’s something to be said about strategy with price too and you could probably write this down that you’re going after a premium market, so you’re going to be selling the premium price. Why? While going back up to the product, I deliver it, install it, help them decide where it’s going to go, make the suggest, “I’m doing design and installation and production. Therefore, my sign costs $200.” They can buy one on the internet maybe for 50, but it doesn’t come with any of those things.

So the price, what does it go for is important and then also the strategy behind it, “I sell a premium product.” Also going back up, “Well, the polos that we sell are moisture-wicking, stain-resistant, odor-blocking, all of these things. They’re great for the market that I’m in, compared to, yes, there’s a polo you can buy for five bucks that doesn’t have any of those properties and it’s not really ideal for my customer base.” So that’s an important thing. You want to mark down what you’re selling. Do you have a pricing strategy? And there’s all different types of ways to do pricing. I think we’ll probably have a whole podcast on this.

Sara Isom:
Oh, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
But let’s just say you want to sell everything at a certain margin and that’s how you price, so everything needs to be at X percent margin. So you can write that down in your pricing and just talk about that as a strategy. And then within price, it’s also about how the customer interacts with that pricing, so, “How do they pay? Can they pay online? Is there a portal they pay online through or do you just literally give them your Venmo or does it have to be checks? Do they pay a deposit? Do they have to pay in full? Is it all paid for at the end?” These are all part of the strategy, and marketing, as we talk about marketing as an entity, now in your business, marketing just might be you.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Or it might just be your wife or your husband or your son.

Sara Isom:
Which is a lot of small and medium-sized businesses. Believe it or not, 90% of small and medium-sized businesses are marketing internally.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s expensive to hire somebody.

Sara Isom:
Absolutely, it is.

Marc Vila:
And you have to be prepared to take that leap to hire an agency or to hire a freelancer or to hire a full-time employee to do that. And you have to grow yourself to be a part of that. Now, the most likely for you to be successful and get to that point is by doing exercises like this because you’re thinking a growing larger business. You’ve got a plan. And when you are ready to hire somebody or hire somebody to do something for you to take over marketing, whatever your plans are, you’ve got all of this in place. You’ve got the strategy, the pricing, the products and the other Ps to be revealed there. So it’s all part of the strategy. It’s important that you write all the stuff down. And in regards to pricing, how else can it affect marketing? Is there anything else you want to add?

Sara Isom:
Well, first, I want to say, I can’t stress this enough, understanding what your competitors are doing from a price standpoint is something that you really need to figure out and that’s as simple as doing some secret shopping, calling them up, searching the web, placing some orders just to see how they’re pricing items, asking about their discounts, asking what discounts they have. Do they have age discount? Do they have a veterans discount? Do they offer special certain times of the year? Getting into that really helps you establish some of your goals of what your pricing structure should look like and any opportunities you could take advantage of from a discounting standpoint. But yeah, really it breaks down to just … Again, a lot of it sounds operational, but it’s what marketing will use to promote your products.

Marc Vila:
Right. Actually, that’s interesting because there’s two ways. There’s your own strategy that has to do with the customers that you have and then what your competition is doing. So in your market, like you mentioned, if they have an advertised pricing, because this is a tricky thing that happens all the time in business, that if they have advertised pricing, they almost never sell at that price. So you think you’re coming into the market equal to their price, finding out that they discount everything 20% or the other way around, they advertise, and this is actually the one that I see a lot, especially in the custom apparel business, is T-shirts from 3.99 and then somebody will post to a forum, “How do I even compete with this company who sells three shirts for three T-shirts for $3.99?”

And then that’s not the whole price. Because they’ll have a setup fee and they’ll have a whatever fee and a waste disposal fee. It’s like tires are the same thing, right? Like, “Get tires for $99 a piece,” and then four tires is $700.

Sara Isom:
Or they’re simply selling that 3.99 shirt, it starts at. They might have a shirt and it might say, “Happy New Year 2001,” and they’re selling it at 3.99 and that makes sense, but then everything else jumps up to $15.

Marc Vila:
Right. So it very well could be cheapest T-shirt, white only, front print only, single color. They may have very strict guidelines to that. And maybe that’s exactly the opposite of what you sell because you know your product lines. Your product lines, if we’re talking again about *T-shirts, you’re using a higher end shirt, you offer a bunch of different colors, and if you print digitally, then you don’t have any color limits. It doesn’t cost you more money to print more colors because you’re using a digital T-shirt printer or a transfer printer. So in these cases, you’re not necessarily comparing apples to apples per se. So it is important to dive into what your competition sells for and then knowing the products that you want to sell.

One of the problems that we run into in small business owners, customization for sure, is they see the product catalog of everything that they can decorate and it’s like phone book thick. In the future, if you’re listening to this and this is 20 years later in the future, there used to be a book that you got that they’ve left on your doorstep with all the numbers of things and then-

Sara Isom:
It was yellow.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it was yellow. And then eventually, nobody used it, but they kept delivering it. So then basically people just left a trash on your doorstep for a handful of years and they’ve stopped it now, so-

Sara Isom:
I think it became a door stop.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it became a door stop. So anyway, we could say that wraps up price there. I’m was diverging too far, okay? We’ve had enough there. So let’s go ahead and go into the next one because we’re making pretty good pace on our episode here. So the next one we have is promotion.

Sara Isom:
Yeah. So basically how you advertise your product or service. This is where we get into a little bit of the difference between marketing and advertising. So with promotion, you would have to ask yourself, what are you capable of from a marketing standpoint? What are you currently doing? What could you currently be doing? And that’s anywhere from, “Yes, I have a website, but I’m not managing it, somebody else’s and we really don’t make updates,” to, “Yes, I have a Facebook page and I’ve dabbled a little bit in advertising, but I just don’t know if it works for me or not.” Because we get the gist of your capabilities, then we can start building the strategy behind that and we can find out and start understanding what channels might have worked in the past, and looking into the future, what channels might be adequate for your business and your business model.

Marc Vila:
That’s good. So when it comes to kind of promotion, promoting your business, if you are a brand new business and you’re a startup, because some folks listening right now haven’t even started yet, they’re right at the beginning of the idea and other folks have been doing this for a while and some are very, very established. So you answer promotion differently depending where you are. And if you’re a new business, these are theoretical things. So you mentioned a website. Are you very capable of building a website already? Do you have that skillset? If you are, then probably building a website’s pretty good idea because you can do it on your own. You have that capability. If you have no technical capability of building a website, then you’re going to want to work into your plan, “Do I want to pay somebody to build a website? How much is that going to cost? Does it matter for the products that I want to sell?”

Because in the new business, everything here is theoretical. The concept of doing the signs and the apparel for those businesses mentioned, the doctors, dentist, real estate agents, golf, I think is what we said, that’s theoretical right now. So, “Should I have a website for those folks?” would be a question. And I’m thinking just answer it for this one, business-to-business sales professionals, educated folks, nice offices, when you show up and go to sell to them, they may want to look up your website later or share it to the owners or the board or whoever’s in the decision-making process. So having a nice, classy, upscale-looking website that shows how you can represent them is probably a really good idea.

Conversely, if you sell T-shirts, local stuff to tourists, they’re probably not going home and then jumping online and ordering something from your website because they forgot to get a shirt like a Finger Lakes T-shirt or something like that, “I forgot to get it. I’m going to order one online now.” No, they’re probably not going to do that. So having the website matters less, but how you can promote what you’re capable of doing and theoretically of what you would do is really important, and then of course, if you’re an existing business, what do you have right now.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, and the capability, it’s not all on you. An example would be there are certain places within the United States where you might not be able to run a local radio advertisement because the range of the nearest network is not close enough to fall within your demographic. It would be spread among an 80, 90-mile radius, which wouldn’t be adequate for radio local. That being said, not everything is under your control, but establishing elements of control is a good idea. And by capability, it’s not only what are you and your staff, if you have staff, capable of, but also what can you afford? What does your budget look like now?

Because what this portion of the P should help represent is what is the best bang for your buck? What is your best return on investment? And the idea is to always start off frugal because you need to put more money into your business in other areas than marketing. But again, marketing represents the lead generation that you need to grow your business. So in order to first stabilize and establish, you really need to set forth a very stringent plan on what can truly be done from a marketing and advertising effort.

Marc Vila:
Right, okay, and it’s tricky, right? Because promotion, marketing, advertising, all of these words that mean different things, but they’re lumped together, none of it’s ever guaranteed.

Sara Isom:
Never.

Marc Vila:
Right? It’s never guaranteed, which is why it’s important to establish a budget. And these are all separate topics for a different podcast, but it’s good to overlay all this information. So it’s good to understand what’s available for you in your area. You mentioned maybe radio is available for some people and they want to do that for certain reason. I can’t think of any of those reasons at this point in time, but somebody … If you’re a car dealer, for some reason, you have to be on the radio screaming, by the way. I don’t know why that’s the case, but you have to scream on the radio. But for a local sign shop or an apparel business or some sort of customization business, the radio may or may not make sense. Are there billboards in your area? Are there print advertising in the area?

Sara Isom:
Or even trade shows.

Marc Vila:
Are there trade shows? Yeah.

Sara Isom:
When you think of the difference between paid advertising and not paid advertising, there’s so many efforts that you can do that don’t cost money. They cost time and energy, but they don’t cost money, but they might not be within your area. We’ve talked about selling to golf apparel. Well, say, that you just had an online store and you were selling golf apparel and you really wanted to get into some of these golf outings and things like that happening, but there were no local golf clubs, then you’d be out of luck.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Sara Isom:
If you really wanted to get into farmers’ markets, but there’s no farmers’ markets in your area, you’re out of luck. Not everything is within your capability, but that’s part of understanding your area and what’s going on.

Marc Vila:
Right. So this is a great both actual and theoretical that you can … And this is part of the promotion thing. You should probably be writing both of these things now, “So what am I doing right now?” And it literally just might be, “Well, nothing,” if you’re brand new, right? But it might just be referrals and that’s it. You’re only working on referrals and you’d like to go your business to the next level. So you need to write down the next piece. What are the ones that are potential piece, potential promotions, right? So that’s where you could put, “Well, I could potentially print. There’s these local print advertisements I could do. I potentially put up a sign at the elementary school.”

There’s a million different things you could do and I’m not saying that any of these are good or bad ideas because I don’t know your business, right? I don’t know these four Ps that we’re getting into right now for your business, but you can figure out which one of these are. And then just from a standpoint that you mentioned about starting frugal in the beginning, I do like that. If you’ve got a really deep pocket and you’ve got an investor or you have a ton of money you’ve saved up, then yes, it’s very easy to say, “I’m going to put 2,000 here and 2,000 here and 5,000 here and 8,000 here and I’m going to spend 20,000 something dollars to start marketing my business.” Well great, you’re willing to take all that risk, but a lot of startups and even businesses that are been growing over years, you don’t have $20,000 you’re willing or able to invest in marketing. So you can start with frugal concepts that you can test.

So there’s a farmers’ market that goes around your area within 5,000 miles and there’s 40 stops throughout the year, right? So you want to decide, is that a good way to promote your business? Well, can you sign up for one or three maybe? Maybe you don’t give up on one, maybe three. Can you sign up for two or three or four of them? And you try them out, see how they go. And we’ve talked in the past in previous episodes about tracking your marketing and understanding the long-term value of customers and all of these things, but this is something you can look to test and start and you can also do the same with print ads. And you can do the same with all the other marketing channels.

You know you sell online, so you could do online type of advertisements, meaning on your website, email marketing, social media. Conversely, you only sell in person, so you can bring flyers, you can bring print materials, you can bring your clothing rack.

Sara Isom:
And making all printed materials if you do have a website digital with a QR code.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, combining these things together. If you have a website and you have print that you do in person, so your business card could have a QR code, say, “View the virtual catalog.” That business card with a QR code that says, “View the virtual catalog,” only works if you have all those things, meaning you’re in a position to hand out cards and you have a virtual catalog to do. So that concept in promotion doesn’t exist for some businesses and does … Somebody got scared. I don’t know if anybody can hear that, but that is, if you didn’t hear it, somebody screamed. And what you’re hearing is, in the office next to us, is the accounting office and this wonderful young lady that works in there is so frightened by people walking by.

It’s comical and it’s a joke within the building. I’ve gotten coffee or water and I’ve just walked into the kitchen and she’s done that scream and that happened the other day actually. And one another gentleman was coming by and he’s like, “I always ask her if it’s my face that makes her scream.”

Sara Isom:
I just wonder if hypertension is covered under work [inaudible 00:43:45].

Marc Vila:
Yeah, she’s young right now, so she’s okay, but in 20 years, there will be. And yes, high blood pressure medication is covered by her insurance, by the way.

Sara Isom:
There we go.

Marc Vila:
So I think we’ve covered up promotion a lot. There’s so many different things we could talk about, social media, YouTube channels, live events, paid advertisement, whether that’s print or digital, billboards to radios. So there’s a ton of different things, but to sum it up, you should write down what you’re doing, what you want to do because maybe you have a gut feeling that it’s a good idea or you desire to do it. For example, not to diverge too much, but you just might want to be a YouTube type of personality, you enjoy it, you like the camera, you like editing and you want to do it. Well, that’s okay to put that in your promotion area if you’re not doing it yet and you desire to do it.

Go back up and figure out what product and price you can add or remove or change to make that channel come true. It doesn’t have to be locked in. This is your business. That’s the great thing about why people do all this stuff, is because it’s your business. You could do what you want. So do the things that you are doing. Do the things that you want to do or potentially could do or you think is a good idea. And then I would still write down the things that are potential in your area that you might not think is a good idea or want to do yet, but you should acknowledge that those opportunities exist for promotion.

Because you may look at all of this together and say, “I’m not a fan of print ads, but when I’m looking at all this and I’m looking at my customers and what I charge and the service I offer, and as I’m visiting them, I see all of them have this one publication that’s thrown around in their desks. This is the fourth time I’ve seen it, so I know that they’re looking at it. I’m not a fan of print ads, but I actually think this might work for my customers. I’m seeing it right there.” So then you can test it out. So that’s why it’s important to write down just the potential opportunities too.

Sara Isom:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Anything else you want to add, then we have the last P?

Sara Isom:
No, I think we’re ready for place.

Marc Vila:
Okay. So place, as you mentioned, revealed the final P. So I have some notes, I can read them out here. Are your products sold online, in store? We addressed a little bit of this earlier, but this is very specific.

Sara Isom:
And they blend. They all should sound like they’re blending together a little bit because they all represent the entirety of the operational aspect of your company. So places where you sell your products and that means distribution channels and how your customers are receiving those. So again, online, if you have an eCommerce store, if you sell in person, if you sell third party where your audience receives this. So if you’re selling through a third party, say that you have something like you have an Amazon store, are they getting most of their stuff from the Amazon? Do you have more clients on the Amazon side of things or your ecomm side of things? Where are the majority of your customers purchasing? That gives you a great understanding of the effort you need to put towards that area.

And then the other efforts that you need to open up. Because if you have an eCommerce store and you also sell in person based on the number of customers coming to one area is where you should start putting your marketing dollars or more marketing dollars. If you want to improve an area, you need to adjust those marketing dollars to the next channel, but it gives us an understanding of all of that.

Marc Vila:
Right, we have a lot of customers that sell eBay, Etsy, Amazon, for example. And if a good portion of your sales are actually coming from eBay traffic because of the product and niche you sell, it happens to live there, then eBay has ways for you to promote your ads. And you may find that you want to try to do paid advertisement there. The place where your customers are is really important to the overall marketing health. If your customers need to be local, meaning that you help design signs, so you’re physically present for all of it, then doing some online ad that’s outside of your area really doesn’t work because you’re not going to travel 150 miles to print and hang up a sign that costs $150, right? You’re not going to do that.

So you need to make sure that you’re focusing all of your marketing on what’s going to happen within the area, “Well, I’m willing to work in a 50-mile radius. So now that I understand that,” as the person in charge of your marketing, “I need to understand that all of my marketing needs to be designed that can handle within this 50 mile radius. Anything beyond that is going to be a waste of time, energy, money, absolutely, etcetera.

Sara Isom:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
So even an example is a YouTube channel might not make sense for that. There’s just things like that.

Sara Isom:
Absolutely. And honestly, looking at your audience now against the audience you want to have and looking at where they are purchasing from. Your audience now might be the demographic that you have today, but it might not be the demographic that you need to grow your business. So ideally, again, this is a little bit of competitive marketing, but doing your research in what other competitors are bringing in from a demographic standpoint, “What do their customers look like and how are their customers finding them?” is always a great way of building your strategy and future strategy when it comes to your marketing and advertising efforts.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, no, that’s great and I love that they all do kind of blend together.

Sara Isom:
All blend. People think that you’re answering the same question over and over again and you are in a way, but it all means something different. It goes in a different pot.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, no, it’s very true that it’s so related, but when you add all this stuff together, you really get a really good picture of how you can market, what you can market, where you should do things and you actually start answering your own questions where somebody will come to you and say, “Oh, a friend of mine had a little T-shirt company that they ran and they made a bunch of money on YouTube.” And in your head, you could be thinking-

Sara Isom:
“That’s great, but you don’t have a website.”

Marc Vila:
“And all of my customers are local because I walk in and sell. I just don’t really have a product that’s a YouTube-selling product because I sell to local doctor, dentist, real estate and the golf community in my area. So it’s just not where ideally I’d be selling. I have a different marketing strategy for that.” And all of that comes into play from place, price, promotion, product, all comes together if you decide how you properly market, who you’re going to market to. But there’s one additional bonus piece that you really need to answer, right?

Sara Isom:
And you’ve heard this throughout, it’s answering the question about, “Who is your target demographic?” So a lot of times we know that. We know our customer base now, and while that will change over time, depending on if we want to grow the business, we want to maximize efforts, but we know ideally who this custom database looks like. And that helps us fill in the blanks of the questions that will later answer, but it all falls into place with each of these Ps. You’ve heard Marc talk about the dental offices, the real estate building, that face of the people that have built your business, is a great thing to answer. This can be, I should say, looking at not only age, race, gender, looking at income level, occupation, marital status.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, education.

Sara Isom:
All gives us an idea of how they get to you or how they should be getting to you from a marketing standpoint.

Marc Vila:
Right, right, and there’s so much to be said about that. I feel like that’s a podcast in of itself too, right?

Sara Isom:
It really is.

Marc Vila:
But you don’t answer the four Ps to get to your demographics. You don’t start with your demographics. The starting point, in my opinion on this one thinking about it, is which one you answer first can be different for everybody. And the reason why, even price could be first. Because if you say, “I want to make this much money and I can work this many hours, and in that many hours, I can make this many things,” then you immediately know how much you have to charge and then you back up …

Sara Isom:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
… and you could say, “If I need to charge $50 a T-shirt,” right? There are people in this world that buy $50 T-shirts every single day, right? Maybe not the people buying them every day, but every day those transactions happen. So you need to say, “Well, who would I sell $50 to? Okay, well, it has to be a high-quality shirt, it has to be this, it has to be this.” So now you start understanding the product that you’re going to sell, then you can start understanding, “Well, where will I sell it? Where are people that are going to buy $50 T-shirts? How am I going to promote? What’s the promotion that I run to move that?” And maybe in that case you may say, “TikTok and YouTube sound great,” for what you’re saying because you’re trying to sell a super unique high-value T-shirt.

You can really start with any one of these or you can start with the demographics. If you know that you’re a member of a local car enthusiast club, then if that’s the case, you know your demographic and you can start backing up to answering your four Ps there. But you’ve got to have all of this together and then you can start answering marketing, advertising type of questions.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, yeah. Because again, by establishing who your target market is, it helps you define your strategy. That’s not only any promotional or advertisement, but also marketing support. And it helps you build the customer journey that a customer would need to even make a marketing or a selling decision, a buying decision, I should say.

Marc Vila:
Right. Well, to wrap it up, we can go back to the questions we asked in the beginning, now that we know and just using the one example, but we can add in others if we want, but if we say that your business is selling to these local places that we’ve said numerous times and-

Sara Isom:
So we said dentist office.

Marc Vila:
Dentist, doctor, real estate, golf, that’s the area you live in. There’s a lot of customers you have in that and you have different product lines that you sell within there and you’re mainly selling to the business owner. And you sell a nice high-end, good quality product, so they can buy it and they look crisp and clean and professional every single day with your product and the same with the atmosphere that they’re in. So should they start a TikTok? Do you have an answer to that?

Sara Isom:
Should they start a TikTok?

Marc Vila:
Yeah, they don’t do TikTok. A business owner now doesn’t do TikTok. Should they have a TikTok channel?

Sara Isom:
And this is where I would break down it, to me, it doesn’t … Well, first off, looking at those business types, I would say, who is the decisionmaker for actually purchasing your product? If, for instance, the dentist, doctor or real estate agent, if they were the decisionmakers, I would say it’s not necessary if you don’t have a person that has ample time for it.

Marc Vila:
Right, and that’s what I would say too.

Sara Isom:
And I wouldn’t say that it would be an advertising effort. It could be a promotional effort in the way of just have it into spread your brand awareness, but not necessarily putting dollars behind it because it doesn’t seem like that’s your demographic. Now, if the decisionmakers within those offices were 20 somethings, then maybe that would be, but you got to look at your demographic.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it’s a good point. I think I would just hard no. I think I would just hard no and I would say-

Sara Isom:
It’s always hard to-

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I would say if you can spend an hour and a week on TikTok, spend an hour and a week getting in the car, stopping by the local places that you can do that and drop something off, say hello, give them something for free.

Sara Isom:
Start sponsoring those golf outings.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, sponsor the golf outing. Show up when they’re having an event and just support them. Even if you’re not selling there, just they’re having some sort of a picnic thing on a Sunday at their golf club or the course, show up. Spend an hour on that rather than an hour on TikTok. But yeah, you make a pretty good point that there are always nuances that maybe if there’s a lot of young decisionmakers, maybe you can show up to the offices and do a TikTok with them and make them feel like they’re-

Sara Isom:
A little collab.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, a little collaboration or they feel like they’re part of your little community and it could ingrain them in. So I’m not saying that that couldn’t be very successful.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, we’ll see where TikTok goes.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. But otherwise, I would just say it’s just probably not necessary at this point in time, unless-

Sara Isom:
No dollars behind it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And you could probably demographic that down based in TikTok’s advertising. You could specifically say that you want to advertise to 30 to 50-year-olds and they do have a growing population on TikTok. And you could ask TikTok just to advertise to those people if you wanted to. However, I just think that there’s a lot quicker ways you can get a return on your investment for this particular business. Now, should you do local paid advertising?

Sara Isom:
Well, if you’ve got the dentist, the doctor, I’m sure there’s more than one of them out there in your local area. That would be a great effort to maximize your return on investment by promoting locally. There’s so many different avenues of that from grassroots up to paid. Paid local. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, so I would say paid local is probably great. If you notice the magazine that they all have, that’s a local magazine, if you notice the-

Sara Isom:
Sponsorship of-

Marc Vila:
The sponsorship, yes, of events or something like that.

Sara Isom:
Little league, farmers’ markets and this, because it sounds like everybody falls under healthcare, maybe not real estate. There’s so many efforts and then referral programs. Right now, small businesses live and die off of their referral programs, and making sure if you don’t have one, you’re establishing one. But keeping a referral program that truly does, you’ve got the numbers, you’ve got the data behind it, that would be where money should be put.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s great. So you could do … If we’re talking about local paid, you can have some sort of a way to promote financially that referral program. So the next one we had and we could short quick on these, but, “Would doing Google Ads be a good idea?” I’d probably say you can target zip codes and these people might be searching for, “Where do I get uniforms for my doctor’s office?” something to that effect. So I’d put it on a maybe experiment with, but you’d have to make sure whatever you’re advertising, you can definitely pinpoint to the zip codes that you work in, which you can do that stuff on most any platform nowadays.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, and I would say, before putting money behind ads, first truly establishing your Google My Business page, that’s where your effort should go. Google My Business will outrake most of your websites at this point. COVID put that into effect for us. And establishing a very firm Google My Business plan where you are constantly updating, making sure you’ve got your images in place, making sure that if you have products placed, that they are represented with the correct dollar amounts behind them and that you’re asking for reviews. It should be part of your referral program. It should be part of any customer experience. You should be asking for reviews and getting those. And just maintaining that to its fullest will give you a better return on investment than a lot of the paid efforts that Google will have. Most of the time you’re found through search engine optimization, which is Google My Business rather than paid advertising.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s a great interjection on a thought there too. So in these questions we’ve asked, these are just random questions, right? But it’s a really good point because when somebody says, “Should you advertise on Google?”

Sara Isom:
Locally.

Marc Vila:
“Locally advertise on Google?” the first question probably should be, “Well, have you set up a Google business profile that’s topnotch first?” And if you say no, do that. And then have the conversation about advertising on Google because that’s the free thing they give you at first, which will land you a lot of business. Yes. The next, two more quick questions is, should you do the farmers’ market thing for this business? I definitely think it’s worth a try. You’ll probably run into a lot of these business owners there. Maybe you’re not going to sell signs or uniforms at the market, but you may have a booth where you introduce people, “Ask me about uniforms for your professional business.”

Sara Isom:
Have some samples sitting out.

Marc Vila:
Have some samples sitting out. Ask about how to produce sign, “I could produce any sign for any business. Talk to me about it and you can have examples of hand washing signs and directions and directories and braille,” and all these things you can print with your UV printer if you have one of those.

Sara Isom:
Well, and there’s so many different things that you can do at a farmers’ market. If you don’t have somebody capable of sitting behind a booth or if you can’t afford a booth or if you can’t afford a booth and to brand the booth, which needs to be done, then you might just go to network. It might just be a handshake and a business card. You might be wearing one of your products or carrying a sign, something that can get you in the door. If the farmers’ market allows you to bring things in without necessarily having a booth, you might be handing out items there.

Marc Vila:
You might be able to even just sponsor with a sign, so you can make a very cool looking sign that they let you put up, that they let you just put up. So maybe your sponsorship is not a booth, but you just have a sign at the entrance that they let you put up a really cool looking design that you UV printed and then it says, “I can make any sign for any business,” and you have something very eye-catching for everybody who walks and sees.

Sara Isom:
Or for an even more frugal marketing strategy, which is what I like the most is, for the tax write off, you support the farmers’ market by printing signs for them and establish …

Marc Vila:
Yeah, there you go.

Sara Isom:
… that tax break.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. So there’s a lot of great things you could do there by partnering with them potentially …

Sara Isom:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
… for signs or uniforms or something to that effect. Okay, well, maybe we had some other random questions, but I think we’ve got the point across really well here. And I think the homework or what you would take home from this is if you’re about to start a business or you have an existing one, I would take out a Word document or an Excel sheet or something, write out your piece and your demographics and write them out and see if it makes sense. And if something doesn’t align right, you may have found a solution on why your business is a little stagnant or not growing as fast as you want or you’re not as profitable. We have people consistently talk about their success and how well they’re doing or we can see it in with the amount of supplies or apparel they purchase.

And we have consistently also have folks say how they’re struggling, “The ink costs too much for me to be profitable,” or, “The T-shirts cost too much for me to make money,” or, “I can’t sell enough, I can’t compete,” and theoretically, that means that your Ps are not aligned. If you’re saying that it cost too much to print something, well, you have a printer that that’s capable of doing something and you’re trying to sell in a market that doesn’t uphold that price. So you need to probably adjust your demographics or where you’re selling or how you’re selling or something like that, right?

Sara Isom:
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think, furthermore, if you look at your business model after completing the Ps and looking at your demographics, look at the ones around you, look at your competitors and you’re going to start to see holes. Some of the holes you filled, but some are empty. What are your competitors doing that is working? You can see this by filling out the piece. You can see where you’re lacking. And this will hopefully help you move the efforts to fill those holes and grow your business.

Marc Vila:
If you pay attention to this and actually do the exercise, you’ll absolutely see things. And overall, this one thing that popped in my head was I went to one of the fancy grocery stores and they had this caviar section, right? And it was just like, “I’m not going to buy that.” But they have $150 or $200 jar there. And for some reason, that popped in my head when we were talking about this and I said, “If you were selling that jar at a local farmers’ market where the demographic is not people who would spend $150 on anything that was that little for food, then would you leave the market and just be like, ‘How can I compete? The guy next to me was selling homemade cupcakes for $2 apiece. How do I possibly compete with that?'”

And I would say, “Well,” obviously this is an exaggerated example, “but that doesn’t make any sense. Well, why would you try to advertise that at a market where most of the food things that can be bought are like 5 to 10 bucks and you’re trying to sell $150 a jar of caviar? That seems absurd,” and it is. But the problem is that some people when they start a small business, they might not be as exaggerated as that, but that’s the situation they’re putting themselves in, is that they’re trying to sell way out of market, whether it’s too low on price for the technology they’re doing or it’s too high on price or they’re not trying to sell to the right people. They’re trying to advertise $6 T-shirts on Facebook and it’s like, “Well, it’s going to cost you $6 for every sale you make. Do you have an upsell opportunity? Do you have a long-term value proposition that you’re going to be making to make that worth it?”

So that’s why it’s really important to line these things up. You’ll what’s missing, you’ll see what doesn’t match and then you can start to adjust and really turn your business into the next biggest P, which would be profitable, right?

Sara Isom:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
The ultimate goal. So I think we covered a good amount of stuff today. So thanks for listening. And if anybody has any questions about any of this stuff, of course you can go to the customapparelstartups.com. Go to the website and you can contact us through there. And then as always, The Custom Apparel Startups Podcast is sponsored by ColDesi. So you can go to coldesi.com and live chat if you have any questions about equipment we have to offer, or of course, if you want to get in touch with The Custom Apparel Startups crew, you can always just go to coldesi.com and say, “I heard the podcast. I have a question for them,” and they’ll make sure they get you over to us.

All right. Well, thanks so much for joining. Sara will be back again, I’m sure, really soon. And in further coming episodes, we’ve got a bunch more guests. And for those who’ve been listening for a while, Mark Stevenson will be back here again. He’s just doing some different things, as you may have heard, if you listened to the episode where he said some changes were happening, but we’ve got a ton more stuff coming up and we have about six or seven episodes lined up, so we can get a little more regularly for those who’ve been missing some of these episodes. So thanks for listening and have a great business.

 

What is a social media strategy?

A social media strategy is an outline or plan of your social media goals, how you will achieve them, and how you’ll track metrics.

Social is talked about all the time in business, but do you need it? If yes, then how will you use it? This episode is all about finding out what is right for your business.

Why having a presence on social media is important for small businesses:

• Maintains and builds relationships with customers you already have
• Grows brand awareness and familiarity
• Builds trust with new and current customers
• Builds engaged communities
• Turns customers into advocates (gain mentions, comments, likes, tags, etc.)
• Gives your business a chance to respond to any negative feedback
• Another channel to promote products or services

How to set up a strategy

1. Determine a goal – make sure it’s measurable/realistic for your business (ex: increasing email sign ups, increase web traffic, generate sales/leads, etc). Understanding and researching your competition can help you.
2. Understand your audience – Know the basics about your target audience like age, location, income, interests, etc. Which can all be found using that platform’s analytics tool. This can help you build better strategies and goals based off that data. Also know things like what kind of content do your customers engage with? What accounts do your customers follow? What do they like/share?
3. Get to know your competition – Complete a competitive analysis to help you understand what your competitors are doing, what their strengths/weaknesses are. Or keep an eye on their pages, search relevant keywords and how your competitors rank, etc.

Start Implementing Your Strategy

• Determine which platforms you want to use and are relevant to you (Instagram for reels, TikToks for short videos, Facebook for customer service, etc)
• Set up your profiles (use consistent branding like logos and brand colors, fill out bio completely, use high-quality images, include keywords people may associate your business with, etc)
• Create a social media calendar to help organize content ideas, scheduled posts, and maintain consistency
• Have your first couple of posts planned out and ready to go live

Who are you selling to? What is your niche?

• Should social media be a place for you to sell, or just display your products?
• What would you be able to show off?
• What do you WANT to do on social media?

Learn about your potential audience / customers

• Does your audience make purchasing decisions from social media?
• Can you reasonably work with your customers or influencers to promote your product?
• Which platforms make sense for your business?

Research your competition or other similar businesses

• What are they doing?
• Do you want to do what they’re doing or something different?

Determine your strategy

• Do you want to sell online?
• Do you want to have customers find you on social?
• Are your pages for building trust?
• Are your pages just an online portfolio?

Define your brand

• What do you want to look like?
• What is the personality of your brand?
• Who is your audience?

Set up accounts / profiles

• Images
• Descriptions
• Initial Posts

Create a social media calendar

• When will you post?
• What will you post?
• Will you go live?

Collaborate with others

• Engage with people in comments
• Connect with customers on their social accounts
• Cross-promote when possible
• Follow and connect with potential influencers

Experiment with new ways to engage

• Contests
• Ask opinions (This or that? Which is your fav?)
• Boost posts (pay to get more views)
• Do you have customers that can promote your pages?
  • e.g. if you work with a school maybe do a # contest for free swag
  • e.g. if you work with another small business, cross-promote each other or share a contest. “Win X from me and Y from them.”

Track performance

• BE PATIENT
• Look for interesting wins
• Try to re-create what has worked before

Extra Social Media Tips/ Ideas

After your social media accounts are created, keep a few things in mind:

• Experiment with style of content: Post polls, stories, contests, cross collaborations (mention nails), boost posts, customer success stories.
• Don’t post too much or too little. One can seem annoying and overbearing while the other can seem lazy or like the brand doesn’t care.
• Get your team on social media, which helps with keeping track of any messages, mentions, or comments.
• Search popular hashtags/ keywords to use in written and video posts.

Using Social Media for business isn’t just as simple as posting cool pictures and getting a million followers. People who have ‘gone viral’ as a rule didnt get there by accident. They spent a ton of time interacting with the platform, creating content, posting like crazy and working hard.

Make a smart business decision on how YOUR business will use social media and go for it!

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Welcome to episode 188 of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. My name is Marc Vila. And today I’m here with Jes Santiago.

Jes Santiago:
Hello.

Marc Vila:
Hi. And Jes is on the ColDesi marketing team with us, and she’s been with the company, with ColDesi over two years now, work in marketing. So tell us, before we get into the podcast too much, just tell us a little bit about what you do, what you’ve done over the years.

Jes Santiago:
Sure. So I started with ColDesi as a E-commerce marketing assistant, and I just kind of dove right in into E-commerce tasks, which was something I was pretty much completely unfamiliar with. But I did that for about a year. So everything that had to do with Colman and Company.com, our supply site, I was in charge of getting product photos, product descriptions, getting new products launched on the website, things like that. And then I took a different direction, and now I am senior content specialist. So now I kind of am more in charge of creating content, planning our video calendar, any written content that goes up on any of our sites, I try to get behind. And pretty much just helping us get as much content as possible up on our sites is pretty much what I do.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And then the final bit of that is really what this podcast is about today. And that’s social media.

Jes Santiago:
Yes.

Marc Vila:
So Jes has been a huge part in growing and changing and adapting the ColDesi and our other brands social media accounts. So today’s podcast, episode 188 is called Setting Up Your Social Media Strategy. And this is important, because if you’re starting a new business, right, you think, “I need to be on social media.” Right? Or you’ve heard of people selling a ton of T-shirts or hats through social media, and are you going to do that? And how are you going to do that? And are you going to go viral or go on TikTok live, or are you going to bother with it at all? Right? So I think it’s a pretty confusing landscape, don’t you think?

Jes Santiago:
Oh, absolutely. And I think that it’s a balance as well of kind of what you plan on doing on social media, and sometimes it’s even as… You kind of get lucky, you know, go viral one time and you may not ever go viral again. So there’s just a couple different things you can do to make sure your business has a presence on social media and it can become really difficult.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So kind of going into this a little bit, we’re going to talk about how you develop a strategy, how you implement that. And then you’ll also, yeah, I mean, you’re going to deal with a little bit of luck every once in a while, but if you do things correctly with a plan, you’re going increase your chances of lucky things happening to you.

Jes Santiago:
Exactly.

Marc Vila:
Right?

Jes Santiago:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
So if you don’t play the lottery, then you can never win it, right? And that’s kind of one extreme of how it goes, but it’s true. If you’re not doing anything on social media, then nobody’s ever going to find you there and become your customer.

Jes Santiago:
Exactly.

Marc Vila:
So before we get into that, can you guess when I’m drinking in this cup right here?

Jes Santiago:
Probably knowing you, a Monster or some type of energy drink.

Marc Vila:
That’s pretty close. Monster Java.

Jes Santiago:
Oh, you do like those. I’ve never had one before.

Marc Vila:
I love it. And I’m also writing with a Waldorf Astoria pen. So there’s some juxtaposition between drinking Java Monster and using a Waldorf pen. But I think that’s the breath of our customers and listeners on Custom Apparel Startups, we have all types of folks. So I got to be relatable.

Jes Santiago:
Exactly. I’m just being boring and I’m sipping my iced coffee.

Marc Vila:
From where?

Jes Santiago:
Foxtail.

Marc Vila:
Foxtail?

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. It’s a honey lavender.

Marc Vila:
Honey. Oh my gosh. So new age.

Jes Santiago:
It’s really fancy. It really is new age.

Marc Vila:
All right, well, speaking of new age things, this social media thing, all right. So when we’re talking about strategy on social media, I’ll start with kind of step one. And the first thing you have to really think about, which what you’re going to do is talk about who are you selling to? What’s your niche? And the reason why I’d say this is so important is because if your niche are the type of folks that are going to make decisions on social media, buy things from there, go to social media to make purchasing decisions, then you’re probably going to want to take one strategy. Versus if your customers are likely to not make any decision on social media, then it might not matter necessarily as much for you to get really deep into becoming a mini social media superstar in your business. So and I have a couple in mind, but, Jes, can you think of any examples of maybe a customer who might make a purchasing decision on social media and ones that might not?

Jes Santiago:
Like the type of person are you saying?

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Or maybe the type of product you’re selling even or whatever. Do you have any thoughts?

Jes Santiago:
So immediately when you asked me that, I thought of the type of person. And I know understanding your audience has to do with some purchasing decisions, their age. I think that plays a really huge role in whether or not they’re going to purchase from social media. I think that if you were selling a product or a service and your target audience happens to be maybe an older crowd, I don’t think that they trust that they can purchase from social media. They don’t trust the technology, if that makes sense, versus your younger customers. Or if you’re selling something, a product or a service that’s geared towards a younger audience, I can say for myself, we’re more likely to… I’ll buy something off of Instagram.

Marc Vila:
Right. Okay.

Jes Santiago:
I can have that trust through Instagram. The older crowd’s not really going to have that. That’s kind of the first thing I thought about. When thinking about what kind of product, that can go a bunch of different ways.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Well, I’ve got a thought.

Jes Santiago:
Okay.

Marc Vila:
I’ve got a thought. So if your customers are typically going to be folks who are purchasing uniforms for schools, if they’re purchasing all of the T-shirts for the folks that work in a warehouse, if it’s just maybe people who own small businesses that are a little more in the boring business world, if mortgage brokers, and insurance agents, and stuff like that, and maybe even on the contractor world like plumbers, and electricians, and things like that. So if that’s your niche, they’re probably not going to be say, “Oh, I need to order T-shirts for my business. I’m going to go ahead and go to Instagram real quick and try to find somebody and then find their Instagram store and purchase something from there.” Right?

They want to do business with somebody who’s going to be professional, helpful, offer good customer service, hopefully deliver it in a quick timeframe. Somebody that they can pick it up directly from and see and talk about the style of shirt that they want to wear. The electrician might say, “I’m up in attics and in crawl spaces, I want something that I’m not going to get all sweaty and moisture wicking shirt.” They’re going to want to have those conversations.

On the flip side of things, if you’re selling fashion or maybe you’re selling directly to students at a school, so it’s not necessarily that you’re just going through the person who works in the main office, but you’re dealing with actually having a social presence to sell directly to the students where they can buy hats and other type of school swag you. So those are going to be two different scenarios where how much selling on social media matters or not.

Jes Santiago:
Right.

Marc Vila:
So I mean, that’s obviously getting into the weeds, but that’s the concept of understanding who your customers are and what they do. And I think there’s another question too, to be asked once you ask who you’re selling to, what your niche is, what’s your business? But do you want to be on social media, right? Why do you think that’s important?

Jes Santiago:
I mean, I think there’s a few different reasons why a business would want to be on social media, especially maybe even a smaller business, for example. I mean, that’s where you can maintain and build relationships with customers you may already have. This is a way for you to grow brand awareness and have people become familiar with your brand. You can turn customers… If it starts going well, you can turn customers kind of into advocates where they’ll mention you if they have a good experience, maybe even show off what they bought from you, a product or even a service. They’ll mention you, they’ll tag you, they’ll like your posts, share your posts, kind of builds engaged communities.

And then on the flip side, it also just, if a customer has a negative experience and you’re not on social media, you don’t really get to mend that relationship. That’s a missed opportunity in my opinion. So those are just a few ways or reasons why I think someone or a small business would want to join social media to be able to build these communities, be able to respond to any negative feedback that people might have that you’re just missing.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s actually a really good point that if somebody is upset with something that happened that they potentially are going to go to Facebook or anywhere and post about it or say something and directly potentially message you or tag you and it gives you the opportunity to respond. Maybe you didn’t even know they were upset. So that’s something good.

And another about wanting to be on social media, I think is great is having a live public platform that’s a conglomerate of all the work that you do, a portfolio. And then I think the one thing about do you want to be on social media? That’s kind of the business decision. But then there’s a personal decision of if you don’t fee… If you’re not into it to be an online personality, then there’s a degree of authenticity that’s important for social. So if you don’t want do it and you’re trying to force it, everyone’s going to know you’re trying to force it and then nobody’s going to want to watch, or follow, or share, or look.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, I think it’s important to make sure that your team wants to be on social media as well.

Marc Vila:
So anyone else that works with you. And yeah, I mean, it’s all about the plans that you have, right? So if you want to take footage of people running equipment or something like that, or having people talk about the products that you’re selling, whether it’s just you and your husband or wife, or if you have employees, you have to figure out what are the lines you want to draw on that. So I think that kind of… We’ve done part one and part two a little bit here, right?

So we talked a bit about, who are you selling to? What’s the niche product? Who’s your audience, right? What kind of products do you sell? How important is social presence for those? So it doesn’t matter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, how important is having that there? And then the potential audience that you have and how they’re going to expect it?

So I would say, I think of kind of two extremes on social media. And that’s going to be… And you just have to figure out which one is best for you. On a personal note, what do you want to do? And then on a secondary note of, what does the business, what would benefit the business the most as an entity?

So the one extreme would be you just create the two most popular, Facebook and Instagram, and you post pictures, maybe videos of stuff that you make. And that’s it. That’s all it’s designed for, it’s an online portfolio. This way if you meet somebody, you’re at a party and someone says, “What do you do?” “I make T-shirts.” And they say, “Oh, cool. Let me see.” You don’t necessarily have to go to your photo album where you’ve got mixed in pictures of drink that you had at the bar and your dinner somewhere-

Jes Santiago:
Or reach in your pocket for your business card. Then they’ve got to go to the website on the business card to see your stuff. It’s an easier way to display what you’re doing with your business.

Marc Vila:
Right. Yeah. “Hey, do you have Instagram? Yeah. Go to it, type in whatever T-shirt shop.” And then they’ll pull it up, and yeah, follow me. And then also they can just see everything that you’ve done. And it looks really cool. It’s a reasonably passive. You could also do the same thing on Facebook. So this does two things. It allows you to share your portfolio in a good way. And it also allows any potential buyers from you that are maybe trying to do a little bit of online research will find your Instagram page, see 100 things that you’ve made, and they say, “Okay, this person knows what they’re doing.” Right?

Jes Santiago:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
So I think those are the extremes. You try to become an online personality and you’re literally wearing and selling hats on TikTok through… Or the Instagram store. And then the other extreme is just like, it’s an online portfolio. And then the third option is having nothing at all, which is I’m going to generally speaking, advocate not for that.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that it builds trust with customers and potential customers if you’re not keeping up… I mean, this is how I think at my age, I’m sure there’s other people a little bit even younger than me, like Jailin who’s on our team could agree that if you don’t see that a customer’s keeping up with anything new age, so any newer technologies perhaps, or any of the social media platforms, you kind of start to maybe think a little bit, “Maybe I won’t purchase for them. Maybe I can purchase from someone who’s more on top of things, more willing to show me what they’re doing on a live.” You can even do a live story. Things like that I think are important for a small business or just a business of any size.

Marc Vila:
So some customers are going to want to see that you’re keeping up to date with things. They’re going to want to see that you’re moving forward because they’re moving forward too. And they would like to work… Listen, if our school or small business, we’re growing small business and if we’re going to need to try to partner up with somebody to do the custom apparel that we’re going to have for not only our customers, but also our employees, we want to make sure that they’re forward moving with us too. And we don’t want to be stuck with somebody who’s going to stay behind while moving forward.

Jes Santiago:
Oh, yeah.

Marc Vila:
So I can see that. I mean, there’s definitely a vision going forward of people deciding who they’re going to do business with. Also, they’re going to be curious if you’re real or not.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Authenticity for sure.

Marc Vila:
They also might think you’re a scam.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I agree.

Marc Vila:
Which is a real thing too.

Jes Santiago:
Oh, yeah.

Marc Vila:
Especially nowadays, there’s so many people with credit card fraud and all these scams everywhere from, I mean, starting with Craigslist scam days, all the way now it’s on Facebook Marketplace, it’s everywhere. Everywhere has somebody trying to scam. So having a social presence is another way to just, it adds another layer of trust. If you don’t have one, that doesn’t mean that you are a scam. And if you do have one, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t, right?

Jes Santiago:
They’re not a scam.

Marc Vila:
But it adds up over time, all the different things. And if they could see that for two years you’ve been posting pictures on various platforms, and some customers have been in those, and maybe they recognize another small business or something that was mentioned in a post in their community, then they’re going to say, “Oh, okay, I didn’t know that you also made the hats, or the shirts, or the mugs for that other business down the road. Actually, I’ve been there before.”

Jes Santiago:
Right. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
“Their stuff looks nice on their employees.” Right?

Jes Santiago:
That’s a good point. I didn’t really think of that, that layer of trust. But I do really think that that’s a good point. I mean, I know for myself, when I’m shopping, if it’s for a small business at least, I do always look up the business on Instagram, Facebook, wherever I can. I’ll try to read through customer comments if any. I don’t see any, that’s a red flag to me on most of their posts. But yeah, I can agree that that’s something that’s super important if you want to make your business not look like a scam.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. That’s a good point. I’ll say I do the same similarly. For example, I’ll be getting married this spring and-

Jes Santiago:
Congratulations.

Marc Vila:
Thanks. And we were looking at somebody local to make cakes. We really wanted to have a really local, small business do it in our area. And that was the first thing that I did with all the folks that… First, I went on to Facebook into a group, and I asked, “Does anybody know anybody in this area that does this?” And I had maybe 10 people reply, right? Three or four of them actually shared their Instagram page. So I immediately went right to their portfolio.

Jes Santiago:
Love that.

Marc Vila:
So the public was easily able to share their portfolio to me. One of them, I found kind of a website that didn’t have much on it, and I pretty much just bailed on that one immediately.

Jes Santiago:
It’s a red flag.

Marc Vila:
Oh, yeah. I was just like, “I don’t know, but I have so many options. I might as well narrow it down to the one that I can already see their work. And there’s a degree of transparency.” So some people immediately got out of the ranking without even me making a phone call. And it’s not like I said, “Oh, they don’t have an Instagram account. I’m not going to do business with them.” That I don’t think that was the thought process at all.

The thought process was, “I’ve got so many that were just recommended to me. I’m only interested in calling three to do price comparisons, to have a conversation. I’m just going to pick the ones that are the three obvious ones for me to make a phone call to.” And the one that had barely had a website and no social media presence, I was just like, my attention was already grabbed by the one that had a tagged local cake made just two weeks ago in a park that was two miles from my house.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I totally get that.

Marc Vila:
So now, right, we’re at the point, we’ve gone in some different places right here, but we’re at the point where we figured out who your customer is, what you’re going to sell to, the potential of what type of social presence you want to have, whether it’s a portfolio or you want to try to sell online based on what you’re trying to do. Next, I would say is going to research your competition or just other similar businesses. They might not be as direct competition as you think, but see what they’re doing.

So one of the thoughts that I had is you want to actually sell online, right? So you decided that you’re going to make real fashion forward type of T-shirts and hats, or maybe you’re going to do even something completely different. You’re going to do custom canvas prints or drinkware that’s really interesting. And you want to sell it actually on social media. Your goal is to not go to a local business like we’ve been discussing a few times, but your goal is actually to get on social, capture people’s attention, and get people actually on Instagram or through TikTok, click a link to buy it right off there or from your website, or something like that. So saying that, you want to see how other people selling similar products, how are they doing it? And if they look like they’re successful, then I mean, one of the key strategies is to just essentially copycat what they’re doing, right?

Jes Santiago:
Basically. Yeah. In so many words. I think that keeping up with what their strengths and weaknesses are, maybe it gives you an opportunity to see what different things you can bring to your social media account. So if you are following, or at least just copycatting a business and it seems to be working for them, you can also branch out and look at their website or their page in a different light as well. Okay, so they’re doing X, Y, Z correctly, but what are they not doing that this other business is doing? You can copy that too and bring that into your business and become those two shops all in one essentially. So basically, I would keep an eye on their pages. That’s what I-

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s great. I think the perfect scenario would be if you wanted to sell online, just as going with that example is, I want to sell a drinkware that has this custom art that I do. So I’m going to do this custom art, and I’m going to do tumblers, and mugs, and I’m going to customize each of them. All of them are going to be one of a kind. I’m going to offer some that are personalized with names, or birthdays, or anniversaries. Others are just going to be just the art that I sell, and that’s what I’m going to do. And so just the fictional business, I sell the canvases, the drinkware, and maybe even some apparel too with it.

But you’re like, “Well, nobody’s doing this.” Right? That’s the concept. It’s like, “I’m the only person doing this.” Right? So you find people in similar industries or adjacent to it. So if you can find somebody who does hip-hop style, where it’s all has to do with rap lyrics, and dancing, and things like that. Find their page, see what they’re doing, how are they communicating with their audience? How are they talking to them? How are they sharing the product that they sell? How are they taking money accepting money from people?

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, that’s a good point.

Marc Vila:
And then it’s not the same as you, but it’s adjacent to you.

Jes Santiago:
Yes.

Marc Vila:
They’re just, what they’re selling is just a completely different audience than yours, right? Yours might be people into art, people who would drink tea or coffee with flowers in it, or something like that.

Jes Santiago:
My lavender coffee. Leave me and my lavender coffee alone.

Marc Vila:
So your customers might drink… And the other customers are drinking Monster coffee drinks.

Jes Santiago:
Monster Java, whatever that is.

Marc Vila:
Right. So saying that, you can just learn some lessons from them. Okay. And then you list what they’re doing. Okay. Well, they’re being live on social media. They’re telling exactly what they’re doing. They’re showing the product being made. They’re inviting customers to join their live with them, and talk about the product, wearing it. And you could say, “I could do that same exact thing.” So you find adjacent customers or adjacent competition that’s not your competition, but very similar. And then you can find direct. And you made a fantastic point where if you find… I would try to find at least three, maybe five or six. Don’t get to 100 or 50, you’ll never be able… Pick a vehicle. And then you Venn diagram it, you draw this is what they do great. This is what they all do great. This is what none of them do great. Here’s this individual idea that I have. And then you pair all that together, and then you build your own little strategy, which is the next thing to talk about, right?

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. That’s perfect. What a great segue.

Marc Vila:
So we wrote down, in our notes here, we wrote down some questions about determining a strategy. So why don’t you tell us about what those are?

Jes Santiago:
So the first question is, do you want to sell online? I think we kind of already went over that. Do you want customers to find you on social media? Are these pages for building trust or are they just an online portfolio? Excuse me. So it’s kind of what we’ve already talked about in the same, I don’t know what-

Marc Vila:
Yeah. All the questions we were asking earlier are now need to go into writing.

Jes Santiago:
Yes, exactly. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Marc Vila:
Oh, no, I was just going to say, you go into Excel or Word or something like that that you have, or on a notepad and you physically start answering these questions and writing out level one of, I think of determining a strategy is just right sentences or words, “I want to sell online. My customers are really active on social media. I believe my customers are on TikTok. I don’t think my customers really use Facebook. I think my customers do use Facebook groups a lot. I’d like to find out about actually selling on Instagram. I just want to build a fantastic portfolio so that I can share with people or my customers can share with people that want referrals.”

Jes Santiago:
So basically determining your goal.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, determining the goals, just write them all down. Things you do want, things you don’t want, to keep it simple. And then from there, you can start… I think you’ve got a vision.

Jes Santiago:
Kind of narrow it down. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, yeah. You’ve got a vision of what you want to do, you know what platforms you want to go on, and how you want to execute.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, you know what platforms your customers are going to be on. So that’ll help you choose, okay, I’m going to start on Instagram, or I’m going to start at the basics like Facebook. Maybe you won’t even touch Pinterest, because Pinterest is one that people don’t think about or TikTok just yet. Maybe that can develop over time. But it kind of just helps you determine where you want to put this content and what kind of content you want to put out there, and who’s your audience. So just determining your goal is super important for just starting.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. No, it’s exactly. It’s just starting. So start somewhere, but have a little bit of a plan of what the start is. Don’t just start making… I read online that if you want to succeed the most, you should have every single social media and post to all of them five times a day.

Jes Santiago:
At this time.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, sure. But if your customers are in procurement for local utility companies they’re not even… They don’t care.

Jes Santiago:
I don’t think they’re worried about that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s just so far removed from them making that decision. And have you seen this thing on TikTok where-

Jes Santiago:
I’m scared to know what, TikTok has so much.

Marc Vila:
These people, they have a box of stuff that would be in a junk drawer at your house, and then for 20 bucks, they’ll like scoop a Tupperware full of it and put it in a baggie and mail it to you.

Jes Santiago:
What?

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Jes Santiago:
Like, what side of TikTok are you on?

Marc Vila:
It’s like it’s pen caps and little squishy toys, and highlighters, clips. Actually, I just had one somewhere. But the chip bag clips.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, the little… Okay.

Marc Vila:
These little twisty tie things.

Jes Santiago:
I’ve never seen that before. That’s interesting.

Marc Vila:
There’s like, oh, here’s a Pokemon toy, and oh, this ones missing an arm.

Jes Santiago:
Oh my God.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it’s just like a junk drawer.

Jes Santiago:
And they just put it in a bag and sell it to people?

Marc Vila:
And people buy it.

Jes Santiago:
That is so interesting.

Marc Vila:
Right there. Yeah.

Jes Santiago:
Well, I mean, I guess they are saying what’s going in the bag, but there’s a little bit of an element of surprise.

Marc Vila:
There is. And there’s some treasures in there too. This one I was watching, the lady had scratch off tickets that would be in there. So there’d be three scratch off tickets too. And sometimes when there would be a scoop, every once in a while they would get a whole little folded up thing of them. So there was maybe 10 scratch off tickets in there.

Jes Santiago:
OKay. So I can see why people maybe like it.

Marc Vila:
So every once in a while you get a couple really cool looking pens and a Pokemon toy and 10 scratch-offs, and you’re like, “Dang, I could be a millionaire.”

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Or you get a bag that’s like three year old candy or something.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, just old candy.

Jes Santiago:
Or old Chick-Fil-A sauce or something.

Marc Vila:
Just wrappers. I’m pretty sure that might have been in there, ketchup packets and stuff.

Jes Santiago:
Well, I’m thinking of my junk drawer at home and it’s not pretty.

Marc Vila:
So anyway, I think the point being on that is you could sell anything online if it makes sense. This one example is entertaining and there’s some luck involved. And then people are just probably enjoy watching it because it’s just this weird awkward person selling stuff out of a drawer. So in the example of the person who does hip-hop rap type of gear, maybe they have people on their freestyle rapping on their live while they’re selling their stuff. So they’re mixing entertainment. So you find that’s again, that’s the one extreme side of things. Because the other is just online portfolio. So now that you’ve, I guess, we can go back on track after that, going down these TikTok rabbit holes. So let’s see, we have here, so oh, the next important thing that you want to do is defining your brand.

Jes Santiago:
Oh, for sure.

Marc Vila:
Okay, so you want to talk about that a little bit?

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. When I think of defining our brand, or just any brand in general, I think about when I’m setting up a page, I want it to be consistent. I want my logos to be in the right places. I want my colors, my business colors to be consistent throughout the page. If I’m going to start a series of how-tos, I want that to look a certain way, be branded a certain way so that when people see that on their, if it’s TikTok, their for you page, or you’re just scrolling through the reels on Instagram, or even on your explore page, if you’ve seen it a few times, if you’ve seen those colors a few times, you know, okay, that’s ColDesi, or okay, that’s Marc’s T-shirt shop, et cetera. So I think having those kind of things, having a personality to your brand, having consistency across the board with logos, colors, I think that’s all important when you’re trying to define your brand, essentially.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. So you-

Jes Santiago:
Make a face for it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. You start with the simple level of things. Do you have a logo or is it more like a personality? Is it more your face or is it more about the business? Are there certain colors that you use? Are there certain fonts you use? Are there styles of things and the types of content that you want to share?

Jes Santiago:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
So if you’re doing custom drinkware, just using that as an example, you have the name of your company, you have a logo, maybe it’s not personal, right? Your goal is to not sell them necessarily online, but you want to have an online portfolio and a place for your customers to share, say thanks, give reviews, things like that. So you’re going to want to have the logo of your company as the main image in all these places.

If you have any secondary images that can be added to your profile. Maybe it’s a product shop display or something like that, or a picture of your shop, or something like that, or of you working, or something like that. And then the types of posts that you want to have for your branding.

So in this example, I just want to have really three types of posts. One is going to be something interactive, maybe to try to get some interaction online. Another one’s just going to be actual pictures of finished products. And then the third type of post is maybe either going to be me making or showing off a finished product. And that’s kind of going to be my social brand, and it’s all going… I’m going to make sure I use the same fonts, the same colors, my logo, take pictures in backgrounds that make sense.

Jes Santiago:
Right. Yes.

Marc Vila:
Right? Yeah. So when somebody goes to your page, everything feels like it belongs to you.

Jes Santiago:
Exactly. Yeah. You want your page to be, I mean, as cohesive, I think, as possible. I mean, you can have fun with it I believe. Even on our pages, one day we’re doing something with sublimation that’s super colorful, and then the next day we’re doing an embroidery design, digital heat effects design. Doesn’t always have to be so structured and so uniform. I don’t want to have people think by saying you want consistency, that has to be a certain uniform kind of way to where it almost becomes boring.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be militant either, where it’s like, I cannot break from this.

Jes Santiago:
Yes. I think it’s important to test, don’t be afraid to test. I think we do that all the time. For a while, we found that just normal social media or Instagram posts, for example, just pictures were working for a while. And then as you scroll up to our most recent, we’ve moved on to reels. So I think that it’s just important to test as long as it makes sense for your business, and as long as you’re still making sure that you have the same kind of face, the same kind of familiarity for customers and potential customers to find you, then you’re on the right track.

Marc Vila:
Yep. And this is a great place to go and look at other brands, whether it’s competition or just any brand in general, any business as on social media that you think does a good job. When one does a good job, you know it when you see it. And sometimes it’s hard to explain. So when you see one that does a good job, try to write down notes about why. I always find that their brand color is pink, and almost every picture has that shade of pink in it somewhere. Whether it’s literally a scarf on the table next to the product or the product itself. So look for things like that. So let’s see, make sure we have here your brand. Yeah. So your brand is all about, what do you want it to look like? Who is going to look at it? What’s the personality of your brand? And just making sure that your whole business on social media is cohesive and makes sense.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Which I think brings us into setting up your account. It kind of just flows into that, making sure that you have high quality images. You’re not just going to throw up a photo that you took, I don’t know, just randomly, you know. You want to make sure that you have some kind of, I guess, process to it. Make sure you have high quality images. Make sure you’re including keywords in your descriptions, in your bio, I think is important. Any links, if you have a Linktree, that’s also really something that we found pretty cool to use as well. Any initial posts you want to have scheduled at first, kind of have a plan, write out a plan. All right, so I’m going to start with reels. I’m going to do this in day one, or post one, two, three, four, five. I think all of these are important in setting up, kick starting your social media business or portfolio.

Marc Vila:
And so, no, that’s a great point. And you brought up something about testing too, which we’re going to get into next again as well. But so what you do is you hit the button on Instagram to start a new page, right? And then just start going through the steps. And before you hit publish, make sure you take notes of everything that they want you to fill out.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, good point.

Marc Vila:
Right. So they want you to make a name, they want you to have an image, they want you to have a secondary image, write a description of who you are and make your first post. So write all that down. That’s what I need to start Instagram. And to future-proof this, it might be different in one month. So rather than listing exactly what it is, the best tool you can do is actually to start to pretend to set one up, even if it’s a dummy one that you never publish and just hit delete at the end, or cancel.

The same thing on any other account that you’re going to do. Start to go through some of the steps so you can figure out what it is. Or potentially even just research on YouTube, how to set up an Instagram account the best way. And be sure to sort your video by the most recent in case there’s any changes. But you want to make a list of everything that you want to do, look back at your plan, make sure that what you have is going to make sense to it. Look at how you’re going to do your branding. And once you’re all set up and planned, then you can make your page. But before you do it, you should probably work on a bit of a social media calendar.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, that’s a good point. I actually have that in my notes. I think without a calendar, I can’t imagine, for example, I can’t imagine working here and not having a social media calendar. And that’s for all three of the platforms that we use, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. It just helps with consistency, making sure that you’re consistently posting, making sure that it’s going out on time.

I don’t want to say, “Okay, we’re going to print a design on one of our machines for St. Patrick’s Day.” Oh, well it’s already the 16th. I got to hurry up and get this post up. It’s kind of too late. You want to be ahead of the game. So for example, for that, we started creating content for that this month. And well, just kidding. It’s the 1st of March. So I forgot. In February-

Marc Vila:
Yeah, we did it last month. Yeah.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, we did it last month. And you just kind of start scheduling and getting ahead of the game so that it also just doesn’t… It doesn’t create, you don’t have to just go in all on one day and post, post, post, create all these posts. You have things kind of scheduled out what you’re going to do, you know what you’re going to film. It just makes the process easier. I couldn’t imagine just not having a calendar and working willy-nilly just, oh, I’ll post this. Oh, I’ll post that.

Marc Vila:
Right. You just want to have a plan. You want to have a daily, weekly, monthly type of a plan. And I would say currently, March 1st, 2023, if you’re listening to this a decade in the future, the AI’s deciding everything. Okay.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Excuse me.

Marc Vila:
It also decided that you should be listening to this podcast from the distant past. But today, I would say if it’s an online portfolio, have the schedule to post something to social media, bare minimum once a week. Two to three times a week ideally, right? But at least once a week, preferably twice, this way at the end of the year, there’s 100 things up there, right? If you’re doing it about twice a week, at the end of the year, you’ve got 100 pictures on Instagram, which is a pretty nice thing for a year later down the road when a customer says, “Yeah, purchase from so-and-so shop. They did a great job for me.” And they link to your Instagram account and this stranger on social media who you don’t even know, that you don’t even know this is happening, clicks on it, and they see 100 things that you’ve made. And they’re like, “This person’s legit. They’re good.”

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Exactly. Going back to the beginning where you were saying you were picking out wedding cakes, you didn’t go for the business that barely had a website built out that barely had a presence on social media. Yeah, you could do the minimum posting, but I mean, I don’t want to look at an Instagram page, a TikTok page that has two, three Instagram… Or two posts, four posts, five posts, even 10. I’m like…

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Jes Santiago:
They seem brand new. I don’t know if I necessarily trust… I want to put my trust into a brand new wedding cake bakery or something.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s actually… And that brings up a point, and it’s something, maybe not… I mean, it could be a tangent we could go into, but what you described of having in the beginning when you’re setting it up, having some posts that you’re going to do ahead of time, ready to go. So when you start your page, it’s not blank, but at least when you’re starting it, you’ve got maybe five things ready to go up or 10 things. And then talking about posting on a regular basis. That’s actually one of the biggest challenges I think for all businesses. They say, even us, “What are we going to post this week?” So I would say this, on your busy weeks with business where you’ve got a lot of orders, you should be taking a picture and or video of every order. You don’t have to post all of those that week.

Put them in the bank, put them in the folder. And then when you have a moment and you’re going to look at your social media real quick, line them up, say, “Order one, I’m going to do on Tuesday, order two, Thursday order three, next Tuesday, order four, next Thursday.” And now you’ve got six weeks worth of stuff kind of written down. And you know what you’re going to post. And you can schedule posts on a lot of these platforms too. So you can schedule to release it at a later date. And you can also change it. So if you have a really… Oops, I just threw my pen somewhere. If you have a really interesting-

Jes Santiago:
Got it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I got it. If you have a really interesting customer that comes up, you can alter your schedule a little bit. Hey, you guys are doing a big event this weekend. I’ll advertise it on my Instagram so people can see. And then you just move that post two weeks later, right? So if you have a bunch of stuff in the bank, you’ll always have a bunch of posts to do. So take advantage of things. And it’s okay to share the same thing at a different angle, or from a different light, or from share making it on Tuesday and then the next Tuesday share the finished product as a follow-up post. There’s plenty of content you could do, and especially on the portfolio side. If you’re going to be selling online, you probably want to have a daily plan.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, for sure.

Marc Vila:
What are you going to do every single day? Are you going to be going live every day? Are you going to be posting every day? What are you going to be offering every day? And that’s going to make sure that when your customer is ready to make that decision, you’re there ready to take the order.

Jes Santiago:
They’re choosing your page, your business.

Marc Vila:
Okay. So we’ve got a calendar, and then there’s a couple more things to go over. One is going to be kind of what you mentioned earlier. I wrote in the notes here, collaborating with others, but you know, also said community involvement and things like that.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. So I know for one, something that we’ve benefited from is our Facebook groups. There’s kind of a community on our Custom Apparel Startups page where we try to be on top of everything, but we’re also busy doing our own tasks. We cannot always reach every comment. There’s a community there that if you’ve built a big enough page built a big enough community, someone else who is familiar, or knows the answer, or can help one of our other customers, they jump on it. I see all the time in our page. And you kind of build cold SE customers who just help each other out when we’re not there for them or we can’t be there necessarily.

Marc Vila:
Sometimes I’ve seen on customer pages where they’ll say on their social media, it’ll say, “Do y’all make hoodies?” And then another customer will comment and say, “Yes, I actually just got some from them. I love them.” So that’s that community that you’ve created. But what you need to do is you need to help facilitate the creation of that community. And that’s going to be by asking your customers to follow you, asking your customers to maybe leave a review or comment or say, “Hey, I’m going to post the pictures of the hats I made for you on my Instagram.” And just I’d say, just be honest, “I’m trying to grow it. And Instagram kind of gives me Instagram points when people comment and like it, so if you wouldn’t mind when I post it up there, if you wouldn’t mind commenting and liking on it.”

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, sharing it to your story.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Or share it. That’d be a big help to me. And I’d appreciate it. So you could just ask folks that, and then anytime somebody does comment or anything like that on any of your posts, be sure to respond. Respond to all of them if you can. And in the beginning, in the very beginning, you definitely can, because there’s not going to be that many. So respond to that. And then another way to kind of build that online community is by cross-promoting. So if you have a customer who is an electrician, you made hats for them, post their hat, tag them in there, write a note, “Hey, if anybody is in the Harbordale area, you need an electrician. I just did a hat job for Joe over there and he was a super cool guy.” And either drop the name of their business or if they have social media, share their social media.

And maybe this electrician, he’s on social media too, kind of sharing his customer’s stories. And potentially ask them, say, “I’m going to share you, will you share me?” And it could be them doing a job wearing the new hats and be like, “Hey, we just fixed the electrical issue at this local school, and by the way, we’re wearing our new hats. And even one of the kids in the school commented how cool it looked.” Whatever. So cross promoting each other like that’s great, especially when you’re dealing with lots of other businesses or if you are doing work with somebody who is really active on social media themselves.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, for sure. So I just thought of something on another way to build your, I guess, community or gain followers, but it doesn’t necessarily have to… I’m backtracking a little bit if that’s okay.

Marc Vila:
All right. Cool.

Jes Santiago:
Doesn’t necessarily have to do with cross-promoting, but going back to knowing your competitors. I think one of the things that I have found helpful, and I sometimes go through our competitors or someone adjacent to us, their followers. Who are they following? I mean, I’m not going to just follow a random person named Bob who has no post. But if it seems like another shop or something that is relevant to our business, I’ll go ahead and I’ll follow. I’ll pay attention.

Marc Vila:
So you potentially follow the followers of your competition or adjacent businesses.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Yeah. What do you think?

Marc Vila:
Yeah, so if you sell apparel and there’s a shop down the road that sells awards and engraving, kind of adjacent, right? Because you figure that a little league is going to use both of those businesses, right? They need awards and they need apparel. And maybe both of you might not do the same thing.

So what you do is you can go to this award shop and you can look at their social media. It’s pretty good. They got a good amount of people there. It’s adjacent to my business. Who’s following them? Well there’s three little league teams that are following them. So I’m going to click on their profiles, look at them, and then right from my business profile, I’m going to follow that little league. It’s going to pop up that this custom apparel shop follows them.

And that little moment there could be the spark that ignites them to look at you, see how good of a job you do, realize how dissatisfied they are with the apparel that they currently have potentially, didn’t even know you were in business. They found you. And that they start following you back. And next thing you know, the next time that their customer messes up or their vendor messes up and gets the hats wrong again for the third time, they’re going to-

Jes Santiago:
It’s a light bulb.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, and they’re going to remember you and they’re going to have seen how good your hats look. And they pick up the phone and they give you a call, or even send you a message on social media and say, “Hey, I’m sick of doing with this business that doesn’t seem to care about me. I’m looking for somebody who does. And looking at your social media, it seems like you care about your customers.” So a little bit of this work that you can do in social can really pay off.

Jes Santiago:
Oh, for sure. Yeah. Even with influencers, influencers, influencers, tongue-tied. Influencers, you can also follow some influencers that are maybe a little bit popular in the type of industry you’re working in and maybe try to connect with them as well. It’s another way to build brand trust on social media. If this social media influencer is doing this, I should do this. There’s a lot of people that think that way. We’re easily, maybe not easily, but some of us are easily influenced to trust what this influencer, this popular influencer is saying. We see them all the time. We see bigger brands partnering with them. So maybe trying to connect with even some of the smaller ones.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, just honestly, and influencers can be on the social media side, meaning they have tons of followers, right? But it also could mean that they’re just an influencer in your community. So the amount of followers they have is maybe very small, maybe 400, but they are the principal of a school, or they are the person who is the head of the homeowner’s association. So the people that are following them are actually a lot of people in your community. And if you’re interacting with them online, they associate you with this person that is of authority, that they trust and it can turn into business for you. So there’s one side of it where it’s like, yes, I’m going to connect with this person who’s in the music industry that has a million followers, that would be great for my business. But that might not really matter too much to you if you’re mainly selling to local stuff.

Jes Santiago:
Oh, yeah.

Marc Vila:
Right. What would matter more to you would be principals, politicians, business owners like-

Jes Santiago:
That big face in the community.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. The realtor that has their face on every billboard as you’re driving down-

Jes Santiago:
On the bench.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, the bench bench man.

Jes Santiago:
I haven’t seen that in a while actually.

Marc Vila:
I don’t drive by a lot of benches too much.

Jes Santiago:
Me either now that I think about it. Otherwise, maybe I just don’t notice. I don’t know.

Marc Vila:
I just don’t drive in the city as much.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, true. I try to avoid.

Marc Vila:
I live in the suburbs now and I drive on the highway to get through it, so I don’t see the benches.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Well, all right. There’s two last things to discuss and then we’re about to wrap up. So you had mentioned before just about experimenting with new ways to engage.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
So what are some ways you can experiment? And by engage, we mean getting people to follow you, like you, make comments, message you, whatever it is, that means interact with you.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Do you have any thoughts of ways to experiment things you could try?

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, I actually did this holiday contest on Instagram and that was kind of a first, I think. Or either maybe a second for us. We did that for the second time, but years apart. So I think contests are a good way to try and get people to engage with you, click on your page, click on your website. You’re going to need some patience though, especially if you’re starting off. You’re a little bit newer on social media.

For us, we did it on our Colman and Company Instagram page, which has a little bit less of a following than ColDesi, and Digital Heat Effects. And it took a little bit for the post to pick up. But once I started sharing that contest, once I sent it to people, I even went ahead and sent it to my own friends that I know make their own T-shirts or hats. They shared it to a bunch of different people. And that’s how we got that page or that post to pick up a little bit. Then the comment section was crazy. People were tagging all of their friends trying to win our contest. So I would say maybe try with contests, polls.

Marc Vila:
Ask people their opinion.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. Exactly.

Marc Vila:
I’m thinking about adding a new… Drinkware example. Before you put art on tumblers and you kind of say, “Which one of these should be the next one I put on my website?” And ask the people that follow you. And the contest one is interesting. You can do something for a free giveaway, or coupon, or something like that. There’s plenty, you can experiment with working with an influencer like the cross posting, see how that works if you cross post with this person and if it makes sense to do it. And by cross posting I mean, you post about them, they post about you. And you probably do that the same day or something like that.

Jes Santiago:
You could boost a post too.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, you could do boosting, which is basically paying money to social media to show it to more people. So you can experiment with that and see what it does. If you have a portfolio page that is just a bunch of pictures of stuff you do, I probably wouldn’t spend a ton of money sharing that.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, agreed.

Marc Vila:
Because the goal is not to sell online. Your goal is not necessarily to get customers online, but build trust to potential customers when they look you up or it’s shared. Versus if you’re actually trying to build a following of people where you do something, where you are making your drinkware live and it’s interesting to watch and you have customers on there that are artists that are doing things, and it’s an internet show that you can buy the product, then boosting the post would make sense to get more eyes to that.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. And something I noticed that some small businesses are doing on TikTok is they’re going live on TikTok and they’re tagging one of their customers. They’re tagging their handle in their live, and they say something like, “I’m making your custom tumbler today.” And I don’t know, I’ve seen a ton of people just watch the live, just tune in. It’s them just sitting there making that person’s tumbler or mug for example. That’s kind of interactive. It gets people excited, it gets your customers excited. It even gets people who are just random. I’m pretty random. I probably am not going to buy from her, but I watched it. I thought it was cool.

Marc Vila:
The fact that you watched it also will get other followers, because TikTok maybe will… The algorithm will kind of say, “This was interesting to get 300 people to watch for three minutes. The next time this goes live, we’re going to give it some more juice.” Because the goal of most of these platforms is to keep you on them. So if people watch your stuff for a little bit, then they’ll show it to more people. So, great. So there there’s a handful of ideas and thoughts, and look at what other people do and see if that’s something that you want to try. And then the last thing to do is to track performance. For one, I think the number one rule of this is you have to be super patient in the beginning.

Jes Santiago:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Nobody is going to care. You’re going to have zero likes on something that you thought was the best thing you made.

Jes Santiago:
I’ve felt that way before.

Marc Vila:
And yeah, you’re going to ask a question and nobody’s going to answer, “Which one do you like better?” And you have one person that says, “The green one.” And it almost feels like embarrassing for someone else to see that, right? But there are a couple things to remember are, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, their goal is not to make you as famous as possible. Their goal is to make money through ads and please investors, right? And the way that they do that, the best way, the way that ads… What are the most expensive ads on TV? Do you know?

Jes Santiago:
Oh, I don’t know.

Marc Vila:
Super Bowl.

Jes Santiago:
Super Bowl.

Marc Vila:
Super Bowl. Yes.

Jes Santiago:
Okay. That’s what I was thinking.

Marc Vila:
Super Bowl. Why? Because-

Jes Santiago:
Everyone’s tuned in.

Marc Vila:
Everyone’s tuned in, right? It’s one of the most watched things ever. So it’s the most expensive ads. So if Facebook wants to make the most money from ads, they want to have the most eyes on phones.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, that makes sense.

Marc Vila:
Which means that ads are worth more money, right? And so that’s their goal, right? So their goal is not to make you famous. Their goal is to make money. So over time, you will start building internet points that add up to say that it’s worth it, right? And if your page never becomes worth it to them for whatever reason, it’s a computer deciding this, then that’s when you make it worth it by you paying for it. By boosting it.

Jes Santiago:
Boosting. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
And then that gives you the shot to potentially grow faster. You put 20 bucks into this, it went from two views to 1,000 views. A good amount of people commented, and then that gives you a little more points. So you’re kind of the internet, the AI is going to say, “All right, I mean this people seem to like this. The next time they boost it, we’re going to show it to more people. And the next time they post, more of these people that followed are going to probably be shown it again.” So it’s kind of a thing over time, but don’t be discouraged by it. The fact that it will be particularly slow. And anybody who… Realistically, if somebody tells you that they started up their social page and they got to 10,000 followers their first month, I mean, they lied.

Jes Santiago:
I’m thinking they bought it, they bought the followers.

Marc Vila:
Or they just got really lucky.

Jes Santiago:
Lucky. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Right? So being lucky is not the rule. Right? Like the lottery example in the beginning. Yes, people win the lottery every week. The chances of it being you are one in 70 million or whatever the number is, right?

Jes Santiago:
It’s so sad.

Marc Vila:
And the same with this getting famous on social media quickly or without purpose is, sure, you may have or heard of somebody who did it. They may be lying. Which I mean, let’s be honest, people lie, that’s not even a secret. People lie. So they may be lying. They may have paid for it, or they may have been lucky.

And then chances are, if you look at somebody who has a really successful social media account, the biggest chance is that they put a lot of work into it over time and were very discouraged for a long period of time, and they did the right things. They kept reaching out to people to collaborate. They kept tagging people, commenting, going through their followers followers and following them.

Jes Santiago:
That person, whoever said that probably didn’t mention all of what Marc is talking about.

Marc Vila:
Right. Right. They may not have mentioned the fact that, oh, I mean I spent 30 hours a week. I’m trying to remember who, I spoke with somebody who was particularly busy on social media and they were saying that it was like they spent 30 to 40 hours a week doing it.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, it takes time.

Marc Vila:
I think it was a customer or something. But they had… Yeah. And they said, they were like, “Yeah, I mean, every video that you see is two hours worth of work, and I do like 10 a week. So that’s like 20 hours of it. Then I probably spend another 20 hours commenting, sharing.” So point being is that if you’re going to sell online, and that’s going to be the business you’re going to do, it’s a full-time job. You know, it’s a good amount of work and it’s going to take some luck. And if you put 40 hours a week into, it’s going to ramp up faster than if you put 20, or 10, or two.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. You’ve got to have that expectation kind set for yourself.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Have the expectation for yourself that… Because the worst thing that’ll happen is you put a good amount of work into it, even if it’s like an two hours a week, eight, 10 hours a month, and then you give up because you thought it was going to happen super quick. So if you go in and saying, “I’m going to be number one, I’m going to win. I’m going to make money on it, I understand that if I only put in two hours a week, it will be slow. And if I put in 40, it’ll be faster as long as I have a plan and keep going.”

Jes Santiago:
Exactly.

Marc Vila:
So set the expectation, have a plan, and then consider everything that we talked about. Who’s your audience? What’s your branding going to look like? How are you going to view the results? And the last bit about tracking performance is just look for wins.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, exactly. Look for wins. I mean, you can get pretty specific with tracking. I don’t know if we want to necessarily…

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I would say, I mean, tracking is actually a good episode in and of itself.

Jes Santiago:
That is actually.

Marc Vila:
So we can talk about that. So maybe we’ll stay tuned for that in the future. But I would say generally speaking tracking, look at the stats on the post. They’ll give you stats on the business side of things in any platform.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah. There’s analytics tools that you can use.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. How many people looked at it? You can just go simple at first. How many views did it get? How many likes did it get? How many comments? How many people shared it?

Jes Santiago:
How many people saved it?

Marc Vila:
Yeah. All that stuff. You just look at simple stuff, and look for something interesting. So you posted a picture of a tumbler because you made custom tumblers. And normally you get five likes and this one got 20. So why?

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, exactly. Ask yourself why. What did you do differently? And then if that worked, try to recreate that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It might not be obvious too, which is the interesting thing too, because for us, we’ve seen that and there’s still some posts I don’t understand why.

Jes Santiago:
I don’t get why this one did so well.

Marc Vila:
It could have been anything.

Jes Santiago:
The audio that you use.

Marc Vila:
The audio that you used, it could have been just the color was real eye catching. You used a particular color of green that really popped out in the screen, so more people stopped to look at it because it got their attention for a second. It could have just been the time of the year, you know, you posted something really interesting around Christmastime and then that was your best post. So how do you recreate that? Well, you’re going to say, “I’m going to try and do Valentine’s Day too.” Okay, well maybe don’t expect the same results because it’s not as popular of a holiday per se. Right?

Jes Santiago:
Exactly.

Marc Vila:
So look for interesting wins, look forward to ways to recreate it, and just have some patience, and keep looking and working on it. So I think that covers about everything. Is there anything else you wanted to add at the end?

Jes Santiago:
I mean, I don’t think so. I think just piggybacking off of you, be patient, have a plan, just set an expectation for yourself that the amount of time you’re going to put in might be a lot if you want to get bigger, if you want to… Might happen over a year, might happen over two years, or a few months, honestly. Just set realistic expectations, realistic goals, and just do the research and do the work.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Do the research, and do the work is a great thing to do. And also go all the way back to the plan. Because if the plan is for it to be an online portfolio that having 100 likes is probably never necessarily the goal. Listen, I sell to local businesses, I just want a place to put all my stuff publicly that’s different than my website. And that’s what it’s going to be. So maybe you’re not going to super get into social and it’s literally, you know what? I’m going to spend less than an hour of a week on it. I’m just going to be posting, building that up. On the flip side compared to you’re looking to sell online. So go back to the goal and determine what it is, and then just follow that correctly and you’ll be good. And be patient with it and take time to learn it.

Jes Santiago:
Don’t be afraid to test.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, don’t be afraid to test out. Try something new if you’re really curious about doing it, and talk to your customers about it. That’s the best way to do it is people that you meet face to face, you can get them to follow, like, hare, talk about it, participate with you on social, leave me a review on Facebook, stuff like that.

Jes Santiago:
Exactly.

Marc Vila:
And then also I say, just if you want to get more reviews on Facebook or more comments or likes, I mean, just literally tell them why. If somebody’s super happy and they’re like, “I love this hat you made, it’s the best. The kids on the team are so happy because their last hats they messed up the numbers for six of the kids and they were so disappointed that the first game they had the wrong number at it, a number, and kids have tape on the back of their hats with Sharpie. I mean…

Jes Santiago:
You can get so specific, Marc, it cracks me up.

Marc Vila:
So that’s something that could happen. And now they’re really happy and you can literally just say, “I appreciate it so much. I look forward to doing business again. You know what, one of the things I’m really trying to do is build up the amount of reviews I have on Facebook. So if you’re on there and you want to leave five stars, it would really mean a lot to me too. It’d be a great way to say thanks as well.”

Jes Santiago:
Just be honest.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, just be honest. And oftentimes that person who was really satisfied would be like, “Sure. Yeah. I mean, I use Facebook all the time. I’ll do it right now.” And they’ll find you and literally do it right at that moment. And so just ask for it. So all right. Oh, what did I write in the end here just to make sure in my notes here.

Jes Santiago:
Basically everything we said.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Jes Santiago:
I think.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it sounds good then. I think we nailed everything. So go ahead and you can take a look. Go to ColDesi on social media and on Instagram, or TikTok, or Facebook, you can go to ColDesi, Colman and Company is another.

Jes Santiago:
Digital Heat Effects.

Marc Vila:
Digital Heat Effects. Those are the big accounts that we spend time on. You can take a look at some of the stuff we’ve done. Yeah. And I’ll say, I mean, some of our stuff doesn’t have tons of likes or interaction. It’s a little bit portfolio style. Some of the stuff we do have a lot of interaction on and so not every post needs to be a win. And we’re in a niche industry. We’re in the customization business. We’re not selling something that that every single person is buying. So I don’t expect us to have as many likes as something entertainment like someone who’s an amazing dancer or singer.

Jes Santiago:
Yeah, ASMR. People love that.

Marc Vila:
That’ll be a whole podcast too, then. Well, great. Thanks for listening and definitely go to ColDesi.com if you’re interested in learning about the different types of customization equipment that we have to offer. And feel free to send a message on any of our accounts on social media. Ask us any questions that you have. And if you really want to directly speak about equipment that we have to sell, then that’s not going to be Jes or I that do that, that’s other folks in the business. So if you go to ColDesi.com, you can live chat with folks if you want to talk about customization equipment. But thanks for listening. My name’s Marc Vila.

Jes Santiago:
And I’m Jes Santiago.

Marc Vila:
And we’ll see you in the next episode of Custom Apparel Startups.

Jes Santiago:
Thank you.

 

 

Financing is an important part of starting and growing a business. However, there are a lot of misconceptions and confusion. Many people only have experience financing a house, car, or a new couch. Yet there is a whole world of financing business equipment and software.

This episode discusses financing for business and answers the most frequently asked questions.

Why do businesses finance equipment?

• Utilize banks money to start
• Keep current liquid money on hand
• Tax benefits
• Time value of money

Can a new business finance?

• Yes!
• You can use personal credit

What if you don’t have perfect credit – should you finance? What if the rate is high?

• Start now, or don’t start
• Risk and reward
• Do what you gotta do

Why not just use a credit card?

• Installment vs revolving credit
• Save your credit card for quick purchase / pay off like supplies or blanks
• Don’t use personal revolving credit lines for business

Isn’t interest bad?

• If you can make more money than the interest, you win
• Tax benefits
• Bank loans cost money, that’s the way it works. They are in business too.
• Better to do something than nothing to win

What’s the finance process like?

• Apply
• Review credit and terms with agent
• Accept, sign, deliver

What’s financing vs leasing?

What if someone has a lot of other questions?

Isn’t debt for suckers?

• Most businesses have debt
• You buy a house with a loan for the long-term benefits (equity)
• Is a car loan for a new and reliable car better than paying cash for a car that will break down?

Financing: assets vs liability

• A machine for business is different from a car
• This isn’t just adding to your bills but giving you opportunity.
• Tax benefits
• You own something of real value vs taking on debt for a vacation or new tv

Overall, financing isn’t complicated, but it feels scary. So is starting a business or buying a house. Those who take the risk are the ones who can be rewarded.

Learn more at https://coldesi.com/financing-options/

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hey everybody, and welcome to the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. This is episode 187, and Marc Vila here doing the introduction. Usually, Mark Stephenson does it, but he is not on the episode today. Instead, we have an amazing talent and an amazing knowledge and so much more from John Sullivant of Adia Capital. So welcome to the show.

John Sullivant:
Hey, Marc. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Great. Great. We really appreciate you too. I’ll give you a really super brief introduction on who John is and then, John, I’ll let you take it away, but-

John Sullivant:
Sure.

Marc Vila:
… John is in so many words, an expert on financing equipment, which is why you’re listening to this episode. You’re curious about leasing, financing, should you, and a lot of frequently asked questions. So John’s going to be here to answer some of those with me and also just have a little bit of discussion on making good business decisions when it comes to financing. So John, I’m not a big fan on people giving a 20-minute story of their life when it comes to a guest on a podcast-

John Sullivant:
Good.

Marc Vila:
A lot of podcasts do that, but I do think it’s important when you are speaking from authority to talk a little bit about who you are. So just to do the same for myself for people, maybe first time listeners here. My name is Marc Vila and I’m the director of marketing here at ColDesi. We’re in the customization equipment business, and I’ve been in this industry specifically since 2008. So I’ve got a bunch of years of experience in the customization equipment industry, and John has even more experience. So I’m going to let you give us just a little 60-second or so on you.

John Sullivant:
Absolutely. The main thing I want people to know is that I’m an entrepreneur, and that’s what most of your customers are. So I started off actually in decorated apparel as a screen printer and then worked my way up to a trade magazine in the industry. After that, I went to work for a finance company that financed equipment in this and other industries, and from there went on to work for a company called Custom Leasing. Then in April in ’80, I founded Adia Capital and I’m the president of Adia Capital now.

Marc Vila:
Wow. Yeah, that’s very cool journey going from being a screen printer and owner of production business-

John Sullivant:
Yes.

Marc Vila:
… to helping people start and grow their production businesses.

John Sullivant:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
So I think you see something from a really different light.

John Sullivant:
Right, and I amended that, of course. I also had time in equipment sales where I sold embroidery equipment. So I know the aspect of embroidery and screen printing from both sides, from helping people start businesses and to running it myself.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s great. Well, if you’re listening out there, you can see that John is the unique wealth of knowledge when it comes to not only this business in and of itself, the customization business in of itself, but the financing side of it too having been doing that, not only working for another company, but owning your own business for a long time too. Now that’s about 15 years, right?

John Sullivant:
Yes, it is.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Time flies, huh?

John Sullivant:
It does, it absolutely does. But it has been, to quote a cliché, it’s been a lot of fun and we enjoy what we do every day.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. When you started the business, what color was your beard at that point in time?

John Sullivant:
Your color 

Marc Vila:
My color. Okay.

John Sullivant:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely not this white, but, yeah.

Marc Vila:
We do post the podcast on YouTube, so if you’re listening to it, awesome. But if you prefer to see us chat, you can check us out on YouTube as well, or on the customapparelstartups.com website. We’ll post the videos on there and such. But to segue way into financing, so financing in general, just broad stroke is an extremely important part of the world economy, and all of us are used to financing things like homes or automobiles or even furniture, right?

John Sullivant:
Sure.

Marc Vila:
Commercial equipment is financed as well, and so are buildings and leasing out spaces and all this stuff. So financing is a really critical part of business as well. But because a lot of new business owners are used to financing cars or houses, there can be a lot of misconceptions when it comes to financing things for your business because you have to think about it differently and it acts a little bit differently I think, as well. So part of this podcast is to help to understand how those lines are different and the benefits of, and I’ll say, just straight up downsides of it too, right?

John Sullivant:
Sure.

Marc Vila:
Because there’s two sides of every coin. So why don’t we just start with a simple question that people ask all the … Or a question that I want to ask you, John-

John Sullivant:
Sure, go right ahead.

Marc Vila:
Generally speaking, why do businesses financing equipment? Why don’t everybody just pay cash or put it on a credit card?

John Sullivant:
Right. Right. Those are certainly options for some people, but most people finance equipment because it is a very large expense. In most cases, since these businesses are being started in a home or in a rented building, it’s their largest expense. So they want to utilize financing to be able to reserve their capital or their credit in the case of credit cards for other expenses that may come up down the road. Another big benefit, which I know we’ll get into, is the tax write-off benefit and the fact that it doesn’t affect our personal credit is debt when you finance certain ways. So some companies do report to you as debt, but here at Adia Capital we don’t. So those are some general reasons why someone would want to finance equivalent as opposed to paying cash. Of course, I can go on and on about that, but I think we’ll have some other questions that’ll come up that’ll relate back to that as well.

Marc Vila:
One of the things that I frequently talked about, I used to sell equipment too, and I used to work for a couple of different banks, the larger one being Wells Fargo. I worked in financing, and I had worked on the retail side of financing. So I had worked with furniture stores and mattress stores and all these little places that when you go buy and you see get your furniture for $99 a month, that’s obviously done through a bank. I had done that kind of stuff through Wells Fargo.

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
So I’ve come into the equipment business, knowing a lot about financing, having done a lot, having done home financing and things of that nature as well.

John Sullivant:
Right. Right.

Marc Vila:
One of the things that we would always talk about to folks when it came to financing anything was the value of having a liquid cash on hand versus not, right?

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
Meaning that some things require quick in and out transactions, so that would be paying for electricity bill, buying supplies, repairing something that just broke.

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
All of these things that happen in real life and in business that having cash on hand or a credit card, I’m going to actually speak of these two things equally, but having the ability to access instant cash is very, very important to success in business. It doesn’t always have to be masses amount, but say you’re wanting to start a business and you decided that you have some money in 401 that you want to borrow from maybe or you’re going to pull out of, you have some stocks you’re going to cash in, you have a savings account you’re pulling out of, you have a credit card that has a little bit of money on it and you’re a small business and you don’t have $100,000 hundred in the bank. You’ve got a reasonably modest amount of money to start a business, probably a four-digit number, right?

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
In that case, if you have say $8,000 or 12 or $15,000 that you decided you’re going to use for this business, if you’re buying a piece of equipment that costs $8,000, for example, you’re using up a huge portion of that liquid money that you have right away.

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
Then when you need to spend cash quickly, now you’re scrambling on how to try to get that versus utilizing the bank’s money-

John Sullivant:
Because you’ve created debt too. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yes, you’ve created debt too, right?

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
So versus using money that a bank is willing to give you so you can get started and actually eases a lot of pressure off you when you’ve got emergencies or quick things you’re trying to move on.

John Sullivant:
Absolutely. I couldn’t have said it better. That’s absolutely the truth. The old saying cash is king is absolutely true in business, available cash for when you need it, and not only for when you need it, but to put it to work for you. I know you and I have discussed before the time value of money and basically essentially, the time value of money principle is the bedrock to commercial financing because it clearly lines out how and why you should finance your equipment as opposed to purchasing it. So as a consumer, we hope to only finance things that we simply can’t afford, like a home and a car. Okay? There are times where we finance other things, sure, but we try not to because there’s no benefit to doing it.

The only benefit we get as a consumer is to run off the interest on our home, and that’s it. As a business, it’s just the opposite, like you said, the government or the Fed or the IRS even wants us to buy equipment ’cause that’s how you stimulate a capitalist economy. So they make these write-offs for us that we can take advantage of either an accelerated depreciation like on Schedule 179, which we can talk about or through the term of the loan or the lease. So this enables us to be able to write off 100% according to whatever tax bracket we’re in and expense 100% of the interest. Okay? So we’d depreciate the equipment and we expense the interest.

So if you think about it from that perspective, why would you take your cash and put it into that equipment unless you were so cash heavy and expected some huge windfall or, excuse me some huge situation where you need to hold on or you need to spend that cash because that isn’t going to happen too often. So saving that cash and using financing will allow you to write off 100% against your income tax on your depreciation, expense 100% of the interest and keep your cash in reserve. So that’s why it’s important to do that on the commercial side. On the consumer side, hey, if you can pay cash for it, do it. But on the commercial side, definitely not. A matter of fact, I know many people who can pay cash for equipment many, many, many times over and they always finance it. So why are they doing that?

Marc Vila:
Yeah, and you had said two things there that I think are worth discussing briefly. So one is a concept that I had spoken about many times when I worked for a bank, but the time value of money, ’cause that is actually a term used by people in the finance world or a phrase I should say, used in the finance world. Can you give a brief explanation of what that means, a principle of it to a degree?

John Sullivant:
I certainly can. Before I do so, I’ll tell your listeners, your audience, you can Google it. Simply Google the time value of money and read it for yourself. It simply states that your money is worth more in your pocket today than it is in the bank’s pocket when you’re in 100% write off scenario. Okay?

Marc Vila:
Okay.

John Sullivant:
So that cash, what could you do with that cash? Well, let’s think about it, for example. We have $60,000 and we got to buy $20,000 worth of equipment. We could easily pay for it and have 40 remaining. But why do that? Why don’t wealthy companies do that? Why don’t wealthy people do that? They don’t do it because they know they’re in a write-off situation and they take that money and invest it in their business through marketing or some other way of gaining more customers or gaining more market share or they invest in the market or any number of different things, other businesses. They take that cash and they put it back to work for themselves as opposed to just simply paying off a debt that you’re paying on anyway. Most people when they buy this equipment, hopefully, they’ve talked to an equipment rep about the return on investment so they have an idea as to how much money they can make, and that payment should fit nicely within that ROI. Okay?

Marc Vila:
Mm-hmm.

John Sullivant:
So that should be an accepted expense, that way, that keeps you relevant in your business as far as your equipment goes. You can buy new equipment more often, you can trade it in at the end of a term and get new equipment, that way, ensuring yourself of newer technology and ability and production. Since you know that you’re writing it off and whichever, whichever way you choose to do so, it gives you the peace of mind to know that you shouldn’t have bought it and just paid cash for it and ride the storm out for 20 years on antiquated equipment. That’s just not smart and it’s not feasible in today’s marketplace especially.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s an interesting thing to think about too. The first thing that came into mind with it was how, I remember when I was in school, university and further in business and studying business learning that one of the biggest things that is a killer of a small business, especially a startup, is the terms cash flow. So having money to do things, to pay bills, to act on opportunities, and when you lose the flow of cash, meaning that you’ve got too much money going out and not enough coming in during the right times, that’s all timing to a degree, because here at ColDesi, we may have an opportunity to, a company may say, “Hey, do you want to help us build a factory?” Right?

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
We could say, “Sure,” and they’ll say, “Well, it’s going to cost $10 million.” ColDesi may say, “We’re not going to do that.” “Why?” “Well, we’re going to give you $10 million, but it’s going to take us a decade to build a factory,” I’m just fictional scenario, right?

John Sullivant:
Got it.

Marc Vila:
To build a factory and get any of that back. In the meantime, we need that $10 million to buy other things.

John Sullivant:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
So moving money around is not just as easy as saying, “I have this much money here today and this much money tomorrow, and that’s profitable.”

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
You have to have money available and it has to be able to move in a timely manner.

John Sullivant:
So you bring up the second point, which is reserve. What we keep in reserve that for whatever, we don’t know what’s coming on the pipeline, so we have to keep money available. We may get a big job and have to buy a ton of soft goods. We may do a number of different things, we have bills creep up, our business may slow down for a moment. Those types of things have to be considered. But even when considering that when you do have positive cashflow and you do have large reserves, it’s still smart to finance equipment predicated simply on the cash is king principle on the time value of money. That keeps you going and it keeps you writing off and it keeps you in new relevant equipment. Okay? We’ve proven time and time again with the equipment, especially at ColDesi sells, the return on investment is there. It’s just there like if that customer has any ability to sell the market, they’re going to be successful.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s the great point, and we should definitely dive into some of that.

John Sullivant:
Yeah,

Marc Vila:
I did mention earlier there are two things you said, so I don’t want to forget to say the second one, and that is just how … I’m going to simplify it a lot more than what you said, but taxes is super complicated and most all of us know nothing about it. So it’s important that you have somebody available that can help advise you on that tax stuff and understand it. But one thing that you mentioned that bears truth is that the government, the Fed, the IRS and things of that are nature do offer benefits when you are doing things that help to benefit them or the economy. Right?

John Sullivant:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Therefore, as you mentioned, financing a piece of equipment has different tax benefits that are offered to you as a business owner that aren’t necessarily present there when things are paid with cash. So it’s something that folks can speak with you or your representatives about when they’re financing to learn a bit more-

John Sullivant:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
… or, of course, if they have somebody that helps represent them on taxes to understand that.

John Sullivant:
Let me interject here. A lot of times when you’re a small business, you can’t afford a CPA and I understand that, but when you can, they’re almost worth twice what you pay them. With the peace of mind and the understanding, these guys would stay up on top of things pretty much on a monthly basis because these laws changed significantly. Matter of fact, and equipment finance laws changed tremendously, the FASB laws changed in 2022. That’s made quite a bit of work for a lot of the CPAs. So larger companies out there that are taking write-offs need to pay more attention now to how they structure their finance packages, then we certainly can help them with that.

Marc Vila:
That’s great stuff and it’s fascinating and confusing and beneficial and overwhelming. It’s a lot of different things. So hopefully we started off with a lot of information in the beginning in the first 15 minutes of the podcast here, but hopefully, you’ve getting a gist of things. Then let’s break some of these things down and just talk about and get it to the point for if you are a new business, you may not know or understand a lot of this stuff and you realize, “Oh gosh, there’s actually some conversations I need to have,” or, “Maybe it wasn’t as simple as I thought.” You were thinking of it like a car loan where, “Okay, I’m going to borrow $15,000 and it’s going to cost me $300 a month or whatever it is,” right?

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
That’s how you’re thinking about it, and you say, “Well, how much interest am I paying?” then you realize that the answer is a little bit more complicated, which is why speaking to pros like ColDesi that has or that Adia has really help to understand this stuff. But for new business owners, the thing that’s often asked is, can new business owners finance equipment?

John Sullivant:
The answer is absolutely. We have startup programs that facilitate all different types of credits. So generally the question is, “My credit’s here,” or, “My credit’s there,” someone has a lower credit score, they want to know can they be financed? The answer is most certainly, not always, but we have some of the best possible financing for people who could be credit challenged. Then for people who have excellent credit, we have great startup packages for them as well. Of course their questions are always, “What’s the interest rate?” We’re very honest and tell them exactly where they’re going to fall. In commercial lending, it’s a little different than in consumer lending in the sense that a startup business is a little bit more risky for a bank than something that’s been in business for a couple of years or more. So generally, they’ll pay a slightly higher rate than they would if they had time in business, just the understanding of that. It’s still a very good position or a rate to be in and the write-off’s nice.

Marc Vila:
Yes. So essentially, if you’re a new business, in so many words, a bank will take a look at your personal credit reputation and say, “We are willing to let you borrow money for your potential new business under your personal name, because in previous you have paid off some cars and had credit cards and things like that.”

John Sullivant:
Exactly. So it gives them a little bit of a picture or a window into your payment history. With that being said, I wouldn’t let that stop someone who may not have that.

Marc Vila:
Okay.

John Sullivant:
We do have programs that can accommodate people who have very light credit. In some cases, now this isn’t a guaranteed approval, but in some cases, you’ve got deals done that weren’t even scored by the bureaus because there wasn’t enough credit there to review. Okay? In those cases, people will pay a little higher rate, but it does get them in business. The beautiful thing about it is they still can write off the equipment through depreciation, they expense the interest and the return on investment is amazing … So it’s definitely something that it’s not as complicated as people want to make it out to be. It is as easy as an application. Then once we receive the application and it’s reviewed, your Adia representative will get back with you and give you your options and they’ll work with you. They’ll help you get the best possible approval and make you comfortable with it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. Working with a company like Adia in general, it’s comforting that you realize you have experts there in the industry who know about all this stuff to help guide folks ’cause a lot of folks come into this a little bit nervous.

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
They’re not sure where to go, so to have somebody educated to help explain things and understand, and like you said, just be honest about it.

John Sullivant:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
One of the things that’s a struggle is if you don’t have perfect credit, and the rate is like it’s a relative term, but high, right?

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
It’s a relative term, what is high? But the rate is, quote, unquote, “high.” Should you do it is the question? I don’t know. You don’t necessarily, you have to answer yes on this, ’cause it’s different for everybody.

John Sullivant:
It certainly is.

Marc Vila:
But this is a conversation that’s often had as someone will say, “I got divorced and during the divorce there was a lot of trouble and then that caused my credit score to get hurt. I’ve been trying to rebuild it, but I want to start this business and gosh, I feel like that interest rate is high,” which is a relative term, “so maybe I’m not going to do this.”

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
Right? And that’s a question. So what I would start with, if you don’t mind, and then you can comment further, but-

John Sullivant:
Sure.

Marc Vila:
The thing that I used to always talk about when I ran into that situation, and I was in equipment sales, so my job was to obviously help facilitate the sale of equipment. So I would never just say, “Oh, look, don’t do it then,” right?

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
I would be bad at my job if I said that, but what I’d liked to do, and I still like to do, I think it’s important to ask yourself, do you want to start it or do you not, and what are the risk and reward of that? If you waited a year or two years and built back up your credit, what would’ve happened during that period of time when you didn’t start this business?

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
Is it if your payment is an extra 75 or $100 a month and you waited two years, for one, we have no clue what interest rates will look like, so your payment could end up being flattened the same in two years. If people who didn’t finance equipment two years ago today and they go to do it now, I would gather easily some people’s payments with on the same exact credit could have gone up $100 or 200 bucks a month.

John Sullivant:
Up to three points more, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Up to three points more, so there’s unknown there. Then the other is, okay, you spent $2,000 more in interest over two years, which by the way, there’s a whole tax side of that, but we’re not even talking about that, how much money would you have made starting your business if you would’ve actually done it today taking a little bit more of a risk knowing you’re paying a little bit more for the money?

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
That’s a question that people need to ask, “Do I do it or not? Do I want to make it happen today or do I want to wait?” I would always say, “Don’t let an interest rate, a number that feels more hurtful to your pride I think than anything, be the stopper. If it means you can’t finance the equipment or you can’t start, that’s one thing. But if it means that I have to start with a payment of 350 instead of two 50 is $100 a month in a business that could make you $10,000 a month worth stopping?” It’s a challenge to get past that thought process, and I think pride is a part of it and also, the idea of that $2,000 extra in interest. So I don’t have a question, but what comments further do you have on that?

John Sullivant:
Well, I think you’ve laid it out very well. I think it is imperative that people think through that because any new business that you start in some way is a gamble. You’re taking a gamble that you can make money doing this and you’re laying out time and money to do it. With that being said, your point about interest is absolutely true. I can almost show you if someone paid $200 a month for this equipment and someone paid $600 a month for the same equipment, I still would go into business if I was a $600 person. The reason is, is that I understand clearly the return on investment. I know what my personal strengths are in a business and how I can help that business grow in marketing and sales, so that wouldn’t stop me. I understand that I’m expensing 100% of that interest anyway, so it doesn’t have the connotation, but it doesn’t say if I’m a consumer. If someone gets a home loan at 2 1/2% and then someone gets one at 10%, well, that’s a huge difference?

Marc Vila:
Right.

John Sullivant:
It is something that you have to budget for. Within what we’re talking about, usually the return investment in most cases within 60 to 90 days is there. So they’re going to be making the money to make that payment easily well within a couple of days, much less the entire month. You’re right, it’s the pride issue sometimes, or we’re still inundated with mortgage rates that we think everything is a mortgage rate or a car payment rate, so like a credit union or something like that, and that’s just not the case. Businesses are always going to pay slightly higher interest because banks want to make sure that they’re protecting their investments. They protect their investments through hedges and yields. So that’s pretty much what it breaks down to. So I would never let an approval that is more than what I want it to be, stop me from going into business. Now, if I could better that approval, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Right.

John Sullivant:
But if I couldn’t, then I definitely would take what was on the table and move forward.

Marc Vila:
One of the things to consider in a lot of these things is the risk to the bank in general, which is something that I learned a lot about when I worked for a bank and we had to take courses and certifications on this in fact. But one of the things they talk about is why that home loan is so much different. Even an auto loan is so much different. The home is the lowest interest rate in general, generally speaking. Now there’s 0% credit cards, but generally speaking, those aren’t 0% forever. There’s always catches and hooks and things like that, and there’s ways they get around that. But when we’re talking about payment financing where you’re going to buy something for a dollar amount, they’re going to give you a certain number of payments for a certain dollar amount, and then essentially, you own it afterwards, a house for one over time, generally speaking, real estate goes up over the long term.

John Sullivant:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
So banks know that their investment is reasonably safe over a long period of time. Two, your house is probably not going anywhere. So if you don’t make your payments, it’s very easy for the, not in so many words, but for the bank to tell the court and the court to tell the sheriff’s office and the sheriff’s office to deliver you a letter that the house is now the bank’s.

John Sullivant:
Bank’s, right?

Marc Vila:
When you’re financing other things that exist in this world, including a piece of equipment, it’s not as easy for a bank to just say, “Give me back the embroidery machine, I’ll just go sell it again,” or something to that effect, which is much different than a house. A house is, it’s reasonably easy for a bank to say, “Give me the house and sell it again,” and to oversimplify things. But that’s the concept, and I think people can understand that. That’s why there is. Also, when it comes to your hierarchy and life, shelter is one of the base pieces of hierarchy, right? It’s like air, water, food, shelter. So your home is probably one of the main things you’re going to put money into if you have to, where the fourth printer you’re buying for your business is significantly higher on that hierarchy of life, and the bank knows that. So that’s a different risk level than your house.

John Sullivant:
Yes, it is. We let people know, again, that we’re intertwining commercial and consumer, but to make it relatable, and I understand that, absolutely. But the principles and the rules that govern how commercial lending works versus consumer lending are way different. Then of course the benefits are way different. But to agree with you completely that a home, yes, and it’s easy to lend money on a home, most times they appreciate, ’08, ’09 is an exception, but most times we see appreciation in homes. They’re a safe bet for the bank. They don’t overextend themselves the way they did in the past sometimes on banks with seconds and things like that as far as homes go. As far as cars go, they’re so movable. They’re so resellable that it makes it an easier situation.

Of course, you’re still taking a huge hit when you buy a car. We all know that. But as a business, as a commercial loan, that’s the difference. That’s a sweet spot because we don’t have to think of it as a consumer. We’re thinking of it as a commercial deal, a commercial business, a commercial agreement where someone’s lending us money to get the equipment we need to make money, okay? As we make a cash asset, we’re creating a tax liability and the IRS lets us write it off according to whatever … You talk to your CPA, but it’s according to whatever tax bracket you’re in and then it’s … and the interest.

So it is a way that you can go into business and continue to thrive in business with the write-off and the potential to buy more equipment and enhance your business to create more capital. So they are relatable, but I always say, I’ll always borrow money on the commercial side, Marc. I rarely borrow money on the consumer side and then my credit cards, I try to keep them as low rate as possible. But I know I don’t want revolving debt because revolving debt hurts my ability to negotiate deals with banks and things like that. As a small business, revolving debt hurts your ability in negotiating with companies like mine because you’ve got too much revolving debt and banks don’t want to lend your money.

Marc Vila:
Right.

John Sullivant:
So it’s important to keep that revolving debt as low as possible.

Marc Vila:
So for those listening, then-

John Sullivant:
Credit card debt.

Marc Vila:
… maybe are not finance heavy, so revolving debt, and the reason why it’s called revolving debt or credit card debt is you have installment debt, which means that you borrowed $10,000. As you pay it off, that number essentially always goes down. So you start with 10, you end at zero.

John Sullivant:
Yes.

Marc Vila:
Right? Revolving debt is you are given $10,000 to spend or not, and you can spend $10,000 and then pay it off next month, you cannot spend any of it and then in the month 11, borrow $10,000 and then have that debt indefinitely because revolving debt does not require it to be paid off in a certain period of time.

John Sullivant:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
So it is a higher risk debt because most of the time you don’t hear about friends or family saying, “I owe so many car loans that I’m never going to get out of them,” ’cause that’s not typically the case. Eventually, if you keep making the payment, it’s done whether you’re happy with it or not. The credit card debt, if you keep making the payment on it it doesn’t necessarily make it go away. You have to actually pay higher than the payment and not be tempted to reborrow because it’s revolving. You can then reborrow that so it hurts your buying power having revolving debt, which goes into, one of the things we were going to talk about in our notes here is, why not just use the credit card? If somebody says, “Well, I have a credit card that has a 4% interest rate on it, and I have a $15,000 line of credit and this machine is $10,000, should I do that?” Why is financing something commercially different?

John Sullivant:
That’s an interesting question. If someone had a credit card that had the limit to buy this type of equipment at a 4% rate, right now, I’d probably do that. I probably would incur the revolving debt or the credit card debt because that’s a super low rate, especially for a new business.

Marc Vila:
Okay.

John Sullivant:
But seldom is that the case.

Marc Vila:
Okay.

John Sullivant:
Most credit cards are going to be way higher than 4%. Some have 0% offers. I have a credit card right now through I think Bank of the West has 0% for 18 months or something like that. I’m going to take advantage of that if I need to, but I’m not buying equipment that I can’t pay off in 18 months. Most people can’t pay this off that quickly. So they’re creating revolving debt here again, and the reason revolving debt is the big no-no is because it’s unsecured. So there’s nothing there that the banks can go and get back, and so that’s why, “Hey, they’re real heavy on their revolving debt. We’re a little uncomfortable,” credit analysts will say, “because they have so much revolving debt.” If you go and buy equipment through revolving debt and you need to buy more equipment or finance something else for your business, that could hinder you in being able to do that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

John Sullivant:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
So that actually makes sense.

John Sullivant:
Yeah. Now look, using a charge card like American Express used to be to buy your soft goods once a month, that’s smart, float it for 30 days. But other than that, I wouldn’t use a credit card for my business for anything that I couldn’t pay off within 30 days unless the rate was so low it made sense.

Marc Vila:
Right. Right. So there’s a case-by-case scenario to be made that sometimes it could make sense if you have a very particular low interest rate, and even if you said a financing something, you could get a very fast return on your investment on equipment. If you put it on a credit card. You very well can, if you work at this business, and it’s something we talk about all the time. But the one thing that’s very important is then you have to pay it off. So part of it is the discipline of paying it off because it’s very easy to be caught in a trap of, “I’m going to catch it next month. I got a really big opportunity this month, I’m going to catch it next month.” The next thing, the 18 months go by and then now the interest accrues and then they tack it on typically-

John Sullivant:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
… because if you don’t pay the debt, then you have to pay all the interest. All of a sudden your balance goes up like two grand in a snap.

John Sullivant:
Right. Yes, it happens.

Marc Vila:
So it’s a dangerous game to play. If you’re really good at the stuff and you’re very smart with it and you’re very experienced, you may not even be listening to this podcast, this podcast probably is for a lot of folks who are looking for the education on this stuff.

John Sullivant:
Right. Right.

Marc Vila:
So it’s a dangerous game to play. I always say if you’re looking to take the risk and take the jump, because anytime you open up a business is a risk or a jump, then the people who have a success in business, folks who are gurus, entrepreneur gurus, coaches, stuff like that, they consistently will say, “The only people who win are the people who take the leap.” So if you have the opportunity and you can jump on it and you take the leap, that’s your opportunity to win. I don’t think there’s a clear answer on any of it, is interest bad?

John Sullivant:
It’s case-by-case.

Marc Vila:
And all that stuff.

John Sullivant:
Right. Right. I know one thing that I read some information one time of some people who were highly successful entrepreneurs and just like this topic, nothing was the same path for everyone. Each individual had a different road that they were on. The one consensus was when they had an idea to take swift and immediate action, that’s what they could pretty much all agree on.

Marc Vila:
Okay.

John Sullivant:
Certainly, ColDesi partnered with Adia Capital can facilitate that in this situation to the best of our ability. Get them equipment as soon as possible, get them trained, get them a good finance package, allow them to put their plan into action ASAP.

Marc Vila:
Yep. Now I have a trick question, maybe.

John Sullivant:
Okay.

Marc Vila:
I wrote this down because I remember hearing this on a finance podcast a while back. I think we spoke about it, so I don’t want to reiterate the same answers again, but I want to say it just because it entertains me to say this, but isn’t debt for suckers? Isn’t having debt bad? Isn’t that what Dave Ramsey and a lot of these famous gurus would say is that any debt that you have as bad, biblically, debt is bad. So why isn’t this type of debt bad? I know you spoke about it already, but maybe we could just reiterate it in a different way.

John Sullivant:
Yeah. Yeah, and I agree with debt being bad in certain situations. We’ve already talked about people have too much debt, can’t get loans sometimes. As a consumer debt is bad because there’s no real write-off advantage to taking on that debt. You’re simply able to use something that you either need or want. Commercially speaking, that couldn’t be further from the truths. Also in life principle thinking it also couldn’t be further from the truth. I appreciate Dave Ramsey and his daughter and all that they’ve done, and I certainly appreciate the biblical aspect of debt. But when it comes to modern-day capitalism and understanding money, there are people who’s net worth is so many millions of dollars it’s unfathomable who got there on solely on debt. They built their empire through debt, banks throwing low-rate money at them, allowing them to buy assets that appreciate. Then they turn around and take that appreciation back out of that debt with more debt.

They keep facilitating those debt programs through different types of investments over and over and over again to the point to where, financially speaking, they could become liquid whenever they wanted to at several million dollars and generally start off with very little instead of understanding how to make debt work for you. That’s the thing. Debt is credit, that’s what it is. So you have to understand what you’re doing. Most of us, people like you and I, we’re taught “Don’t finance anything you don’t have to,” and, “Debt is bad and it’s for suckers.” Well, these suckers are multi multi-millionaires and they’ve figured out how to use debt for their advantage. So no, debt does not make you a sucker. If I’d be so free to say that type of mentality can be restrictive when it comes to business growth.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

John Sullivant:
That being said, let me say this, I see about eight, maybe not even eight, 6% of people that I talked to even over the years that I’ve been doing this where I see they’re in a situation where they should pay cash. Okay?

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

John Sullivant:
I never see a situation where they should use a credit card outside of a super, super low rate.

Marc Vila:
Right.

John Sullivant:
So it’s always smarter to finance something at an agreed upon rate and go that way. That’s always the smart play is to create that debt commercially because there’s ways to write it off and then we can build relationship and build more debt, which is creating more cash asset, right?

Marc Vila:
Mm-hmm.

John Sullivant:
That debt is helping us facilitate the tax liability, if that makes sense. When you make money, you owe taxes. Okay?

Marc Vila:
Okay. Right.

John Sullivant:
If you’ve never been in business before and you make $1.00 And you thought you made $1.00, guess what? You make $.70 pretty much. So you have to understand tax debt that comes along. Most people who started a new business, they’re used to working on a W-2 and they don’t understand that those taxes have to be paid and that they have to pay them. No employer is going to hold it out for them. They’re responsible to reporting their income to the IRS on a quarterly basis. This is something they consult a CPA about. I like to say this, at the end of the day you have to live with yourself, and most of us can get inside of our heads pretty quick.

If you are so ingrained with paying cash and getting debt paid off so fast that it gives you a sense almost of euphoria, then I suggest you stick to it. Don’t make yourself miserable because I can show you a thousand ways to Sunday you how it’s the right thing to do. But if you don’t believe it is and you can’t convince yourself it is or open yourself up to the knowledge that it is, then don’t do it.

Marc Vila:
Right. Right. One point that I think is important is, it is a decision between you and your business partner or your spouse or whoever is involved in this situation for you.

John Sullivant:
Absolutely. Yes.

Marc Vila:
One of the problems that I’ve seen in consulting businesses with marketing and doing marketing myself, having been a business owner myself, having lots of really good friends who are entrepreneurs, is that when you make these decisions, all the people that I know, a few really good friends that are successful in their businesses and have had businesses for 20, 30, 40 years, they have similar mantras that have been said over time because I ask these questions all the time because we have a podcast. So I’m always looking for topics and interest and ask questions all the time.

John Sullivant:
Sure.

Marc Vila:
One of the things that is consistent is that I don’t let other people’s opinions or image of me or the decisions that I’m going to make influence it. Meaning that I don’t make business decisions for vanity. I don’t make business decisions based on, somebody might think it’s shameful to borrow money. You have a really good friend who’s very anti-debt, and they think it’s shameful to borrow money to a degree. Well, this is not their business. Then when I say that it’s not their business, I mean it literally and figuratively. They don’t own the business you do, and it’s none of their business on how you handle your finances because they may have a completely different financial situation in their bank and their home life and their business than you do, so you have to operate differently. So I think some pride comes into it, some self-reliance comes into it, some self-actualization. There’s a lot. When you’re looking to start a business, if you’re not sure what to do and you are unsure about debt, but you do know what the goal is ahead of time, right?

John Sullivant:
Right.

Marc Vila:
That’s when you contact folks like pros at ColDesi, and folks like John and the team over at Adia, and you start having conversations about this with experts. Then you and your business partner or your spouse or whoever is involved, talk about that together. It doesn’t matter if you have a friend who said, “I financed everything for my business and the bank paid me money to borrow them.” It’s like it doesn’t matter what those stories are because many of them may not be completely true on paper and also, it’s not their business. So I just think it’s really important to go into it yourself. One of my good friends had said to me something to the effect of that he knew somebody who worked in this finance industry that they were in, they do 401ks and a lot of that stuff, personal finance type of stuff.

He had a friend that was opening up his own branch of this finance thing. Because of views of people, of his peers and hiring people and how you should hire employees and pay people, he ended up quitting ’cause he had an idea that he wanted to do. He said, “You know what? All these people are telling me that this isn’t the right way to do things and that I shouldn’t do it that way and it’s a bad idea,” so he quit. So a bunch of years later, my friend started doing what he said. He called it, he’s like, “I’m going to do what you said you were going to do.” He’s like, “Everyone says it’s a bad idea.” He’s like, “But it’s a good idea.” He’s like, “Those guys, they’re in a big circle. They live together in this bubble,” so he did it and the guy has got a million-dollar house now.

John Sullivant:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead and finish, please. I love it.

Marc Vila:
Oh, yeah. So I think just the moral of the story is is that what he did was, and it was the story he told me, he’s like, “I talked to people who were in other industries. I talked to experts in my industry and I didn’t let influence of false friends let me decide what I was going to do with my business because it was mine.” He said, “I wouldn’t have achieved success like my other friend who just didn’t achieve success because of this poor influence and poor education on things,” because when he got actually educated on it, he’s like, “Wait a minute, if I pay people … ” It was like a commission versus draw, all that type of stuff, and it doesn’t matter the details.

But he said, “Actually, when I started investigating, there was lots of industries that paid people this way and they grew faster and the people made more money and they were able to share wealth a lot better. It turned out to be really well if you worked with the right people.” So I think the moral of that story is education yourself is number one. Making the decision for yourself is number one, understanding everything, all the terms and realizing that and not letting pride or people around you necessarily influence you when they shouldn’t be influencing you. It doesn’t mean don’t take advice from friends, that’s not the point. But I’m just saying that not everybody knows everything and you got to do your best.

John Sullivant:
Absolutely. I love that point, and I’m absolutely with you 110% on that. Over the years of my life, I’m 58 now, that’s always born out to be true. It always shocks me when people go along with groupthink, whether it’s over something like sports or one thing on day is absolutely taboo. The next day, “Oh, why didn’t we do this?” Change their mind. So when you go along with a groupthink sometimes it keeps you from accelerating your life or your past in a way that could be more financially beneficial for you, so take your path. Usually, what I tell people, “What’s in your gut? If it’s in your gut to start this business, then do it.” If you don’t want to start this business because you’re scared, don’t let that stop you. In other words, don’t let fear stop you. But if you have a calculated understanding of why you shouldn’t, then that’s fine, but don’t let fear stop you and don’t let time stop you. Be on top of it, get it started and get it moving. That’s the way to succeed. If you never start, you can never succeed.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. No, this was great, John. I love talking to you about this stuff because, well, for one, it reminds me of days of old when I used to work in financing and I learned a lot and I worked really hard, and that brought me to where I am today. I think it’s important to continue to discuss these things out in the open and educate them and let people know that resources like Adia Capital are there not to convince you to buy something, but to help these folks make the right decision on, like you said, hey, if somebody has a crazy low credit card and that bank is taking that risk, sometimes I’ll tell them to do it.

John Sullivant:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Like you said, it’s rare, but you know when it’s right, and sometimes you know when the right decision is to pay cash. So when they know they can talk to somebody who’s going to help to guide them in the right direction and also properly say, “Here’s A, here’s B, here’s the facts,” guess what? You get to decide which is the best thing about owning your own business.

John Sullivant:
Man, I couldn’t agree with you more.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. So this is not going to be the last time we have you on the podcast. I hope we have you on more, and we can dive into very some specific topics. So if you out there listening, have some real specific questions about financing, you can just send them over to marketing@ColDesi.com, and that’ll come right to me, Marc Vila. Then I can pass those to John or back and forth, or maybe just some of these questions will come in and it’ll inspire a very specific podcast just on that topic. So I may reply and just say, “Hey, you know what? That sounds like a great podcast just for John to talk about that one topic.” So thank you again, and if you-

John Sullivant:
Thank you.

Marc Vila:
I’m going to put a link in the podcast notes on customapparelstartups.com that’ll link to a page on the ColDesi site that’ll talk a lot about Adia and financing and things of that nature. If you reach out through that link, you can chat with our pros and even get John or someone on his team on the phone to directly discuss financing your business.

John Sullivant:
I’m certainly happy to help. Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you all. This has been Marc Vila from ColDesi and our wonderful guest, John Sullivant from Adia Capital.

John Sullivant:
Thank you, Marc.

 

2023 Is Here : What’s In Store For Your Business

Mark and I have been reading around to learn what problems the “experts” say small business owners will run into. We then put our heads together to consider how these affect the customization business industry.

So here we go… let’s get ahead of 2023 with expected challenges and resolutions!

Supply Chain Issues

There will still be issues with getting supplies, and it shouldn’t be a surprise anymore. Since 2020 everything from toilet paper to cars has seen the effect of backorders & supply chain issues.

What this means for you

• Stock up, Stock up, Stock up
• Have backup plans, especially for apparel
• Don’t procrastinate
• Include in communication to customers

Accelerated Digital Transformations

Changes are happening faster than ever. Your customers are going to want to interact with you digitally the way THEY want to. Texts, live chats, emails, social media, package tracking, etc.

What this means for you

• Find the ways your customers like to interact
• Figure out how to implement (CRM, Texting Software, Apps)
• Move away from the old ways (Excel quotes, Taking credit card numbers over phone, physically signed quotes)

Inflation

Prices are still expected to go up.

What this means for you

• Prepare your customers ahead of time
• Be watchful of waste / Find ways to be more efficient
• Raise YOUR prices when you have to
• Find ways YOU can help YOUR customers save money. e.g. “what other promo items do you use, maybe I can help you consolidate all of them with me to save money”

Talent and Staffing

Good quality employees are going to have plenty of opportunities.

What this means for you

• It may be hard to hire if you need to add staff
• Create a Good Working Environment that encourages employees to join/stay
• Know employees’ worth, if you hear similar jobs pay $2-3 more an hour, consider raises

Increased Customer Expectations

People get things faster and more personalized than ever.

What this means for you

• You ARE in the customization business, so that’s good for you
• You will want to be efficient to deliver things faster than ever
• Consider what you keep in stock so you can deliver same/next day

Transformation Of Gig Workers

More people are moving to gig/contract work as a side hustle or even full time.

What this means for you

• Potential to outsource to help your growth
• You might not have to hire in a full timer
• Hire people seasonally, even IN your shop
• Gig workers can be a market too

Even though challenges are expected in 2023 there is still a ton of optimism in our industry, so be sure to keep pushing forward and make it a great one!

Are you a company of one? Get help with Gig Workers.

Transcript

Mark Stephenson:
Hello everyone and welcome to the first episode of 2023. My name is Mark Stephenson.

Marc Vila:
And this is Marc Vila. We’re here with custom apparel startups to talk about getting ahead of 2023, challenges and opportunities.

Mark Stephenson:
Right, because there will be both. I don’t have to have a crystal ball, which I do by the way.

Marc Vila:
You do?

Mark Stephenson:
I don’t have to have one though in order to tell there will be both challenges and opportunities in 2023.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. This is the first episode, as you said, of the year. It’s been probably maybe 60 days or less, maybe 45 days since we did an episode. It’s been a little while, but this year, we plan on doing more episodes. We plan on having some more guests come in. We’ll have some different people from over here at ColDesi and maybe some other experts around the industry to help you and your business out. Definitely stay tuned for more stuff. But today, we’re going to talk about getting ahead in 2023.

What we mean by that is Mark and I went all over the internet, we’ve noticed some things on our own, and we did our own research, and we just started looking around at what do the experts say that small businesses will run into this year? What challenges will they have? Then we took the challenges that we felt were the most interesting for our industry and we put together solutions that should be effective. We also noticed it started with challenges and solutions, but then as we did this, Mark Stephenson noticed a bunch of opportunities. We had to add because that not only are there challenges and solutions, but there’s opportunities for you to be more successful.

Mark Stephenson:
I mean, everybody knows that I have the most positive outlook on everything.

Marc Vila:
I think that’s under your LinkedIn profile.

Mark Stephenson:
It is.

Marc Vila:
Mark Stephenson, most positive.

Mark Stephenson:
Not curmudgeonly at all. Okay. I think, Marc, you’ve got the first issue that we’ll probably continue to face in 2023, which is supply chain issues. I know that we’re seeing that in the custom apparel industry in a variety of different ways, but I’m seeing it in my outside clients as well. I’m seeing it across the board with people in any kind of industry where you have to deliver goods. We’re seeing some kind of supply chain hiccups that will probably continue to affect us.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean it started in 2020. I don’t think anybody thinks it’s going to be over in 2023. I mean, everything from toilet papers to cars and everything in between. We’ve seen it all across our industry and in plenty of others. Here’s a few things you can do about this. For one, I wrote it three times. Stock up, stock up, stock up. Especially on simple things. You should not be… This has always been true, but more true than ever.

You should not be on your last foot of vinyl before you’re placing an order for your next role, especially if it’s something you use a lot. You should not be out of white ink before you order something. You should not have five sheets of paper before you order something. If you do, then all you are… it’s a ticking time bomb waiting for that one thing you need to be back ordered and it may only be back ordered for a week, but that week of time could kill the order you were trying to fulfill.

Mark Stephenson:
This is not a new phenomenon. I mean, I think we’ve done 1,100 podcasts that mention, “Keep good inventory control, make sure you have the stuff that you need in stock because,” if you need to order a roll of backing, or a liter of pretreat, or anything else that has any bulk at all, you need to order it overnight. One thing that we know in 2023 is shipping costs are not going to go down. You’re going to stack up the pain by having to order something on back order and then getting it overnighted or expedited when it comes in. You’re going to wait, you’re going to pay more, and you’re going to wait, and then you’re going to pay more.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. You’re going to be stressed out, you’re going to miss out on orders all because you didn’t do one of two things. You have to manage the money in your business well enough to be able to keep inventory of important things, and or you didn’t actually check your inventory to see what you actually had in stock or organize it in a way. This is just going to continue to be important. The folks who do…

Even if you do a great job of it, you’re still going to run into supply chain issues, but you’re going to have a lot easier time than the folks who are just flying through the wind, ordering things late and consistently because they’re going to be in more trouble than you, because you’ve stocked up. Be sure when you’re stocking up to just consider shelf life of things. If something says that it’s good for two months, you probably shouldn’t order more than two month’s worth. If something is good for a year, then you probably shouldn’t have more than a year’s inventory of anything, but you should consider that as well, right?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, I think that’s a great idea, to make sure to check expiration dates, but I also want to apply this idea to the apparel that you sell every day. I don’t know how many times… I think probably at least several times a week in the CAS Facebook group, you see calls out for a particular Richardson hat that’s on back order, or for a shirt, or a jacket, or something along those lines. If you get regular orders for an item, there’s no shelf life on a hat.

If you’ve got a good business, a solid business, you’ve got a track record, you know that you’re going to sell 50 hats a month, or there’s potential that you’ll get an order for as many as 200, you can invest in that inventory, take the last minute shipping and the potential for supply chain issues out if you just pick those common items, keep the cans of soup in the pantry. Regardless of what the food cost is, you can buy as much soup as you want to, as much canned goods as you want to right now, and it’ll last, so you don’t have to deal with supply chain issues if you keep the regular things on hand.

Marc Vila:
Especially when it’s not a size, color thing. If a gray cap, it’s one size fits all, you can order more of those. By the way, just like retail stores do, and we’ve talked about this in the podcast, if you sell, let’s say a can cooler as an accessory you often add on a little plaque or an award or something like that, that’s usually a generic color that can work out for folks, just like retail stores do, that’s what you sell. If you order a bunch of black and white on the caps or gray and white or whatever it is, then that’s what you pitch.

Just say, “Hey, you know what? Your logo will look great on gray, I’ve got them in stock, I could start making them today.” Stock up what you can, especially one size fits most for apparel or things that aren’t necessarily size and color. Then even with size and color, if you do a lot of polos, you can carry… you know the sizes that you sell often, you can do black and white, and again, you can sell the black and white. If somebody normally gets a blue shirt and you decide to invest in some black and white, sell the black and white this time, they might love it.

Mark Stephenson:
I think that that also goes to what your next point is, which is to have a backup plan. I mean, if you’ve got a regular set of, you normally sell these two polos, you normally sell one of these four T-shirts, you’ve got these three or four cap designs, then if you think there’s a hint that there might be supply chain issues, select and sample something similar so you’ve got a backup plan that you’re comfortable with.

So you’ve got something that you can fill in. I mean there are tons of t-shirts on Colman and Company’s website and while you may really love the perfect try for DTF shirts, the DT104 is great. If you go in and you look and say, “Look, listen, I just sell these perfect try Ts because they look great for many things,” but those are going to be slow coming, you can easily switch to another T-shirt model number and still not interrupt your business if it’s on the shelf.

Marc Vila:
That’s great. That’s great. We have two more points in this category. One we’ve already hit, but it’s pretty simple, don’t procrastinate. If you know you have to order things and you have a certain amount of time to order them, do it sooner than later. That will put you in line, if there is a back order, it’ll also give you opportunity to find an alternative if you need to. If procrastinate, and you know you have to order it by Friday, and you wait until Friday at 3:00, and it’s back ordered, then now you’re working all weekend trying to figure out how you’re going to get this versus taking the time to enjoy your kids’ baseball game or something like that.

Mark Stephenson:
That is correct.

Marc Vila:
Then the last one is, Mark, you mentioned this one, which I think is one of the best ones, is just communicating this to your customers, especially your regular ones. Hey, by the way… I’m just saying, every month I deliver these hats, the world from cars to toilet paper is back ordered, or we’ve run out of supply chain issues, or something like that. I’m not having an issue with this hat, but I’m just pre warning you that I’m hearing about things in my industry as well. If you want, I have a couple alternatives I’ll bring by your office one day, and I’ll say hi, just to show you. Then this way, you’ve seen it at least once before. You could actually be an opportunity to revisit with customers. It’s an opportunity to contact them and just give a reason to be in front of their face again, whether it’s an email, or a phone call, or in person.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I think that goes with your standard communications as well. If you are producing a quote by email or by paper, you may mention that in… you can put right in there, “In the case of supply chain shortages, we will propose an alternative solution.” Or if you’re talking to somebody about a price and the job is 60 or 90 days out, keep in mind and let them know that if there’s any kind of a supply chain issue, because everyone knows how things are now, we may have to make a substitution, but we will let you know if that takes place.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s great. Also, it’s an opportunity to get somebody to commit now.

Mark Stephenson:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
This is in stock now. I recommend you order it because in our industry, we’ve noticed all types of things disappearing. If you are in love with this shirt, I’m just going to say let’s get them in now, because it’s better to have them early and in stock and ready to go than to think about it for another week, and they’re not around, and now you missed out on what you really loved.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, just remind them there’s no shelf life on apparel.

Marc Vila:
No shelf life on apparel. What about the 1,000 years, Mark? 10,000 years?

Mark Stephenson:
1,000 years? There will be no shelf. So it doesn’t fly. You had put down here accelerated digital transformation, which fails my syllable test. You’re going to have to explain what that means.

Marc Vila:
Me too, actually. But when I kept going online and looking around, I heard somebody speak about this on a YouTube video or something like that. I think it’s a word people are using to sound smart in 2023 or a group of words, I should say. But accelerated digital transformation essentially means, well, accelerated would be to move to increase speed, and digital is the internet and stuff, and transformations are changes. It is increasing the speed in the changes that happen on the internet and such.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay, gotcha.

Marc Vila:
Which means that in this, you figure the amount that digital things changed between the year 2000 and the year 2010 is significantly slower than the changes between 2010 and 2020. This speed of digital transformation is continuing to accelerate. What’s going to happen is from the beginning of 2023 to the end, you’re going to see more AI software being used more often. You’re going to see CRMs being used more often. You’re going to see customers wanting and desiring to interact with you in different ways that other companies do.

For example, something that blew up over the past year or so is getting a text message for your tracking number. At first it was weird. I was like, “I don’t know if I like this.” Now I get a text every day on stuff that’s being shipped and it’s common for me and I’ve accepted that it’s good and now I kind of like it. That’s going to happen between you and your customers. You’re going to want to communicate with them the way you can and adopt technology that makes sense, that brings you into the modern digital age.

Mark Stephenson:
I agree. You can think of this, it’s almost going to continually be like the transition from regular TV to cable TV, from cable TV to video content services. There’s so many different ways that people interact with each other and absorb content that you’re going to have to adapt probably more than you want to. Two years ago, Facebook, for the business generation, two years ago, three years ago, Facebook was a fantastic place to get new business and it still is. It’s still a great quality place, but it’s more expensive and there’s less business there.

Three years ago, no one used TikTok for business at all. It was all just a good time, mindless video scrolling, and now it’s a common tool. For communications, it’s WhatsApp. For payment, even taking things like Venmo is a little old fashioned now, let alone PayPal. You’ve really got to maybe not make concrete changes and sign up for all these services, but you’ve certainly got to constantly stay in touch with your customers and figure out which ones they’re using so you can be wherever they are.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I would just ask them… There’s a couple things you can do. For one, if you have a website or even if you don’t have a website, look at ways that you can accept payments that make it more flexible for customers. If you’re using Stripe or one of those, if they have an option where the customer can easily click and easily pay, especially if they have an iPhone, if they can use Apple Pay, or they can use Amazon, or PayPal, of course, any of these services are going to make it easier for them.

Ask your customers how they like to pay, ask them how they would want to communicate with you, and if they would like to text or email or phone calls or whatever it is. If you are going to do text messaging, maybe you look at some software that you can use that’s text messaging for business, so it’s not just going to just you on your personal-

Mark Stephenson:
On your phone.

Marc Vila:
I think the plan is to consider things that you like that you can maybe implement, because that’s a place I like to start, like, “Gosh, I like to shop this way. It’s easy. Could I add that to my business?” Ask people what they like, see how you can implement that. We lost Mark Stephenson’s video, but he’ll be back, I’m sure. Here we go. That’s moving into the future and then looking backwards, move away from the old ways, because you’re going to have to eventually, and this is going to be the year to do it because we’re having an accelerated digital transformation. The longer you hold on to the old ways, the further behind you’re going to get.

If you’re quoting through Microsoft Excel, you might want to consider a quote software or something built into a CRM. If somebody has to call you and read you their credit card number, you probably want to look for a way for a customer to enter it themselves. If you’re making customers physically sign a quote and deliver it to you somehow, you might want to consider a digital way of signing. These are all options. ColDesi is doing some of this stuff too. We’re implementing a new quote software for quoting equipment. I’m not part of that project necessarily, but I keep hearing about it.

Mark Stephenson:
That’s great.

Marc Vila:
And they’re working on it. We continue to do things like that and you should to.

Mark Stephenson:
Great. All right, the next one on our list is inflation. Have you heard of inflation?

Marc Vila:
No.

Mark Stephenson:
I ordered an Indian food takeout last night and about had a heart attack how much a meal was for two people.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. $90.

Mark Stephenson:
Exactly. $90.35, that’s crazy.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I mean if I had a nickel for every time I heard the word inflation in 2022-

Mark Stephenson:
It’d only be worth a penny.

Marc Vila:
It’d only be worth a penny. I was going to say, I would probably cause more inflation. I mean basically, prices are just going to go up on various things. Maybe not everything. Some prices are going to go down, some are going to go up. There’s always a political spin on what inflation is and when it is bad and stuff like that. But the point is that I would say that some of your apparel, or blanks, or equipment, or whatever it is that you typically use to service your customers, some of that stuff’s going to go up, and you’re going to have to deal with that. What are some things that they can do to customers… the listeners out there could do to deal with inflation?

Mark Stephenson:
First of all, it’s before you quote, check current prices and keep the delivery date in mind. In other words, you may have a sheet, if you’re still using Excel, of prices on all the common blanks and supplies that you got last year in order to do quotes properly. I’ve had some construction clients of mine really get caught out because they will price out supplies, use them in all their quotes for six months, and six months later, the supplies are 25 or 35 or 40% more. Definitely keep updated with your prices.

The thing that I can’t stress enough is you are not doing your customers a favor by not passing on the increases that you experience. In other words, if a shirt blank goes up by $2, you eating that $2 is not making your customer’s life any better. It’s only making yours worse. If someone is paying $22 for a shirt and it’s legitimately costing you a couple of bucks more, charge them a couple of bucks next time, let them know that my supply costs have gone up in this specific way.

You’re not an oil company that’s making up the differences. Don’t look at yourself that way. You’re looking at, oh look, my costs went up, everybody knows that costs are going up. I don’t need to lose money to make my customers happy. Just get that through your head, put that in your psyche that when your prices rise, your customer’s prices just have to rise.

Marc Vila:
It’s complicated, because at Colman and Company, we’ve had… on colmanandcompany.com for example, the cost of paper goods has gone up, but we’ve made the decision to not increase the price on certain papers that we sell. It’s because of many, many factors that come into it. The number of customers, people that are on auto ship, there’s all these different types of things. It’s like, sure, maybe a vinyl cost goes up and you do the math on this logo on this shirt and you’re like, “I mean I guess it went up a nickel.

Do I want to bother my customers, disturb anything for that?” You may make a decision, but Mark makes a good point. On a $22 shirt, $2 is 10% almost. That’s a pretty significant increase for you to absorb right now, if your cost went from 25 cents up or the shipping cost increased a little bit, and you’re like, “This is less than 1%.” Make smart decisions, right?

Mark Stephenson:
That’s a good point. That’s a good point.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. One of the ways to combat inflation is a simple one that we’ve talked about a lot. Just be watchful of waste. Find ways to be more efficient. If you can waste a little bit less, if your costs went up 10% and you can find a way to save 10% on your supplies, you have flattened it. There’s a million different ways to do this, but if you’re DTD printing, does your customer need the highest resolution print? Maybe they don’t. One does, one doesn’t. The one that doesn’t, you’re not giving them a lesser product if they don’t care or they don’t need it.

Mark Stephenson:
I can’t get this toothpaste example out of my head. I saw this comedian or something and they were talking about your difference in attitude when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning, and you have a brand new tube of toothpaste, and you’re kind of tired, you squirt it onto the toothbrush, and half of it just goes into the sink, no big deal. By the time you’ve rolled it up to the little amount and you’re pressing on it and things like that, if a drop goes down there, you’re scraping it off the sink bottom and putting it back up on your toothbrush. It’s the same thing.

When inflation hits, you’ve got to treat it like you’ve already rolled down the toothpaste as much as possible so you make use of everything that comes out. You spend extra time making sure if you’re gang printing onto a digital heat effects sheet that you are using every square inch or taking on the opportunity across jobs to make sure you’re optimizing your paper usage. For designs, for digital designs of any kind, if you can take a look at the design and legitimately make the decision to make it slightly smaller and not have it impact the customer’s satisfaction at all, a 5% change over all of your DTG designs might make a little bit of a difference in the bottom line.

Marc Vila:
That’s a good point.

Mark Stephenson:
You can call that benign shrink-flation.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Well, I mean it’s kind of like when the orange juice manufacturer just changes it from being 30 ounces to 29.2.

Mark Stephenson:
Right. Sucks, sucks.

Marc Vila:
I mean these are just decisions. Again, just all smart decisions, you figure out what makes sense. We’ve talked about this before too. If you spend so much time trying to gang print the logos that they’re so tight that you have to spend five, 10 minutes cutting around them to save every last millimeter of paper, you are probably wasting a lot of time, which is going to hurt your business more than if you would’ve wasted a little bit more paper. Balance, smart, right?

Mark Stephenson:
Agreed. Yeah. You’ve got to be aware of what’s going on at all times.

Marc Vila:
The next point, you actually mentioned Mark already, but raise your prices when you have to. We already went into that and the last point on this one is just find ways that you can help your customers save money. What I mean by this is we always talk about upselling and cross-selling and things like that. When you’re talking to your customers, this is an opportunity to ask them questions. Say, “Hey, 2020 to three inflation, buzzwords, happy new year, I wanted to mention that to you because we do shirts together,” and actually offer other things, “Do you have other promo products that you order?

Anything else you print? Any signage? I mean, mention other things you do that you order from other places. Because what I’d like to do is to see, maybe we could put it all together, and I can help save you some money by doing it all together,” and maybe you can, maybe you can’t save them money, but maybe you can look at, normally we order a mug for every new customer. You say, “Okay, what’s that costing?” I pay about $10 a mug. Well, you can turn around and offer them a lower price opportunity that they might be happy to say, “Well how about this?

What if you did a pen, and a can cooler, and maybe even a third thing, a key chain?” And you could say, “Because I can do all three of those for $6 rather than the 10 you’re spending on the mug. Maybe they think that’s a great idea. Now, they have saved $4 per customer for a promo item that they’ve done. They’re saving money to help make up for their rising cost on other things. In turn, you’ve increased the amount of revenue you’ve brought in by selling them more stuff.

Mark Stephenson:
Great suggestion.

Marc Vila:
All right, we got a few more things to cover. The next one is… this is especially hard for small business owners that are growing, but the talent and staffing issues that are going to continue to be an issue for 2023.

Mark Stephenson:
Especially if you are in what I might consider a small shop where it’s you and maybe two employees, four employees, or something like that. Each one of them is very important. They represent a huge amount of effort if you’ve got a small department or a small company. When a good employee leaves, it hurts more now and will continue to do so in 2023 just because the workforce is not available for you to replace them easily.

Marc Vila:
The job market changed a lot over the past few years. The balance of power from companies has changed, shipping companies have grown, and other companies have shrunk. That means that whenever there’s big changes in the job market, typically, people become more aggressive on what they’re willing to pay, how they’re willing to treat people, all of that stuff. If you do have to add staff or grow, or you have current staff, you should really take a close look at what’s the work environment like? Is it a good place to work?

Are you paying them fairly? I mean, it’s wonderful if you got a great deal on that employee, right? I mean, good for you and your business, but if you think that the pay is low enough to a point that, “Gosh, this guy could go and literally find a job anywhere and make more money,” then you are one Friday night beer conversation from a friend saying, “Hey, I can get you a job at my place. I make $17 an hour.” That employee’s just like, “Done.” That’ll encourage your staff to want to stay.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I also think that it’s worth letting go of your preconceptions on what having an employee means and what that’s like. I was having a conversation with a business owner and he was looking for salespeople. He wanted to bring salespeople in to handle the current volume and everything and he was just having trouble. He couldn’t find qualified people that he really liked that seemed like they wanted to work.

After we talked about that, really what it boiled down to is this person had the need of having people in the office where he could see them work, because he was paying them by the hour, and the workforce that he was finding wanted nothing but flexibility. They’d loved to do what the guy wanted, but they wanted to do it from their home office and didn’t see a reason to come into the office. All they needed was a laptop and a phone. If you have that kind of position, like somebody in sales or in bookkeeping or someone that’s not involved in manufacturing shirts, maybe you want to look at that option for staffing or at least add in that alternative workplace to your conversation.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that was actually something that came into light often when I was doing a bit of this research was… and I didn’t put it on here as an issue because I don’t see it as much in custom shops, but it is true of the idea of a flexible or blended work environment that a lot of companies are willing to pay for staff to say, “Well, Monday through Wednesday, you have to do stuff in the office because you’re doing office things. But Thursday and Friday, you’re doing Excel spreadsheets and computer work.

You can go ahead and do that from home.” Especially backing up to the last point with inflation, gas is more expensive. All these things, eating lunch out is more expensive, as you mentioned, with your $90 Indian food. When folks can stay home, and they can save the gas, and save the time, save paying for childcare, whatever they can do, it makes it a lot better. I mean it’s a whole conversation about watching your employees all the time, making sure that you’re getting every nickel out of them.

Mark Stephenson:
But just in general, for the purposes of paying attention to how you staff your business and how you do production, you should maybe be more… you’ll need to be more flexible in the money that you pay, the environment that you provide, and the flexibility that you allow if you want to maintain a good quality staff through the whole year.

Marc Vila:
Again, it’s back to doing things that make sense, don’t necessarily dig your heels in on what you pay people for flexibility in the job, what the work environment is like, what it’s like to be a boss or an employee. It’s just with the competitive market… when there’s a competitive market, people are looking for a good place to work. Right?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Good point.

Marc Vila:
Let’s see, we have the next one, increased customer expectations. people can get things faster than ever. They can get things more personalized than ever. They get communicated to more than ever. The expectation of what’s good and what’s fair changes and some of these things you can control and some can’t. Amazon will ship you five bricks overnight for free. I don’t even know how, it’s like $4 and it’s 100 pound package. Oftentimes, business owners, even a company of our size at ColDesi, we can’t… a mug is $1 or two.

It’s an 11 ounce mug, that’s three quarters of a pound or something like that. Case these things, it’s like 30 pounds. It costs more to ship it than the product. How are we going to ship that for free? We raise the price to cover the shipping or we make it relative based on where you are. You’re a business owner out there too. You understand if a customer was going to order shirts from you and you have them, and had them at the lowest price possible, and it was going to cost $50 to ship them, and that was your entire profit for the order, how can you continue doing that?

There’s challenges with this, that being an example of a challenge. But the good news is, there’s actually a lot of good news, is because people want this personalized stuff that’s fast, if you’re a small business owner that delivers a lot of things locally, you’re in the customization business, and you could deliver things locally to people. That’s opportunity for you. The business that we’re in is going to continue to grow as people know that they can go somewhere and they can get a mug that they don’t have to pay a ridiculous amount of money to ship, personalized, right there. Maybe the same day.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I’ve got to say, I’m starting to appreciate local businesses more as I see so many Amazon trucks on the road and I have to break down 11,000 Amazon boxes every month. It can be so much more satisfying to actually talk to a person. Even if someone orders a dozen shirts from you, and it’s a new customer, and you have the ability to get in a vehicle, or send one of your people out in a vehicle, go and meet the owner, and make the delivery, that cemented connection is a huge advantage. The more and the smaller companies get that are looking for customized goods in your area, the more personally you can respond.

I mean, that is a hedge against any of these changes that we’re talking about. Because when someone knows you as a business and likes you as a business, they’re maybe willing to overlook that you still ask them to write you a paper check, or they may be willing to pay a couple of bucks more, and not make a big deal out of it, or wait a little bit longer, or accept your advice on an alternative blank if you’ve cemented that relationship. Developing that customer expectation in your favor is a big hedge.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Because part of customer expectations is being treated well, wanting to have good customer service, because with a lot of competition out there, when there is a lot of competition, in this world, there’s tons of competition, why would you go somewhere where they don’t treat you well when you can go somewhere else where they do treat you well, and you know the person, and they remember certain colors that you like, or whatever it might be? If you’re doing customized things, they know a little bit about you, so you know a little bit about them.

That really does cement an increased customer expectation of stellar customer service that you can deliver locally by being face-to-face, hand delivering things, and we talk about other things you could do. In the past, we’ve talked about bringing a can cooler or a hat as well and just delivering it with the shirts. Or with the signs that you made, you also deliver a hat and be like, “Hey, by the way, I’m giving you this.” It’s like that expectation, you have an opportunity to upsell, to deliver customer service, and deliver things faster.

Because if somebody wants to go to say Vistaprint to order something customized versus you, if you’re in their town, and you have mugs in stock, you could potentially make those mugs, and bring them to them, or have them stop by your shop and pick them up the same or the next day, or even the second day, where Vistaprint’s not going to get it to them for say a week. Plus they’re going to have to pay a shipping charge, potentially a hefty shipping charge for something heavy like that. There’s a lot of opportunity that you can deliver this way, but you also really have to consider with these increased customer expectations, that goes back to some of the other stuff we talked about before, being able to pay in an easy way, stuff like that.

Mark Stephenson:
I really want to bring that back around to the stocking up, particularly when we talk about supplies, blank hats for example, like you said with the mugs, is imagine the conversation and how happy a customer’s going to be when they call to order. Not only can you provide them great service and great quality, but you can say, “I keep these caps in stock, I can bring them to you tomorrow.” That conversation is going to be the only one like that they have, because they’re going to call eight places, and it’s all going to be seven days, 10 days, that’s out of stock, it’ll be two weeks until we get them in. You’re going to say, “You know what? I’m going to go get one out of the back right now and do it for you while you wait.” You’ve got a customer for life.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. When you solve one problem, you sometimes are solving a second problem too. Mentioning things in stock and potential back orders and all that stuff, if you do keep some things locally available, then you’ve got an opportunity to sell or upsell a customer or just sell them in the first place because you’ve got it and it’s ready to go. People want things fast and personalized. If you’ve got a digital print system and mugs in stock, you could literally personalize 10 mugs with 10 different names in minutes while a customer waits potentially. If you have the opportunity to do that, then yeah, it’s going to cement people in, just like you said.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Terrific. All right.

Marc Vila:
So we’ve got one more.

Mark Stephenson:
The last one is definitely really close to me and that is the transformation of gig workers or the conversion to the gig economy, where people are looking to work for short periods of time or for a company or do different things, work completely flexibly… completely flexibly?

Marc Vila:
There you go. Maybe.

Mark Stephenson:
I think that might be it. I’m not sure. They’re going to want to work when they want. They can do piece work, not be employees. There are definitely some ways that you can take advantage of this phenomenon in your customization business.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. As you’re growing, it’s increasingly easy to find people who are willing to do a small job for a small fee rather than necessarily wanting to work full-time. This could be anything from bookkeeping, to potentially sales, to delivery of goods, anything like that. You can find plenty of people who just want to work gigs and whether they want to do it full-time or they’re looking for a little side hustle to make a little bit extra money, because of inflation or something like that, all this stuff is you could do little jobs, and you can help grow your business by utilizing this gig market out there to be able to pay somebody for a job that you’re making a profit on right then and there. Then there’s no other costs after that.

Mark Stephenson:
It’s funny, because I was talking about ColDesi and all the equipment that they sell and everything. It seems like when I talk about that, a good 20% of the people that I talked to have done screen printing at some time or another. It’s like, “Oh yeah, I did that for a month in college.” Or, “I had one of those home screen printing kits,” or something like that and they really enjoyed it.

Or they’re just crafters and they do different kind of printing and stuff. Those may be a great source. Maybe if you have a big job, you need somebody to come in for a few hours. Or if you get all the complicated stuff set up for a screen run, maybe you can train somebody that just wants to do something with their hands that’s used to sitting at a keyboard all day. Maybe you can train them up and they can come in for a couple of hours a week, making a few extra bucks.

You can figure out what Uber drivers there are in the area and what other skills that they might have that they’d prefer to do, like Marc said, whether it’s in sales, whether it’s something in the shop, maybe somebody from a local high school wants to fold and pack. There’s a lot of options for you to take advantage of people that aren’t looking for a full-time job and don’t want a contractual relationship, but they’re very interested in making some extra bucks when you have extra work.

Marc Vila:
Keep your mind open for stuff like this. We have a lot of customers like this. This is an example that comes to mind. You have moms with young children that know that they are embroiderers and they just do it as a hobby. Because we have a lot of those phone conversations where some of them are looking to actually invest in a machine and potentially run a little side gig, but maybe… definitely, there’s people out there just like this that maybe you can develop a relationship with that can come to your shop every once in a while when you have big orders to do and you say, “Hey, can you help me run embroidery machines for a while? Every time you come in, I’ll pay you $100.” Whatever it is. There’s just a lot of opportunity. The last point on this, Mark, you brought it up and I want to give you credit for it.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, thanks, I appreciate that. That’s pay attention to gig workers and freelancers as a market. When we’ve done all of our niche market podcasts and when we talk about looking for niche markets, it’s normally based around a business with employees. Like you’re going to address plumbers or landscaping services or whatever. But there are people that do marketing, and they do freelance writing, and they do things on a 1099 basis instead of for an employee. Swag is still important.

If you get a business consultant that they work online, they work by themselves, but they work with some very important clients to them, then they probably would want a shirt with a logo on it for Zoom meetings. They might want to send a thank you basket that’s got a T-shirt with their logo on it and some tchotchkes to potential customers. They may be in an industry, like even real estate agents are… most of those are 1099 contractors. They don’t actually work for the company, for Coldwell Banker for example, they’ve got their own business and they get commissioned on the real estate that they sell.

They’re responsible for their marketing materials. You can get them a shirt with their name on it. You can get them things with their picture on it. You can sell them whatever things they leave behind at a real estate showing or thank you gifts they send to customers. You should make sure that you are aware of the non-traditional workforce in more than just ways that you can use them to help your business. But look at them as a market as a whole. There might be some opportunities for you.

Marc Vila:
For folks like that, it’s important to make those jobs profitable. If you can find a profitable way to sell small orders to gig workers, then you’ve got a huge market. If you keep it simple, “Hey, I have $100 package,” and it’s got to be something that you could do quick so it’s in and out of production and it’s profitable for you. Think of the quick ways you can decorate things, whether you’re doing transfers, or vinyl, or something like that. Pick products that are potentially low cost to the customer, but high margin to you, so you can make a good amount of money on each one that you’re making.

Like the can coolers or something like that could be an example. If T-shirts are really competitive, actual T-shirts, then that’s not the product you should push. Push for polos, hoodies, sweaters, sweatpants, whatever the other things are, hats. There’s just a lot of opportunity in that gig worker market too. That’s going to be something that if you pay attention, you’ll see the one that’ll work for you.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, I like that idea. When you talk about gig workers, there’s a couple of ways to think about it. One is a very specific definition. They’re like the Uber drivers and they deliver food. They work for a big company, but they do small things for it and they do it on an ad hoc basis, make their own schedule. But people are starting to widen that definition to mean anyone that’s a freelancer or a 1099 contractor, if you do your own taxes and you file a Schedule C at the end of the year, then you fall into that gig worker umbrella because you don’t have a boss.

You are your own boss. If you have a one person company, I’m going to slide into a bit of a pitch here, if you have a one person company, then you should look at things like the Association for Gig Workers and Gig Worker Solutions for more ideas on how to market your business and how to handle your finances. Because there’s a lot of things that you get when you’re an employee that people that come to work with you on a gig basis might be looking for as well. When you’re an employee, you get life insurance.

It’s a little bit, but it means something. You get your payroll taxes taken out. If you’ve been in business for more than a year, you know that self-employment tax, you’re going to pay 15% of your total just in self-employment tax to the government every year. There are ways to lessen that. If you go to get a loan and you don’t have a W2 because you’ve been doing your business for three years, it is a super pain to get income verification. You’ve got to dig up taxes and bank statements and things like that.

You, as a gig worker and as a self-employed person, can benefit by taking a look at those gig workers’ situations that you hire and applying that same thing to yourself. You can go to the Association for Gig Workers and sign up, it’s free, and start getting an education. That’ll all be launched pretty soon. If you are making some money and you’re thinking about it, then I’ll drop a link to Gig Worker Solutions. You should definitely check it out as another way. One of the reasons that I think about this too is because I do the marketing for the Gig Worker Solutions company and we are just setting up a team store for the people that are affiliates.

These are people that are basically gig workers for us and they’re going to order from a team store Gig Worker Solutions branded apparel and tchotchkes that they can give away. Look for those situations too. Just because somebody’s not a traditional employee doesn’t mean you don’t have these bigger opportunities, because I think the people that are setting up the team store for us are just going to make a boatload of money selling to gig workers.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I think that goes perfect into wrapping it all up, that challenges are expected in 2023, just like in 2022. But there’s still a ton of optimism, especially in our industry, with the customization and people wanting to deal with small businesses and dealing with small businesses is becoming a cultural virtue now as well.

Mark Stephenson:
True.

Marc Vila:
It’s becoming a cultural virtue. This is a great time to be a business owner. As long as you’re focused in the right direction, you’re flexible with your ideas, you’re flexible with how you treat employees, you’re flexible with adopting new technology, how you traditionally work with people, how you traditionally order and keep your stock, I think that being malleable is probably one of the best ways to be successful in a time like this.

Whenever I talk to either friends or people that we’ve interviewed for jobs and things like that, if they work for a company that is firmly dug in the ground, they want to leave. People don’t want to do business with companies that keep their heels dug in, “No, we don’t do that. We never do that. We haven’t done that in 30 years.” Okay, are you still riding a horse to work every day?

Mark Stephenson:
Right, right.

Marc Vila:
There’s a lot of opportunities and a lot of optimism. I think some homework we talk about sometimes, I think you should go through this list and shore up your business a little bit. Take a look and look at how you would handle supply chain issues. Ask yourself these questions. What am I doing to stay ahead digitally?

What am I going to do if prices go up on particular products? How did I handle that last year when prices went up? What am I going to do about hiring people and talent or gig workers? Then within all of these things, look for opportunities on how you can make more money, increase your revenue, sell more to your current customers, and get new customers.

Mark Stephenson:
I don’t think there’s anything else to say.

Marc Vila:
Okay.

Mark Stephenson:
That was very well said.

Marc Vila:
Then, we’ll just wrap up then with a ColDesi commercial, because this is a ColDesi podcast. If you’re not familiar with us, check out coldesi.com, C-O-L-D-E-S-I.com, and you’ll see links to all different types of stuff. The hottest stuff lately has been our DTF or direct to film printers. It’s just been a really hot product. It’s beautiful technology.

If you’re not doing that right now and you’re looking to do some production of transfers, you should check it out. Embroidery machines have been getting hot again lately. It’s another way to really customize and create a high-end type piece of customized apparel that the cost of production is particularly low. If you’re interested in either of those things, be sure to go to coldesi.com and live chat with one of the folks there.

Mark Stephenson:
Fantastic. I highly recommend it. This has been Mark Stephenson from ClientsFIRST Marketing.

Marc Vila:
And Marc Vila from ColDesi.

Mark Stephenson:
Have a great business.

 

 

Show Notes

Working with many customers can be very challenging, especially when it’s repeat customers.

Some customers are very needy, others are poor at communication, others don’t pay on time.

So how do you handle all these different types of customers when you are trying to run your business YOUR way? You want to keep your best customers happy, so they come back!

Get a CRM

This is key. You need a way to organize all your information, contacts, notes, reminders, invoices.

Set Reminders

Be sure to have reminders for ANYTHING important. Remind customer to get you the art, Remind that a bill is due. Remind to follow up on approval for production.

If you can set up automated reminders to email / text them… even better.

Use your calendar

Every meeting needs a calendar meeting (invite the customer too)

Use Calendly to avoid those “are you available at XYZ time/day” emails

Block out time for work. Invoicing, production, etc.

Have policies and procedures

You cannot force your customers to do everything your way, but you sure can suggest it. Many people will comply to your procedures. And YOU can decide which rules are ok to bend and not.

Fire customers

Yes, it’s HARD to say no to money but there is a price for your time, effort and stress. If one customer is preventing you from growing or enjoying your business, it’s time to let them go.

Be Friendly

You catch more flies with honey. People will like you. People will adhere to your reminders, people will respect your calendar invites, people will follow your procedures and you will have enough customers to be able to fire the bad ones.

Transcript

Mark Stephenson:
Hey everyone. Welcome to episode 185 of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. Wait a minute, Episode 185 of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. It’s been that long. I can’t even say it properly anymore that we’ve did the last episodes, but this is Mark Stephenson from ClientsFIRST Marketing.

Marc Vila:
All right, and that’s utter confusion there. So this is Marc Vila from ColDesi, and for those of you who’ve listened to this before, then maybe Mark Stephenson will explain what he means about that. For anyone who this is their first time listening. I apologize for Mark Stephenson’s antics ahead of time, but there’s some really good content coming up in probably about a minute or two.

Mark Stephenson:
It could be. So for those of you that have been listening for a while, I’m no longer officially with ColDesi. I’ve got my own marketing company that I’ve been doing on the side for quite a while, and we’ve talked about that freely in podcasts in the past. It’s how I’ve been able to bring some outside perspective into the customer apparel business. And I’m just doing that full time now, but that’s not going to change what happens here on the podcast. So I’m excited to keep going forward just with a slightly new introduction.

Marc Vila:
All right, well great. I love it and I’m excited to hear some more things you have to tell us in other episodes. But Mark is going to continue to participate in Custom Apparel Startups podcast for many episodes. We’re also going to have a lot of other guests from ColDesi from outside of ColDesi I hope as well. So guests are welcome. If you’re interested in being a guest and you have something good to offer, please reach out. But we’ve got a bunch of cool stuff on the line. But today we’ve got something particularly interesting and it has to do with some of Mark’s recent experience, but also just in general, some things that we’ve researched and known over the years from talking to plenty of customers, how to handle and keep your customers.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And especially during that transition when you’ve only got 10 customers, 12, 15 customers, 20 customers, if you’re really smart, if you’ve only got that number of customers, then it’s really not too hard to keep everybody straight, to keep all the orders because you know everyone, you remember doing the quote, you’ve got an easy job management kind of thing because there’s not that many customers to deal with and not that many orders, but that really changes completely once you start to scale up and add, whether it’s customer number 11 for you or customer number 50 for you, whatever marks that transition in your business from something that you can wrap your head around easily to, you can no longer wrap your head around it easily. That’s the point that we’re talking about.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And actually it is when you reach that point and you, it’s too late once you’ve reached it because when you reach that point and you’re no longer organized, you’re forgetting things, you’re leaving clients behind, you’re probably going to lose a client at that point in time when you realize, Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I missed this meeting. I missed a deadline. I forgot to follow up. I forgot to order. Just because you have too much stuff going on, you may have very well lost a client. So that’s one reason why it’s too late. The second reason why it’s too late is now you’re a little bit over busy, you’re having a hard time keeping up. You’re between just the mess of how you’re keeping everything and inside your brain, you can’t keep up. Then you decide you want to find some solutions, which we’ll talk about, and you’ve got to learn how to use those potentially, or write them or make them or whatever it might be. So you’ve just added more workload to your already-.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And it’s not just that, and it’s, you still have to enter in everything that’s happened. You still have to, it’s not like you can just say, Okay, I’m only going to systemize things from the last customer forward. No, you’ve got to include those original customers and those original deals and everything in whatever organizational style that you adopt or software that you pick.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. And I thought your audio drop, but I think it was me, for some reason I lowered my speakers. But anyway, if the audio did drop, I apologize.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay, thanks.

Marc Vila:
But I think we’re good. So this is essentially what we’re talking about here is you’re working with a lot of customers, it gets very challenging, some customers are going to be needy, some customers are going to communicate poorly, some are not going to pay on time. There’s going to be a lot of different things you’re dealing with and it’s not when you have a system like an eCommerce store where you’re taking individual orders consistently and maybe you don’t have a lot of repeat customers, you have people buying T-shirts of something that is hot or trending at the time and you may never see them again. That’s different than managing a book of clients like if you have schools, businesses, sports teams that you want to depend on them over time, they potentially could be, each of those clients could be five, 10, 20, 30% of your business when you take them up and if you say, you have 20 or 30 clients and things start getting messy, and you start making mistakes, it’s too late.

So here are some things that you can do to help handle all those clients, keep those customers, and overall just make your business better.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep, that’s true. And we’ve done a bunch of episodes on this in the past. I think one of the first ones that you want to take a look at is a CRM. That’s where we’re going to start. Right, Marc?

Marc Vila:
Yep. That’s the first thing to start, and we’ve talked about this a bunch, but a CRM, a customer relationship manager software. Essentially it’s just a piece of software where if you know what this is, great, if not, you should jump out and google and find one. But it’s a piece of software that is on notes and all the information about your customers.

Mark Stephenson:
If you think about it, if you are on the phone with a customer and you open up a spiral binder or legal pad or notepad or whatever, and you ask the customer for their information, everything that you write down is exactly what you would type into a CRM. The difference is, instead of flipping back through a book to try to find your notes, if it’s all typed into a CRM, if you remember their last name, you can type in their last name and search for it. If you tag them properly and know everybody they were interested in sweatshirts, then you could type in sweatshirt and that customer would pop up. So at the intake point, it’s super important to have something like a CRM, especially because this is where it all starts. And it’s also something where if you got it, you would load up all your existing customers in it as well.

Marc Vila:
So it’s a modern day Rolodex if you’re old school and you’ve been around for a while and you had a Rolodex or a book full of business cards, it’s a modern day version of that, that does so much more than just store phone numbers. So one of the keys to get from the very beginning is to get some sort of CRM. You can get a free one, it doesn’t have to cost you money in the very beginning if you don’t have the money or you don’t want to invest in one yet. If you do have the ability to invest a little bit of money, not too much, just a little bit of money every month. What do you think is a reasonable cost for a good CRM monthly?

Mark Stephenson:
So it really depends on what you want. So a very basic CRM, you can get into Zoho or something similar for 20 to 50 bucks a month if you want to go paid. The client’s first CRM, which is one that I’m customizing for the custom T-shirt business is going to be a lot more for a more advanced CRM that does more things, you’re going to expect to pay between 70 and a hundred bucks a month, but by far you don’t have to start with that. But it depends on the functionality that you’re looking for.

Marc Vila:
So step one would be free basic.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep.

Marc Vila:
Do that 100%, find a free one. Many of them will let you have up to a hundred or 250 or more customers for a hundred percent for free. You have to do that minimum.

Mark Stephenson:
And first, let me interject, don’t get analysis paralysis here. Find one that looks easy to use and get it because they’re all very transferable. So just find something, don’t spend your whole life, don’t use that as an excuse not to get started. Just get started, pick one and get started and start typing stuff in.

Marc Vila:
Yep, that’s great. And the next level up would be find an entry level one where you’re going to pay 20, 30 bucks a month, something like that. You will see that you’re going to get more features like that. And the next level up is going to be a higher level one, which is something like Mark mentioned and the client’s first one. And that is going to do things like, it’s going to already have things like automated text messaging or going from sale to invoice and you can move things around.

Mark Stephenson:
And you add workflows in there, all kinds of stuff as you grow. But a lot of the stuff that we’re going to talk about next is also included in many CRMs.

Marc Vila:
Yes. And even in many of the freebies. Of course-.

Mark Stephenson:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
… read the feature list, but at minimum get a free CRM at bare minimum because it’s really going to help you out because by the time you wish you did it, it’s going to be too late and then you’re going to have to backfill the information and you’re already staying up too late printing T-shirts.

Mark Stephenson:
Let me just interject something about your workflow now because this is a really important step in picking that next step in your business, is when you get a phone call or when you get an email, rather than relying on that pad next to you, you’re going to keep your CRM open and that’s where you’re going to take all your notes. That’s where you’re going to do your intake. This is now a substitute for your pad and paper next to your desk. So if you engage in that discipline, it will be a very easy transfer from using a pen and paper to just typing it in on your computer.

Marc Vila:
That’s great. That’s where you put in that, the customer hates polyester shirts because they’re allergic, things like that. Okay, so that’s great. The next thing that’s going to be important to do to keep your clients, keep yourself happy, is to set reminders. And I think this is such an obvious thing and shouldn’t even be said, but if anything important needs to happen, remind a customer to get our remind to pick something up, remind to drop something off. Anything that’s really important and critical, you should set a reminder for, and I mean electronically in your phone, in your CRM, wherever it might be, you need to make sure you get reminded to do things because as you get busy and you’re running around embroidery machines and you’re running around client phone calls from noon to three o’clock is going to fly by super fast and you needed to drop something off at UPS by 2:00 PM and you missed it. So reminders are huge.

Mark Stephenson:
I think that this is, and it combines with what’s next, which is using your calendar and setting your calendar reminders as well. I think that one of the things that have saved me in the past month of going fully into the marketing business is having a single calendar with reminders set, because there’s been times, and especially when you’re doing the work yourself, if you are the one that’s printing the T-shirts and at the heat press and everything, sometimes if I don’t get a reminder that I’ve got to make a phone call or I have a meeting or something in 10 minutes, then I’m just going to write blog posts right through that time period. And I’m not, because I’m careful about interruptions, I’m not going to see my phone, I’m not going to get any of that, but I will get a calendar reminder pop up on my laptop while I’m working.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I’ll tell you-.

Mark Stephenson:
Or if I’ve got the CRM open on my phone, I will get a notification that way as well.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I do the same. If I’m really trying to concentrate on something, especially working on a spreadsheet, doing art, you and I write articles, writing an article, it very well could be something a little bit more technical and important in our industry, you’re lining up vinyl for T-shirts, you don’t want to be constantly picking up your phone, looking at things, checking the time because you’re concentrating lining those things up. You’re in the zone, you got some flow going on, getting production done, it’s going to be important that you have a reminder with a specific sound, that sound means I should probably stop what I’m doing and check.

Mark Stephenson:
Hey listen, just imagine that you had a personal assistant that if you imagine you’re on the phone and you do a quote and the customer says, I’m going to think about it a little bit, I need to order by Wednesday. If you don’t hear from me, give me a call back Wednesday morning. So imagine you just type in your notes and you set a reminder inside your CRM, or inside your calendar somewhere. It’s like having a personal assistant. You say, here’s everything I have to do, come tap me on the shoulder when it’s time for me to do that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
And that’s exactly what it’s like, if you can’t afford that, then use a CRM and use your calendar, because it’s literally the same thing. It’s definitely I’m super productive now because I definitely focus on the task at hand until the bell rings and I see what I’m supposed to be doing next, and there’s no way you’re going to remember that somebody has this event every year and you need to call them in April 1st next year. There’s just no way. So definitely the setting reminders thing is important.

Marc Vila:
Yep. I think it’s great if you have a iPhone or an Android phone of some sorts, Samsung, something like that, they’re going to have built in reminder apps in the software. So if you don’t know how to use those and you would like to do it on your mobile device, just go to YouTube and search how to use iPhone reminders and there’ll be a video to learn how to do it and boom, you’ll be a pro in a couple minutes and just start throwing things in there. Also, between, well Siri is for iPhone, do you have one for your phone? Your Samsung?

Mark Stephenson:
Google.

Marc Vila:
Google. Hey Google. Okay.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, that’s it.

Marc Vila:
You can just say it and it will do it, which is cool too.

Mark Stephenson:
I would do it on the way to work. I would set reminders for when I arrived at work and it would do it by location to remind you.

Marc Vila:
Yep, I do that plenty. I do it in my personal life a lot because of work. So I’ll say, remind me when I get to Lowe’s to also get air filters. And because I’m driving and it just popped in my head and you can use your voice to do it too. So there’s never an excuse as long as you actually set them, it’s really important.

Mark Stephenson:
And I’ll expand that into the calendar area too and also mention this CRM stuff again. And that is if you think reminders that are going to be valuable for you, whether it’s integrated into a calendar or not, they’re just as valuable if you can remind your customers of things. So you can actually set, remind me to follow up with John on April 3rd about this job. You can also send an automated text message or email on that day, every April for the rest of my life, John’s going to get an email from me on Wednesday at 8:00 AM, Hey are you still doing that T-shirt order? And you are just going to get business because that happens.

Marc Vila:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ll tell you, and if you have Amazon, Walmart, any of these apps, CVS, they will tell you when it’s time for you to get something else again. And they get so much business because of that.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
I’ll just say, you’re probably running low on this, I’ll get those emails and stuff from Amazon and I’ll say, I probably am. I don’t even know if I am. I’ll just going to order it so I don’t run out. And then I go ahead and get that. So it’s fantastic if you could do that. And yeah, it’s just another little thing. So go into the next one on the list and since you mentioned it, Mark, is using a calendar. So talk about how important that is. And again, this is obvious and I hate to preach to the choir to folks, but so many people don’t use a calendar, and tell us how important it is.

Mark Stephenson:
So even internally at ColDesi, there were a few higher ups that did not spend all day on their emails like Marc and I did. But they just were like, hey, let’s meet at two and that would be it. Where with, I would immediately fill out a calendar invitation for a meeting at 2:00 PM and I would invite everyone that was supposed to be at the meeting so it wouldn’t be a run around the building go, Hey is Bob here right now? We’re supposed to have a meeting. Steve said to… It was time and all of that stuff. It’s super important if it’s your own paycheck that’s on the line, if it’s your own business on the line, that not just you but your customers know and have a reinforcement and a commitment to when you’re supposed to get together. So if you have got a call on that Wednesday with Bob about the next T-shirt job, then don’t leave it at just exchanging emails, say I’m going to call you. If you send them a calendar invitation and they hit yes, they’ve done a couple of things.

First of all, they’ve committed to you that they’re going to be there and that they are available. That’s a mental and emotional commitment to availability. And the second thing is not only are you going to get the reminder on your calendar, but they’re going to get the reminder on their calendar when they hit accept. So everybody’s going to get notified, everybody knows when it is, there’s no excuses, you get notified in advance as a reminder, you are now in a place where those five customers that you used to have, you could keep track in your friends and you can give them a hard time if they don’t show up. 75 customers, 50 customers, you can’t manage your days like that. Just from a customer interaction perspective, you’ve got to use a calendar system to schedule meetings, make sure everybody’s on the same page.

Marc Vila:
Yep. So at any time that you can get a time from a customer and when to show up, be there, meet somewhere, be on the phone, whatever it is, you definitely want it on your calendar and it’s really great to get it on theirs, because it’s going to remind them and they’re going to feel obligated as well too, which they should be because they told you. But they’ll even more obligated when they pick up their phone and especially if you have an iPhone, something like that. When I wake up in the morning, my little calendar widget tells me that I have something happening at 10:00 AM, but I went to check the time and in the corner I saw meeting with Mark Stephenson at 10:00 AM and then immediately my mind shifts, Oh yeah I have that meeting. Am I prepared for it. Let me double check all that stuff. So that’ll be great. Go ahead.

Mark Stephenson:
I was just going to say, and the other use for a calendar and meetings in particular is as part of the sales process. So if you do a quote you can get a commitment from the customer on when you’re going to follow up on it. I’m going to put this in my calendar, I’m just going to invite you so you’ll know I’m going to call to follow up and see where you are.

Marc Vila:
Yep. And there’s lots of things you can do in those calendar invites depending on the situation. So you can remind people 15 minutes before is usually when most things default to, but you can add second or third reminders to those as well. Remind people hours before, or a day before if they should be preparing something ahead of time for you. For example, getting the size of shirts for everybody in their office, because you’re going to come and you’re going to finalize the order and you’re going to want to have the list. So you could in that reminder of when you’re coming on Wednesday morning, you can hit, I’m sorry, in the calendar invite you could put remind 24 hours before and they’ll get a reminder that says on their phone or their email that says tomorrow so and so get the sizes. And it’s all in the calendar invite. So one thing I was going to say about calendars are there’s calendar apps. Right now probably the hot one is Calendly.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep.

Marc Vila:
It’s a paid serve. I think they have free stuff but they don’t give you much unless you pay. And it’s I think 10 or 20 bucks a month. It’s not too expensive. I think 20. And what this is, is you can sync up your personal calendar and your work calendar and all that stuff in there and all of that’s only visible to you, but you can send somebody a link and it will show them the times you’re available. That’s great for those times when you are trying to coordinate meeting with somebody and you’re consistently getting, I’m busy then, I’m busy then. Nope, I’m busy then, I’m busy then. You can send them a link and they’ll be able to click on it and it will show a virtual calendar for you with the time slot that you have available and they can click and pick one right there if they want to and take that spot.

Mark Stephenson:
I’ll tell you, and you’ve probably used Calendly maybe without even knowing it, but I just finished a podcast series for attorneys on paid advertising and every time I get an email from one of them, there’s a suggestion for a Calendly link, like book a time on my calendar and you click and you can see the calendar, you can pick the time that you’re available and it avoids that back and forth. The other thing is that a good CRM will also have this built in. So you know can use the calendar inside your CRM and you can have the same kind of functionality. But I really like the note that you put in here and how to manage your not online time with your calendar as well. Blocking out time for other things.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I block out probably at least eight hours a week minimum every single week on a rolling thing to make sure, for one, it’s a little bit of a reminder for me to check stuff. So I block something for social media and during that time it pops up on my phone and whatever I was distracted with before I say okay let me just go check that. And I go and I check and I make sure some of those things are updated and I get it done. It also prevents somebody from looking at my calendar and thinking that I’m all free all the time for everybody, because I’m not, and you shouldn’t be either.
So if you normally do embroidery work every Tuesday and Thursday morning from eight to 11, specifically you block that time for that reason, for many reasons probably, whatever all the reasons are, like there’s no kids around, you never have this, whatever there are, you booked them then. And if you start booking calls during that slot, you could probably take a call at a different time. But that embroidery slot’s there for a specific period of time. So if you had that, you should put those in your calendar, block them out. For one that’s great for Calendly or your CRM because people won’t be able to book that slot, and it will remind you that nope, Thursday morning I’m doing embroidery. Sorry.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, you’ll get that reminder. As a matter of fact, personally I just did this because I walk in the mornings three or four days a week depending on the weather, and it’s usually at seven now that it’s light again. But what was happening was I was also doing LinkedIn posts every day. So I would just get up in the morning as I usually do and I’d start working on a post and then all of a sudden it would be 7:30 or eight o’clock because I just kept going, I just kept working and then it was too late to accomplish what I had set out to do. So now when I wake up 10 minutes before I’m supposed to go for a walk, I actually get the calendar link and I have doing my that other stuff, the LinkedIn post, things like that set for later on in the day. So it’s a great way to mix not just your professional life but your personal life as well.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, and I’ll put, speaking of personal life stuff, you put in there, if your kids have soccer game, baseball game, if you want to take your significant other out for an anniversary dinner, you can block those in there too and block out shopping time, it’s great if you fill up that calendar for one, it’s definitely going to help with your business, it’s going to keep your customers happy and it’s also going to allow you to balance your life-.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, I’ll say too, last thing on that is it will give you an actual realistic look at your availability and your week. So if you have to pick up your kid from school at 2:30 Monday through Friday and it takes you 45 minutes, if that’s not on the calendar, you might look at your day and say, look at all this time that I’ve got, but you know you’ve got to leave at 2:15. It takes you 15 minutes to get there, 15 minutes to pick them up, 15 minutes to get back, 35 minutes to get them all settled. So you’re really not available to work even to schedule stuff for yourself to do during that time period. It may even give you the opportunity to look at your priorities and align your work schedule to fit.

Marc Vila:
And all this is just really good stuff. The calendars and the reminders are so key and if you’re listening to this saying I already do that, I would implore you to go through and actually look at your calendar and look at your reminders and see how often you aren’t using it. And if you’re not, if you add stuff in there, you’re going to be happy.

Mark Stephenson:
So back to that transition between being able to keep everybody in your head and growing and still retaining your customers, having policies and procedures that you put down here, Marc, is a life saver because you’re setting up rules in advance in how you’re going to conduct your business and how your customers are going to conduct their business with you.

Marc Vila:
So a policy and a procedure for your business might be you don’t accept blank goods from customers, you only provide the blanks. It might be that all artwork needs to be submitted a minimum of 48 hours before production. It might be that nobody can just call your cell phone and you’ll answer it and help them. Whatever it might be. And you have your own reasons for doing whatever those policies and procedures are. But if you need to sit down and consider what are things you’re willing and not willing to do for and with your customers, and why you’re doing it. Okay. So if you don’t want to do it because you don’t like it, that’s fair. There’s having a business that you enjoy doing with things the way you like to do it is good, but more importantly it’s going to be the reason that you do it is to prevent issues.

So you say you require art to be submitted 48 hours before production is going to start. So maybe you give them a date, you have to submit here if you want your product to be done by here, if you submit a day later, I move it out a day. Well, why do you have that? Because you know that there’s probably a 50/50 shot that there’s going to be a problem with the art. You’re going to have to change something, you’re going to have to get a second approval from them. So they’re going to submit something, you’re going to fix it, you’re going to have to send it back to them, they’re going to have to approve it, then you’re going to send it back again and you go in this circle. And you know that, that process can take a day or two. So you prepare that and you have this that you communicate this to your customers.

Mark Stephenson:
And I also like this, especially in that transition point because it may be that you knew your first 10 customers and you’re very friendly so everybody just gets along and they understand the business and the relationship. But when you get somebody new that doesn’t know you personally, or maybe wasn’t a referral or something like that, they’re used to doing business with other people, you’ve got to have parameters set because they may not be prepared for the idea that, you may want to collect 10 or 20% in advance before you build the order, where you wouldn’t do that for somebody that you’ve done business with for 10 years.
You may want to make sure it’s written down and they know it’ll be 10 days unless there’s a rush fee, where for your first customers they would just call you up and you’d be like, Oh yeah, I have time to worry about it. Well now it’s different because you’ve got 30 customers, you can’t do that. So you’ve really got to look at not just where you are right now, but in six months, if I have X number of customers, what do my policies and procedures have to be? And that will smooth that transition a lot. It’ll save you a lot of heartache if you’ve got it all in writing.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And honestly it’s your fault if you don’t have a procedure for something and you don’t communicate that to your customers, and then you can’t deliver on time or whatever it is that makes them a dissatisfied customer, essentially it’s your fault because you didn’t let them know how should they know? How should they know this? Why should they know this? And if you didn’t communicate that, then they have a little bit of a right to be bothered by that and maybe not come back. However, if you communicate, I have to have my art, you have to have the art by this time and they submit it three days later and then they ask you why it’s going to be late?
They may still have some dissatisfaction, but when you discuss with them say listen, I told you it was here. I sent you a reminder via email, I had a thing on my calendar to check on it. I called you and left you a message to check on it, and then three days later you got back with me. I’m trying my hardest to help you. This is what I can do for you, this is what I can’t. And if the customer is not going to say you’re right and admit it and then move on, you probably don’t want them as a customer anyway, because they’re going to be terrible all the time.

Mark Stephenson:
And that rolls right into the… That was a great setup by the way. Congratulations. That was great. That rolls right into the next thing, which is all about firing all your customers.

Marc Vila:
Fire all, maybe not all of them.

Mark Stephenson:
But your job would be easier.

Marc Vila:
It would be much easier. What you want to do is you don’t want to be a slave to your customers. You don’t want to be subservient to them constantly. This is, the relationship should be balanced. You want to have a good business that is successful, that grows to the point where it hits the limit you want to hit, and that you’re satisfied being an owner of this business, because if you wanted a job you hated, you can go get one of those. That’s easy. Those are the easiest jobs to get.

Mark Stephenson:
Let people work for Amazon.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I have no clue if that’s a good job or not.

Mark Stephenson:
No, me neither. I have a suspicion.

Marc Vila:
I have a suspicion. I do know that there, it’s easy to get the jobs that nobody wants to have. Owning your own business is challenging. It’s not an easy thing to do. And since you’ve put so much work into it, you should have a little bit of say of who you’re going to let boss you around. Who are you going to let participate in doing business with you. And not everybody needs to be super great and pleasant and it’s always a balance of how much money do they give me and how big is the headache, and that’s a sliding scale. But if you have a particular customer, whether it’s one or two or three, and you notice that they slow you down from growth, their jobs are not profitable, they stress you out, when the phone rings you make a noise before you pick it up. If all of these things are happening, then this customer is actually making it worse for all of your other customers.

Mark Stephenson:
That’s a good point. That’s a good point. And I think you’ve got to really own the idea that you don’t have to say yes. You don’t have to say yes to your current customers. You don’t have to say yes to new customers. You put yourself in the situation where you’re getting business that you want. Right now I’m at the point where in the marketing practice I’m starting to say no to potential customers. Just right up front, I’ll have a little conversation with you, I’ll try to help, but I really can’t take any more clients until the end of the year. I’m just too busy. So it’s a no. And some of the people that I’m just like, really, you don’t want to spend enough money, or I’m really not interested in that business, or you’ve just fired your third marketing person, it’s probably not the marketing, it’s probably you. You can make those decisions when you talk to people and just say, look, I don’t think I’m going to be able to help, I’m too busy at the moment. Feel free to try again at another time.

Marc Vila:
And so then we can even expand this from fire customers or refuse new customers.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes.

Marc Vila:
So they do fall into the same territory. One is you already know that they’re tough to deal with or you don’t mesh for whatever reason that is. And also another thing is they could be the nicest, coolest person, but it just so happens that what they need is not what you deliver very well. Whether it’s a type of apparel or a specific service, maybe… I had a friend who had a T-shirt shop and he had a customer that was just a salesperson hustler and he would go find people that wanted shirts in his neighborhood. So he would just talk to business owners. Then he would find somebody who wanted T-shirts and he would call him up and he’d be like, Hey, I need 20 T-shirts tomorrow, can you make it happen? How much? The job pays this. Okay great. And he said at first it was good because the money was good. He’s like, This guy’s paying me 20 bucks a T-shirt, I didn’t have to do any of the sales and et cetera, et cetera.

The problem was, was every time this guy called, he needed the shirts within sometimes hours. Can you make these tonight man? And the money was good. So the guy knew, he said he was a cool guy. He’s like, listen, this guy pays a lot for shirts. He knows how expensive it is to do super rush orders. That’s probably why he charges his customers whatever he was charging them that he could afford to pay 20, 30 bucks a shirt wholesale, because he’s making profit on that. And eventually he just said, Hey, I can’t do this. It’s not in his flow of business. He was doing e-commerce stuff. So he had very planned out orders and he was dealing with shipping and all of that stuff and he couldn’t drop everything and do an order because he was in the middle of making things from people he promised he was going to ship out today that ordered between five o’clock and 10 o’clock the next day. Stuff like that.

Mark Stephenson:
That’s a great example. And I think as your business grows, you do have to constantly reevaluate unfortunately some of those early customers, because there may have been compromises that you made, or when you’ve got unlimited availability because you’ve only got five customers, or 10 customers. So you’ve got plenty of time to do whatever they want you to do for money. So you’ve got the time and the equipment, you can do it. When you get to 50 it may be that the way those first few customers, you can’t support that kind of relationship anymore, you may get to that point. So if you look at your existing customers as you grow, constantly evaluate, reevaluate whether this is the most profitable use of my time and this is the best application for the business that you’re building.

Marc Vila:
And that actually goes into a bunch of stuff, which is almost a whole podcast in and of itself of sometimes you have to raise prices for these customers or change policy on older customers. And it happens to us every single day, everywhere we go. Return policies change, your doctor’s offices policies change, things change all the time. And sometimes you no longer do business with those places, whether it’s because they’ve made it where they don’t do what you do anymore, they’ve essentially fired you. And it gets even interestingly complicated. But when you’re talking about just retail stores do it to you all the time. Lowe’s used to carry a particular product all the time.

Mark Stephenson:
Oh yeah.

Marc Vila:
And you’re a contractor and used to go there all the time and buy this product. Well, Lowe’s decided not to carry it. Why? Maybe they broke on the shelf too much, or wasn’t profitable enough, or the vendor was hard to deal with. Whatever it was, they decide we’re not going to carry it. And we know that there’s a bunch of contractors who might not shop here anymore because that’s what they use and they’ve essentially had to fire you in a way. Not your fault they would love the business but it just doesn’t make sense anymore.

Mark Stephenson:
Great example, I like that a lot.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. So you have to think of your business holistically, look at groups of customers you have and it also could work for products as well. But look at all that and decide what shouldn’t be there anymore. Every once in a while. And you’ll know it when you feel it. And I know that, that’s really complicated when it gets to be… What do you do Mark if you have a customer, I’m going to put you on the spot. You have a customer that’s 40% of your income and you really don’t like them for many reasons, but they’re almost keeping your business afloat.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
What would you do? What would you do?

Mark Stephenson:
It would be hard for me to get into that position because I really will only do business with people that I like. There is-.

Marc Vila:
All right. Well, I’m going to change it up on you then.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay.

Marc Vila:
I’m going to change it up because that is a great easy answer. But I want to make it harder for you.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes it is. Okay hit me with something harder.

Marc Vila:
So here’s the twist on it, is that you have a client who was your favorite client. Good money, great, every A plus across the board. And then they sold their business. They called you up one day and said, Hey, by the way, this person’s taking over starting next week. And great, well a week goes by all of a sudden this new person’s a nightmare but they’re 50% of your income. How do you handle something like that? Because I know that’s a challenge that I’ve read online and that’s why I’m asking is because I’ve read this online on Facebook groups, I’ve talked to somebody in person about this where they said, Gosh, I would love to get rid of this customer, but it’s so much money.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. So I would do two things, and I can appreciate that situation. What I would do is I would set a transition period goal, and I would aggressively look for replacement business. I would spend all my time looking for replacement business, because if I’ve got one customer that’s 50% of the business, that means I’m really not… I’m probably spending too much time executing that job than I am prospecting for new business. And I would just have to either work harder or free up extra time some way from that account or another to look for a replacement. Giving myself a deadline at the end of that period, I’m just not going to do it anymore. So 90 days try to get more clients to fill in as much of that, do whatever you can to do that and then just let them go because it’s not worth it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And I actually, when I spoke to someone in person about that, that’s the answer I gave. So that actually builds some confidence and having giving someone that advice before. But I had said, I said what you should honestly do is, first I said shore up the whole house, meaning that make sure all your stuff is efficient, clean, ready to go so you can make time, because what you’re going to need to do next is you’re going to need to find 10% of your time. Let’s just pretend you’re doing 50 hours a week, five hours a week to find a, or hopefully multiple clients to replace that one. And that’s what I would say to do, because it’s the same exact thing as if you work a job, which everyone in their life has that they really hated, what do you do? You start looking for another job and then when you find it, you get to leave the other job. You’re doing the same thing for clients.

Mark Stephenson:
And the other thing I will say if you have the financial luxury to do this or the wherewithal to plan more carefully, organize your personal life so that 50% customer doesn’t drive you bankrupt.

Marc Vila:
There you go.

Mark Stephenson:
Organize your finances so you can lose two customers or three customers or 25% of your business. And you may not get rich that year, but you’re going to be okay until you find somebody else. So the business number looks like crap, but your life is okay.

Marc Vila:
Okay, that’s good too. I think that’s great. And those are all realistic things and it is a real challenge in business. But the reason why you’re going to want to do this is because of what I said starting off. The goal is to have a successful business that well, that hits your goals and is satisfying to own and run. And it’s going to help all of, when you’re in a good mood and you’re happy to run your business and you’re satisfied, it helps all of your other clients because they’re going to hear it in your voice. I’m setting the next one up pretty good. All right, Mark.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, I like that.

Marc Vila:
They’re going to hear it in your voice, they’re going to like to talk to you, they’re going to want to participate in doing business with you. So, that leads us to the next one.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay, go ahead. You’re going to have to read your first line then.

Marc Vila:
It’s just be friendly.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Be nice to talk to. You catch more flies with honey is what they say.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay. Okay. So stop.

Marc Vila:
Do they say that?

Mark Stephenson:
So why are you catching flies? Do you have a spider? What is the whole point behind wasting honey to go out and try to catch flies?

Marc Vila:
I’m in the larva business.

Mark Stephenson:
You’re in the larva business.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
You’re a fly fisherman.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Well, no, not exactly, but-.

Mark Stephenson:
You’re using the honey to catch the flies. Is that not what that means?

Marc Vila:
I think it means, I’m sure somebody could look this up, but I would imagine that if that they would land on the honey and maybe get stuck or you could put poison in it.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay. Poison honey’s not something I ever thought of-.

Marc Vila:
Nobody wants flies unless you’re in the larva business.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes. The larva business. I’m going to google that, larva business per sale. So I agree. So the more that you, honestly, it really is the way it works. When I’m talking to a customer and I actually realize I can help them, like an attorney was using Google search ads and he said he was wasting money, he was just going to cancel it. So I took a quick look and he hired me to redo some stuff and within two weeks his cost per a customer was down by 50%. So, that’s a huge boost. And being able to take that enthusiasm to the next customer you successfully are, you’ve got 20 customers that you keep happy, it makes you feel more positive about your business. The next time you pick up the phone to talk to somebody, you know that as you grow, you’re going to bring that same kind of performance. And it makes it easy to be friendly, easy to naturally get more business when you talk to people about it.

Marc Vila:
And that ties it together with getting rid of bad customers, you have good customers that you’re happy to work with. Generally you’re satisfied with your business and you’re going to do well. And also just friendliness in general. Even if you have some bad customers, resetting yourself, being friendly, answering the phone in a friendly way, telling people you’re happy to help them saying, sure, no problem, don’t worry about that. I appreciate your business. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to help you. Just being a friendly and good person is generally speaking, going to have people want to do business with you. And I do find that people who have busy businesses are usually the jerkiest, but they don’t really-.

Mark Stephenson:
Really?

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it’s because they don’t really want new customers though. They’re too bitchy.

Mark Stephenson:
Got you.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
I was thinking about when you fire that customer that is no longer, hits your business or whatever the reason is, I think it would be a very friendly idea to make a few suggestions on other companies that might fulfill their needs.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Helpful, sure.

Mark Stephenson:
So you really don’t like someone, but you still want to be friendly and kick them loose, then suggest that they buy from Amazon merch.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. There’s plenty of things you could suggest. And there’s a whole episode about how to fire customers and I’ve read a lot of things about how to fire customers and make money from it, and how to fire customers, but get referrals from them. And there’s all these interesting things you can do. But I think the ultimate thing is here is that when people like you and they recognize that you’re sincere and that you’re really trying to do good for them. So when all that happens, then people are going to adhere to the reminders you gave for them. They’re going to respect your time and show up to your calendar invites. They’re going to want follow your procedures if you say, Hey, get me the artwork within 48 hours, they’re going to do it because they don’t want to do bad by you because you treat them right, you’re good to them.

And that’s, I think one of the great things. And one of the more important things about being friendly is you catch more flies with honey, whatever that actually is supposed to mean, I don’t know. But when you want people to do things for you that you prefer to do things for you, for people that you like than to do favors or things for people that you don’t really like. And I’ll tell you, a lot of, plenty of businesses we’ve all done with, you’re almost bothered to give them money because the person that you work with is just not friendly. It doesn’t seem like they care about you or your business. And that’s still important. Customer service is still important. And I had a conversation with friends of mine, not exactly related to this, but in a way, and they were talking about everybody wants a tip now. You can’t buy anywhere without them flipping an iPad around and wanting you to answer questions and to tip them for doing nothing basically.

But that came up in a group chat and then we were all talking about that and then it morphed into tipping the people you should tip. And everybody pretty much agreed that they’re like, If I have a server or whatever it is that really is just seems like they’re working hard and they’re treating me right and they’re doing good things, I’m happy to over tip them.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes

Marc Vila:
And they were all saying that they liked doing that. And I said that we’ve got ice cream for the family and there’s a young kid behind the counter. As soon as we walked in, super friendly, really nice to the kids, just treated them like kids, treated us like adults. He went and then he made everything with care. You could tell he wasn’t just sloppily putting it together. And it came, we checked out, it’s like $18 and I gave the kid five bucks.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
I normally would not do that on ice cream, but I was just in a situation where I said, Gosh, it made an experience that I was expecting to be annoying, bringing kids and a bunch of adults into an ice cream place and I was going to pay for it. And it just turned into a whole pleasant thing. And I said, You know what? This kid deserves to be rewarded. I noticed we’ve been here and nobody else has been here this whole time. So he’s not tipping out a bunch of money tonight. And you do it. So I think that all in all, that just comes to a really long way to make a point that if you’re friendly, you will get good and good customers, you’ll keep good customers and it’ll give you the ability to fire those bad ones.

Mark Stephenson:
I love it. All right, I think that’s it for me.

Marc Vila:
All right then. Well, in regards to this, what I want is, I think the homework thing to do is if you don’t have a CRM, you should start making the moves to get one, even if it’s a free one. Make sure you know how to use your reminder and your calendar apps, whether it’s in the CRM that you’re going to use or on your phone, and if you can tie those together, whatever email you have, Google Office 365, iCloud, they all have calendar and reminder type of apps. And then consider some of your policies and procedures. How can these tie in together? And then just last, just be a good person to do business with and try not to do business with bad people. And then overall, that’s going to really help you keep those great customers and grow your business, hit your goals.

Mark Stephenson:
I love it. This has been Mark Stephenson from ClientsFIRST Marketing.

Marc Vila:
And Marc Vila from ColDesi.

Mark Stephenson:
You guys have a fantastic, well organized CRM driven, friendly growing business.

Marc Vila:
Wonderful.

 

 

Show Notes

When you think of your business you may think:

• Maria does the printing
• John does the art
• Mark does the writing and website
• Etc.

But how do you manage that as you grow? or if Maria is sick?

Do you also think about how Maria does maintenance? Or how Mark answers chats on Google? Or how John posts to Facebook and answers comments?
Further, as you grow, and art goes from 5 files a day to 15 files a day, WHAT are tasks that John could take off his plate? IS there something Mark can do instead of John? Is there something you can hire a part-timer to do, or outsource to an agency?

When considering the inner workings of your business, think about all the tasks, not the people.

 

List EVERYTHING that the business needs to do.

• This should be anything your team can think of, and the list needs to grow over time.
• e.g. maybe Mark makes sure your website domain renews every year, but he doesn’t remember that when making the initial list.

List the talents and skills of your team

• Who can do what?
• One team member does the website now, but can anyone else?
• One team member dislikes running the embroidery machine, but CAN in a pinch

List areas of potential growth & efficiency

• If we did X better we could grow
• If we did Y better we could save money

List anywhere that is close to max capabilities

• Is there an area where your team is spread thin?
• One team member does art. Some days there is more art than they can do. What if you grow 10%, can they handle that? How will you handle that if you do?

Go back to the top

• Now that you have all the above data, take a bird’s eye view of it.
• What can you improve?
• Do you need redundancy in talent?
• How will certain jobs get done if someone is sick or on vacation?
• If you hired someone, what could they fill in?

Transcript

Mark Stephenson:
Hey everyone. And welcome to what could very well be episode number 184 of the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. My name is Mark Stephenson.

Marc Vila:
And this is Marc Vila. And today we’re here to talk about your business butts in seats.

Mark Stephenson:
Mark, I really don’t know if I appreciate you using the off-color language in the titles. It’s…

Marc Vila:
Well, you’re going to have to explain this because my title was less catchy and interesting, but very literal. So-

Mark Stephenson:
See, and that’s what we don’t want. I mean, that’s lesson one for marketing is you never want to actually tell people what’s going to happen. Anyway, so the idea here is the butts in seeds conversation is one that we’ve been having pretty regularly recently at ColDesi. And it’s the idea that if your business was a bus and your employees or your tasks were all people and they were sitting on that bus, to kind of go through and make sure that you have someone assigned to every task and they’re the right people in the right tasks. So moving people around the butts, putting the right butts in the right seats for the job and for the task at hand.

Marc Vila:
Right. Right. And in other words, you may think of your business as Maria prints the shirts. John does the artwork. Mark does the writing and the website. And somebody else does the embroidery. And you think of your business as that, as those things. Here’s the person who prints the t-shirts. But as your business changes and grows and if you want to make sure that you don’t have any detrimental issues to your business, you need to kind of look at everything that is being done in your business and, for one, make sure you have the right people doing it, but also just understanding everything that those people are doing on a day-to-day basis.

Mark Stephenson:
That’s a good point. And the example that you use with Maria not being there today and what happens next is kind of looking at everything. So yes, it is a person and it’s also a to-do list for each job.

Marc Vila:
Right. Right. So it’s a bit of both. And the reason why this is so important for your business, especially as you’re a small business growing to a medium size business and things of that nature or you’re a startup trying to get going is people are going to get sick. People are going to quit. People are going to get overwhelmed because all of a sudden you’re making 50 widgets a day, t-shirts or hats or mugs or whatever it is. And then all of a sudden, boom, three orders come in a row. You go from needing to do 50 in a day to doing 200 in a day. How do you do it? Who handles it and so on and so forth. So this is a conversation about what are all the things that happen in your business? Who does them? And how does this affect things like growth or changes in your employee or just employees, or just little changes over time like someone going on vacation or spraining their wrist.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And there’s a lot of variations on this idea. We did an episode about The E-Myth, which is a really old book about making sure that you write a job description for everything that needs to be done in your business even before, and then assign people those jobs, even if they’re all you.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. And one of the reasons why you want to assign, even if they’re all you, is as that business grows and changes, what else can be done by other people? And you mentioned on plenty of podcasts we’ve discussed this, but I think that a nice dedicated one just discussing how to create this framework, how to define everything. And then this way, when you do get busy, you can take a look at something and say, what can somebody else do? Or if you have a friend or a family member that works with you or your spouse or something like that, that works with you and they catch the flu or something like that and they’re going to be kind of laid up for a week, who else can do those other things? Or what needs to be done that I can do, because I’m going to work doubly hard. What needs to be done? What do I want to make sure that I don’t forget? Things like that.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I mean, I think the worst scenario is that Maria gets sick and not only does no one knows what she does all day, no one knows how to do the same things. For us at ColDesi, Hannah does probably 75% of our emails. But Jes can do the emails as well. So if Hannah’s out, we’ve got Jes that can back her up. If they’re both out, then Marc Vila can do the emails. So we’ve got redundancy built in as well.

Marc Vila:
Right. And redundancy is important. And I actually had a conversation with a parent of a student at school, just ran into this guy at a little party. And we talked about what he did. And he does some work, some construction type of work for the city. And I said, “Oh, how big is the company you work for?” And he said, “Oh, it’s about 20 people.” And I said, “Oh, that is kind of nice because you kind of know everybody. And there’s not a lot of red tape to having conversations with your team.” And he agreed that, but he said, “The hardest part is it’s hard for me to take a vacation. I have to prepare a month in advance to be able to take a vacation. I don’t have any redundancy.”

And that turned into probably a half-hour conversation of him discussing what other people can and can’t do and how he wishes he would’ve trained this other guy and how to do this thing because it’s not that hard. And every time he thinks that he should train this person, it’s already too late because now he has to plan for a vacation or he was sick last week or whatever it might be. So I think we can dive into how to think about this, how to make and list and write all this down, and then what you’ll do with that information.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I like it a lot. And the first one that you’ve got down here is to list the talents and skills of your team. And I would almost like-

Marc Vila:
We have one above that.

Mark Stephenson:
Oh we do. Okay.

Marc Vila:
We do.

Mark Stephenson:
I didn’t scroll down far enough. Oh good. Yeah. That’s exactly what I was going to say.

Marc Vila:
Okay. So I’ll say it then.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes.

Marc Vila:
List everything the business needs to do as best as you can. Use an Excel spreadsheet, whatever it might be. I think for something like an Excel spreadsheet is simple enough for this. But every single thing that the business does and don’t save it and open it up consistently or leave it open for a while so you always run into it because you’re going to need to add stuff for a while until you truly list everything that the business does.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And notice Marc keeps saying the business, because it’s not just everything that you do. It’s everything that needs to be done.

Marc Vila:
Everything that needs to be done. And this is interesting, part of this is a lot of this list gets forgotten. And one that could be easily forgotten that would have terrible side effects would be forgetting that in the example we mentioned above, Maria did the printing. Maria also does maintenance every day on the DTG printer, or on the DTF printer. She does maintenance every day while everyone kind of thinks of her as the printer because they see her walking out of a room with t-shirts and transfers. But behind that, she manages the inventory of the ink. She makes sure to shake or agitate the ink as it needs to be done, cleans the print head every day, does a maintenance check once a month to make sure that everything’s been done, and even keeps a log of all this stuff. And if, as you get removed from these things, meaning you’re selling to customers maybe, and you’re doing all the embroidery work and artwork, you could be doing all of these things and you slowly forget that there’s all these other tasks that go along with printing shirts.

Mark Stephenson:
I like the task-oriented kind of approach. But one thing I just thought of is we recently had ColDesi-related kind of business. We found out that the person in charge did not have access to the Facebook page.

Marc Vila:
Oh right. Right. Right. Right.

Mark Stephenson:
So this is one thing, maybe we’re picking on Maria. I don’t know why. She’s a perfectly lovely person. But maybe Maria is the printer, but she was also really active on Facebook when the business started. So she just is the one that set up the business page. So now if Maria is out, if she’s out, then you have to go through an incredible amount of rigamarole to get control of the Facebook page. So it’s an important kind of global look at the activities and the people.

Marc Vila:
Right. Right. So the business needs, when you consider kind of basics, are some things to list and hopefully this stuff can get you going. So you can write some of this down. But manage the email account and hosting. So if you have a business email through Gmail, who has the login credentials? Who makes sure that the bill gets paid? Who gets an email if the credit card expires and you forget to change the date? Where’s that information going to go? Equipment, maintenance on equipment, supplies that are in stock, listing the customers, accounting for invoices, making sure everything gets paid. You got any other interesting little examples?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. It’s like who handles all of the social media accounts? Who does the books? Are the books on the cloud and everyone has a password? Or are they localized on a computer and one person has the password?

Marc Vila:
Right. If you order supplies or apparel from somewhere, who has the account? Who has the login credentials? And someone listening to this is just saying, “Me, me, me, me, me,” because it’s only you. But you have to list all these things because most people are going to, that we talk to, at least are trying to get their business beyond just me. You want to grow it a little bit at least. It would be nice to have some part-time employees that filled boxes and hit start and stop on the embroidery machine for you so you can make a little bit more money. That’s often the goal is to get to a point where you make some pretty good money and you’ve got a nice little business that you’re running that’s yours.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And even if you don’t go the route where you want to hire people and bring them into your house or your small shop, even if you start outsourcing things like the bookkeeping or the invoicing or things like that, you can see how all of those things come into play. Here is where I get access to all these things so I can give them access. Here’s who does the packing, if you’re just going to have someone else do the packing for you, if you’re going to have something drop shipped. Here’s all the information that’s required to accomplish that. It’s all in one place.

Marc Vila:
Yep. You might hire an agency that manages your Google business account for a few hundred bucks a month and someone who does your accounting, your taxes. I mean, all these things are things that should be put on a list because you’re going to have to either give somebody some money or hire somebody or whatever it might be. And then of course, if you do all this stuff by yourself, say it’s you’re married. You do all the business stuff and you are bringing in that income. So you’re depending a bit on that income. And then you get really sick and you’re full-on flu sick and you tripped and sprained your wrist because you were sick and you got up in the middle of the night with a fever. Just this whole cloud falls on you and you’re not ready. You’re not back to normal for three weeks. Do you want the business to just stop?

Mark Stephenson:
Right.

Marc Vila:
Now you could depend on friends or family, even you, open up that list. You’re too sick to get up and run the embroidery machine maybe. But you can open up the list and you can say, “Honey, will you do these few things? Please log into here and make sure to pay this. All I need you to do, son, is to teach you how to maintain this printer, which the stuff I’m going to show you is really easy. I just can’t do it with both of these sprained wrists because I fell twice.” Whatever it might be. But having this list of things-

Mark Stephenson:
I think you should consider a mattress on the floor at this point, I think you should.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, sure. That’s fine, too.

Mark Stephenson:
So here’s what else I like about this is if you’ve got the list, maybe you don’t even have to ask anyone. Maybe you can just make sure that the people in your life knows where the list exists and they’ll just step in. So they can at least contact your customers and let you know there’s going to be a delay or send out the invoices or something like that. You’ve got the list of things that you could even have it. Here’s the list of things I do on the computer. Here’s the list of things I do in person to fulfill an order. Here, son, here’s the list of in-person things. Here, wife or husband, here’s the list of computer things.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s great. And having it all written down allows you to do that when you run into situations that are unfortunate. They also allow you to do this stuff when you’re trying to grow or change the business. Or there’s just, you are a unique person if every single thing the business needs you love doing. You’re the only person on earth, by the way.

Mark Stephenson:
I think you should probably see something professional, someone professional.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. You either like the art and dislike the accounting or you enjoy the accounting and you dislike the sales or you love the sales and you dislike doing embroidery or you love doing digitizing, but you don’t like running the machine. I mean, whatever it is, you might do it all now. But there are things that you do and don’t like. As you list these things out, you can even add, you can grade them on how much you like doing them. And then you can find all the things that list them one to 10 and you can find all the ones and say, these are all the things that I’m going to have somebody else do later.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I like that a lot.

Marc Vila:
I’m going to pay. So that’s the first thing is to list everything and keep it open and keep listing things as you think of new things. And it’s going to take you a year to get the full list. Next is the one you mentioned earlier, Mark.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And that’s list the talents and skills of your team. And again, I mean, if it’s you and a part-timer, if it’s three people in the shop, if you’re running a big shop and you’re listening to this and you’ve got a dozen employees running screen printing and embroidery equipment, then the bigger you are, this even becomes more valuable is to list out specifically, maybe not even just who can do what, but who could do what?

So you’ve got the, who can do that? Who could do the emails right now? Who could do the emails if we spent 10 or 15 minutes with them to make sure they knew how? And is there anyone else that could do the website? If it’s someone on your team that does the website, is there a contractor somebody knows that could help? Or vice versa. We’ve got a great contractor who’s part of your team, like an external marketing guy or an external bookkeeper. They are going to be part of your team. That external person does the website and the books. Is there someone inside that can be the main point of contact or can back that person up?

Marc Vila:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s great. And this is once you hit two people, this is really important. And it’s important by when you’re by yourself of course, because the other thing is, if you can do everything, you, again, are a unique individual because the chances of you being a great digitizer and being great at running the embroidery machine and being a great salesperson and being a great accountant and being able to build a website and run social media, that’s not common. There are things you’re going to be weak at. And so you should understand that. So if you don’t use your digitizing, you should be putting on your list the digitizing is going through ColDesi graphics. And if you don’t do the accounting, you should list that this is my tax preparer or CPA or whoever it is.

Mark Stephenson:
And I would really give yourself the opportunity to be surprised. So if you do have kind of a team of people, then ask them also, go through this process and go, “Okay, so Maria does the embroidery. Is there anyone else here that would like to learn how to do the embroidery to back her up?” Find out what their, not just talents and skills, but their interests are too, because maybe you can train someone up a little bit. Because if you do hit two people, then it’s a good chance that you’re going to be arrested and you’ll need someone to take over this job for you. I had to wait so long to say that it was really not worth it. It’s really not. But I couldn’t let it go.

Marc Vila:
No. I think that’s great, Mark. Well, all right. So step one is you list everything the business does. Then you list the talents and skills of the team. It’s important that you list it for yourself because you’re probably not good at everything. And it’s even more important if you have more than one person. And the more people you have, almost the more important it becomes to really get to this point. Then the next step is you list areas of potential growth or potential improvements in efficiency.

Mark Stephenson:
Well, I like this a lot. And it’s almost like a process improvement, especially if one of the things that you like is printing or doing the embroidery. There’s some real opportunity for everyone if you examine what the steps that you’re taking or the way you’re approaching that task for your business and looking for ways that you could do it faster or better or more profitably.

Marc Vila:
Right. And it’s everything or anything. I mean, all areas have areas for growth, but you should know the areas that you don’t pay attention to or you’re not very good at, or you consistently have issues with and that those can be improved. So you might not be the best salesperson, but you get business and you get referrals, but you struggle with asking for business and charging enough money potentially. So an area for growth, you mark that. Get better at sales or get somebody to sell for me. Then that could be the same with digitizing. You try to do all your embroidery digitizing yourself. You’re not that good. You spend so much time digitizing, selling, digitizing, selling that is four hours deep and you haven’t even started your production. That’s an area for growth. Should I outsource that? Should I hire somebody? It’s also areas of improved efficiency. If you did something better, could you save money?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I mean, I think the outsource digitizing thing, we get people who switch to using ColDesi graphics because the new software, the design deck software, that ColDesi is coming out with is just super simple to use. And it’s a very friendly interface. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at it or that you’re not going to struggle with it. So it’s an opportunity to save you maybe hours of education time or hours of fiddling around with the design and not really improving it any. If you just go to ColDesi Graphics and, say, in a day or two, you can get a beautifully digitized design. I mean, we get the opportunity to see some of those. They do sample sew-outs, and we get the opportunity to look at those. And they’re just incredible. There’s some beautiful stuff. And some of you are a little bit twisted. We’ve seen some crazy stuff come through there, too. I’m just going to say that out loud.

Marc Vila:
Thank you. I’m glad you said that.

Mark Stephenson:
But that’s somewhere you could look. Hey, if you think you’re at max capacity because you’re spending so much time doing these things. If one of those things, if you can identify one of those things that, like Marc said, you don’t enjoy, you’re not that great at, then man, if there’s a simple $25 solution or $50 solution, you should probably take advantage of it.

Marc Vila:
Yes. And this is also just when you’re looking as you grow your company. So you don’t do very much in social media. You don’t necessarily understand everything. There’s too many terms. What’s the difference between a reel and a post? And what’s a page versus what does for you mean? I mean, there’s all these words. You don’t understand it. You know that there is growth out there if your business did some social media stuff and you hope to get there. So you may just say an area of potential growth is social media. As the business grows and I get some income in, it’s not something I’m good at. I don’t plan on being good at it. It’s on my list as something I’m not good at. So this is going to be something I’m going to hire somebody for in the future, whether it’s an outsource agency or a full-time employee or whatever it might be.

Mark Stephenson:
And I’d apply the same kind of logic to specific people. So in other words, if somebody on your staff is tapped out, you can see that Maria is working nine hours a day and she’s not going to be able to work anymore. That’s kind of her max. You’ve reached the limit of the number of t-shirts you’re going to print or polos that you’re going to sew. Then that’s a max capacity and you have to look at whether or not you can outsource some of that work maybe, or whether it’s time to bring somebody in, get another piece of equipment.

Marc Vila:
Right. And it’s okay also to be a little tough on folks in writing, just say that this person runs the printer and the embroidery machine. They’re just really inefficient with the embroidery machine. It’s an area for improvement. And it’s good knowledge to have because as you grow and change your business and things like that, you may just say this person’s not that good at embroidery. The business is growing. I can probably go ahead and hire somebody, another part-timer or full-timer and I’m going to get somebody in for embroidery. That’s what I’m going to look for.

Mark Stephenson:
And I’m just going to remind you to take a nice cold look in the mirror when you’re doing that as well. Are you at max capacity? Are you doing max capacity because you’re taking twice as long doing something that somebody else could do significantly better and faster? Then that goes on the list. It’s not a problem that you have to solve right now. We’re not in the kind of solution phase, but you need to identify all of these places where you could improve by either reducing your responsibilities or increasing your capacity.

Marc Vila:
Right. And it’s great. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that sometimes you don’t even notice it until you really write it down and look at it. So we’ve got to list those close to max capacities. We’ve got that. And that includes individual team members, whatever it might be. I also think it’s important to list equipment there as well because your equipment is a team member. And if your embroidering machine is being run six hours a day and you’re looking at the trail, and it went from zero to 10 minutes to one hour to four hours to six hours. And that’s the path over six months, you know that you’re not that many months away until you have to run your machine 10, 12 hours a day. And that’s not really what you want to do.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I love this idea because that’s a great example. If you can do, I don’t know, let’s say you can do 30 hats a day, are you turning away hat orders because you can’t produce them fast enough for the deadline? Are you burning out the employee that does hats? Are you stressing out old equipment doing that, doing those jobs? If you could do twice as many hats in the same amount of time, what else could you do with that time? Because using embroidery is a perfect example. If it takes 15 minutes, 12, 15 minutes to embroider something, I mean, the operator doesn’t have their hands doing the sewing the entire time. If you add another embroidery machine, one person can run both. And now you’re getting twice the production. You’re doubling your capacity and capabilities of one person just by adding a piece of equipment.

Marc Vila:
Right. Right. So this is just all great stuff and it lets you really understand what’s happening in your business and individually for each person, even if it’s just you, for each piece of equipment, and then for the business as a whole. And this is where you’re going to really understand how you’re going to be able to grow. So many people get stuck that I want to make $100,000 dollars a year. But they never pay attention to what they’re doing, what other people are doing, inefficiencies, efficiencies, all of that stuff, never pay attention to it. And you get stuck at $60,000 or whatever the number is. A million, you get stuck at a million and you want to get to five million. You get stuck there because you’re not paying attention to anything. And then eventually you become, you just think you can’t grow past it when you absolutely can. The chances of your business being the absolute most efficient and everybody doing the right thing and none of these things can be outsourced, that just doesn’t exist.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And even if you’re one of these companies of one, one of these entrepreneurs, even if you just have a Cricut that you use at home, I think I get more comments on our Facebook posts from Cricut users saying, “I could never do that. Or my Cricut isn’t fast enough. I can’t take these orders because it’s too slow. But I could never do what’s next. I don’t know how to grow with me and my Cricut.” And they get cemented into what they’re doing right now because they’re not stepping outside and looking. They’re not even really thinking that maybe they could get a better piece of equipment that’s more efficient and make a lot more money for the same time they’re spending. Maybe they could outsource some of the design work, which is not that hard to do. Maybe they could find someone to help them get more business.

All of these max capabilities by person and by task, conquering those is how you get to $60,000, $100,000, 12 people, three million dollars. You know what I mean? You don’t do it by yourself doing the same things again and again. This kind of business introspection that Marc Vila is talking about here is definitely what will separate you from just staying in your back bedroom, doing the same thing. Cool, we’re not judging. But if you want to grow, that’s keeping you back.

Marc Vila:
And this type of stuff will help you change your mindset as well, especially as you look at it and you start thinking like an entrepreneur and you stop thinking about small dollar things and you start thinking about big dollar things. You stop thinking about, oh my gosh, I just wasted a quarter of a cone of thread that costs you like a dollar. And you start thinking about how can I make an extra $5,000 this month? And we see the social comments all the time. Somebody will look at a $10,000 printer and say, “Why would I buy that when a Cricut can do the same thing?”

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Because it can’t.

Marc Vila:
Now, I don’t know. Why would you buy a pickup truck when a red rider wagon can do the same thing? Both of them can haul bricks down the road, right? And so this type of stuff will help you change your mindset because, okay, if I want to be able to do this, I have to be able to understand everything. As I begin to understand everything, I’ll start to think about what’s the next step?

Mark Stephenson:
Right. And I think this is an ongoing exercise, but you should go through this list one right after the other or within a 30 day period more than once because these things come up. There are a lot of things that you do once a year that comes up. There’s a lot of things that you do every quart… If you’re doing this now and you haven’t paid your quarterly taxes yet and your quarterly taxes go on the list, that’s something that’s going to fall off the list until you kind of add it. It’s one of those tasks that will get forgotten and no one will do if you’re taken down for a while.

Marc Vila:
And I think we have… Is it four? Yeah. That’s the four lists that you make. And now that I recommend doing this in Excel. You could do multiple sheets or you could do one sheet and list everything kind of in there somehow. But once you’ve got it all, now you go back to the top, you go back to the beginning and you look at it all from above and you look for patterns. You look for the holes where there seems like things aren’t getting done correctly. You look for skills that seem to be completely absent from your business. You look for somebody that employees that are completely overwhelmed and you look at all those things and you figure out how can I move things around? This person’s really overwhelmed. This person’s underwhelmed. This person does all of the embroidery work. This person does none of it. This one can, because Mark mentioned, list people that could do something. This person could learn to hoop and pull stuff on and off an embroidery machine and fix thread breaks. I’m going to teach them.

They’re going to be a secondary person. They’re going to relieve a little bit of the stress off person number one. And now they’re both in there. You’ve built-in redundancy. And now that you’ve got two embroiders, even if one of them is a part-timer that works one day a week, you could sell more embroidery. So get out there and fill up this new person’s shift. So there’s just so much you can do with this information that will make you a better business owner, whether you’re doing it completely by yourself, or you’ve got the whole family working in it, or you have three employees.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And hey, this really is a different mindset and a different way to look at your business. And I’d really like it if you went through this exercise and just didn’t think about it while you’re listening to the podcast. I’d really like it if you actually did it because that’s the difference between someone that makes the leaps ahead or really fundamentally improves their business is not just learning all this stuff, but actually doing it, doing some of it. I read a book called Skip the Line. And it was talking about just writing 10 random ideas every day. And in a little while, you’ll get some fantastic ideas and you can implement those, et cetera. And reading about it I thought was amazing. Doing it was great. Really doing the exercise that we’re talking about here is definitely going to, it’s going to help give you direction. It’s going to help plug holes and help you grow.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, you’re going to see it. You’ll actually feel very accomplished and intelligent and like a good planner. I mean, there’s a lot of great things to come out when you create something like this. And then you get to show somebody and they’ll be thoroughly impressed because another friend of yours who has a small business didn’t do this at all. And you’re going to show them this Excel spreadsheet and say, “Hey, tell me your thoughts.” And they’re going to be impressed. I should be doing this type of stuff. And so it’s great. So I think this has kind of wrapped up what we wanted to talk about here. And the homework on this is obvious. Go out and do this for your business. And if you want to share it with us, you can feel free to share it with us. I’ll be happy to take a look at it.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, love that. And I enjoyed this today. Good episode, Mr. Vila. I appreciate that. That’s it for me.

Marc Vila:
All right. Wonderful. Well, as always, this is a ColDesi podcast. So brief commercial, check out coldesi.com and you’ll find links to supplies, blanks, graphics, all types of customization equipment. There’s a new DTF printer, direct-to-film printer.

Mark Stephenson:
Oh yeah.

Marc Vila:
That just came out and it’s very affordable for a small to medium size business that’s looking to get into a solid t-shirt transfer production.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I mean, it’s a compact high-volume t-shirt transfer printer.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That the return on investment is about 15 seconds on this thing. So it’s really fast, really cool. So I recommend you check that out if you don’t know much about DTF printing. And there’s a ton of other things we have on there. We mentioned a bunch of examples from sublimation new embroidery to cutters and white toner transfers. So check out coldesi.com and live chat with one of our pros.

Mark Stephenson:
Cool. This has been Mark Stephenson.

Marc Vila:
And Marc Vila.

Mark Stephenson:
You guys have a fantastic, well-organized, list-driven, non-end capacity, high-growth business.

Marc Vila:
That’s enough of that.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay. Bye.

 

Show Notes

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is keeping up with all of the ‘tasks’ that can bog you down. These things may seem redundant or not as important as your daily duties, but avoiding them will absolutely cause trouble.

Review pricing

• Is everything still available?
• Has pricing gone up?
• SHOULD pricing have gone up?
• Is there an opportunity for a SALE or Discount?

Marketing check-in

• Promotions for next month or the NEXT month?
• Does your phone number work?
• Does your contact form work?
• New/replace products?
• Planning for events
• Website updates and changes
• Check your voice mail message
• Social media review (links in profiles, contact info, posts)

Financial Review

• Look back at the prior month
• Revenues Profits Expenses
• Lessons and changes
• Invoices and bills
• Taxes
• Fees/Dues

Sales Review

• How many new customers
• Lost customers
• Best sale of the month / worst sale of the month
• Most profitable orders

Legal Stuff

• Tax filings
• Certificates
• Licenses
• Order legal language
• HOA?

Clean Up!

• Make sure your work area is clean and safe
• Check your computer – are all the files in the right place?
• Gut check – how do YOU think you’re doing? How are you feeling about the business?

The purpose of a monthly check-in is not always because you didn’t properly adjust prices or didn’t pay bills. It’s so much more than that. It is creating a consistent habit of checking very important things often. It is also about making sure you didn’t forget details. Lastly, as you do this you will recognize patterns or oddities, which will help you catch something before it’s a problem (or catch something while there is opportunity!)

Transcript

Mark Stephenson:
Hey everyone, and welcome to episode 183, believe it or not, of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. This is Mark Stephenson.

Marc Vila:
And this is Marc Vila. And today, we’re here to talk about monthly business to-dos, so to-do lists every month.

Mark Stephenson:
Man, I run into this all the time and it’s something that we should have been doing for the past, I don’t know, decade for ColDesi and Colman and Company, just having this kind of checklist approach. And we’ve only recently adopted doing things like this. And so far, and I’m doing that in my side hustle business, and I know a bunch of business people that are just starting to get into this. And it’s just a matter of figuring out what you need to make sure of every month because when you don’t, terrible or hilarious things happen.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I would agree. Terrible or hilarious, or maybe worse, missed opportunities, the kind of thing where you want to kick yourself, be like, “Oh, if I would have just, then I could have” and it could be money-making opportunities or money-saving opportunities or just headache avoidance opportunities.

Mark Stephenson:
So these bullet points are going to be in the show notes. You are welcome to grab them if you’re on your desktop or later on, but let’s jump into it because this first one, we just did recently, started doing recently and I was shocked in the review pricing.

Marc Vila:
Oh, okay.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay.

Marc Vila:
So yeah, that’s a good point. So yeah, this is essentially, what we’re saying here is: just take a look at all of your pricing, your retail pricing, essentially, of everything that you sell on a regular basis and make any determinations, is the price wrong? Right?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And not just that, but is the price wrong for your business? And is the price incorrectly displayed? Right? So two different things. When we go through this past month, we went through our pricing for our Digital Heat FX product line and I think we identified 34 different places in the ColDesi, Colman and Company and Digital Heat FX universe where the price for one or more of the Digital Heat FX machines was displayed. So now, we know, because we were having those issues. We’d forget to add a special to one page that was on another, or there’d be some small change in the package or something like that and we’d forget. So now, we’ve literally got a spreadsheet that has each individual page. So when there’s a price change, our review pricing list starts with, “Okay, go through each one of these pages, make sure the price matches what we have decided the price should be or the price change needs to be.”

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It can be a challenge, especially if in your business, you work with flyers or brochures or anything that could be printed or posted online that is maybe a non-dynamic document, that can always be a challenge for you. So you want to have a list to make sure. Do you have multiple price sheets?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Do you work with schools and maybe you have a price sheet for each individual school? So you’ve got maybe half a dozen price sheets. Well, you just found out that the cost of one of the T-shirts that you sell has gone up. Now, maybe you have stock so it was okay while the month was going on, you were still profitable, but you know that come September or October, you’re going to have to re-up at the new higher price. Have you prepared and updated all of those? Do you have a list? So you can go ahead and get those out to your vendors or your customers, I should say.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, because what you want to avoid is getting a nice order from a school or a good customer and then realizing you’re losing a buck in order because you forgot to update the price list.

Marc Vila:
Right. And I think the opposite is true too, which we don’t think about it as much necessarily, but is there opportunity for a price to go down? Because, and I’m sitting on one of those opportunities now. Right?

Mark Stephenson:
Okay.

Marc Vila:
Actually, so Mark knows, I got a new chair recently and one of the things I noticed, I got an alert on my email and it said an item you’re looking at the price went down. And the price of this chair that I looked at six months ago went down 40%. So I started shopping chairs. Apparently, just in this day and age, there’s probably an abundance of chairs. I’m assuming a work from home 2020-

Mark Stephenson:
The famous office chair glut of 2022.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That everyone wanted a new chair to work from home in. And then the factories in China started making an infinite number of chairs. And then eventually, they ran out. So now, the price of chairs dropped. Well, if you’re an Amazon seller and you’re selling chairs like this and you haven’t checked pricing, you could still be running a chair that’s 30%, 40% higher than everybody else and potentially losing customers you didn’t even know you were losing.

Mark Stephenson:
But I think we should adapt that for our customers if you were selling custom chairs, customized chairs. All right. So I think review pricing is a great idea and it should be done at least every month. I mean, really, even if you think your prices haven’t changed, it’s probably not, that’s probably not true. Something has changed, you should take a look at the prices.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And I think a good way to do it is especially on standard products that you sell often, there’s probably not a lot of them.

Mark Stephenson:
Right.

Marc Vila:
So you go through, you take a look at invoices, you compare some data. You check if you got any emails or notifications or letters from your vendors, just double check those. Okay, yes. I remember getting something about this going up. Did I make any proper adjustments? Also, what I like about it, and one last thing, is it’s an opportunity for you to get that letter or notification or you go to shop online and you realize the price went up, that you don’t have to burn everything down and fight that right that moment because you’re going to buy supplies and make something custom and deliver it to a customer. That’s your plans for today. You don’t want to interrupt that with having to adjust pricing on all of your products and do it haphazardly in the middle of a busy day. So you know that on the second of next month, you’re scheduled to review that and “Hey, okay, everything’s fine for now. I’ll make through. And then I’m scheduled to look at this in a couple weeks.”

Mark Stephenson:
I think the second is a good idea because this is actually September 2nd that we’re recording this.

Marc Vila:
There we go. That’s why I said it actually, if why you picked up on that.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. That’s why you picked that number. So I agree with all that. And then the next thing to do, and it’s what we just talked about here when we’re looking at our websites to make sure that all the pricing is right, is that’s really part of a marketing check-in. You really need to take a look at your marketing universe, what you’re selling, how much it is, et cetera, at least once a month to make sure that you’re staying on track with your customers and your own business.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. The marketing check-in is something we’ve actually discussed many times on the podcast. We’ve talked about doing annual ones and regular ones and marketing planning and stuff like that. But a marketing check-in, I think to summarize it is, in my opinion at least, is everything that’s outwardly facing to your customers should have a degree of check-in or check-up once a month.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to read every paragraph of every social media post and every flyer you have, but you should have a running thought process of are these things still relevant? Is there anything that has changed recently? And if you have a monthly check-in scheduled, if you notice that again, example, you get an email, “These items are on sale. They’re discontinued, coming soon.” You don’t have to tackle it then, but you know that you sell that hat. So potentially, what you do is you add it to your list, your marketing check-in, and then you put on there “I’m probably going to want to take that hat off of my website because it’s discontinued.”

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, or you’re going to take advantage of any kind of discounted prices from that vendor and have a closeout sale.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Mark Stephenson:
So buy them all and have a sale for the coming month.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Mark Stephenson:
Because that’s the other thing to look at, is to figure out, are you going to engage in any promotions next month? What are the sales going to be? That’s now on ColDesi’s list and why we put together that list of the 34 pages for Digital Heat FX is we need to find out not just what changes we have to make, but we talk to our vendors to see if there’s a financing special that they’ve got, or maybe one of our vendors has given us more supplies that we can give away with our units, or maybe we’ve negotiated some kind of a deal with the freight company so we can offer free freight on more things. You really need to take a look for a minute at least, and see if there’s anything that you want to change for the season or for the month coming up.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s great. And sometimes, what’s so hard about this is guys, you’re telling me obvious stuff. Right? I mean, somebody said, “This is obvious stuff. What am I getting out of this?” I’m telling you that Mark and I both know this because we both work, have worked over our entire careers independently with small business owners to help them out. How many times have you gone to somebody’s website and filled out a form and they don’t even get it?

Mark Stephenson:
70% of the time.

Marc Vila:
Right, or I’m just saying-

Mark Stephenson:
But wait, I’m not making up that number. It’s literally 70% of the time.

Marc Vila:
And I had somebody that I was talking to recently and I said, I think it’s super cool that you do this. “Oh, no. Oh, actually, we don’t do that anymore.” “Oh, okay.” He’s like, “Yeah, I haven’t done it for a year, at least. Not since, I don’t think we’ve done that since 2019.” By the way, if you’re listening to this in the future, it’s 2022.

Mark Stephenson:
Right. Actually, even if you’re not. If you’re listening to this in the past, it’s also 2022.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. If you’re listening to this in the past, 2020 is a weird time.

Mark Stephenson:
Just skip it.

Marc Vila:
But anyway, I’m not even sure where I was going, Mark.

Mark Stephenson:
No, neither am I, but I will say that-

Marc Vila:
No, I do know.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay.

Marc Vila:
So this person said, “I haven’t even sold that in a couple years. I don’t even do that in a couple years.” And I said, “You know it’s right on the front of your website. It’s on the homepage. It’s in the main banner.” And they’re like, “Oh, you know what? I just really don’t go to the homepage often. I go to other pages and I share these posts and blogs and stuff, so I’m all over the website every day, but I’m not really on the homepage hardly ever. I didn’t even think about.”

Mark Stephenson:
Right. And that’s that, I mean, really. And like I said, I think I mentioned, we just put together this list of the 34 pages where Digital Heat FX pricing lives, officially. We would always go through all of the websites, but we really never had this page, this page, this page and this page. And we’ve been selling Digital Heat FX for eight years, something like that. I mean, it’s been a long time, but there are other things in just checking your website for updates and changes and checking for what promotions that you want to run next month, if the pricing needs to be changed. I also want you to really just quickly make sure that the phone number on your website is correct and that it works, that your contact form works, like Marc Vila mentioned, and that any links that you’ve got to social media because one thing I also found is people will develop their websites from a template and it will have 57 social media links at the bottom to services that no one actually ever goes to.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. There’s still a vine link down there.

Mark Stephenson:
Blog spot, no one knows what that is.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
And if I go and click on those, it takes me to spam pages or it takes me somewhere I don’t need to go. So you should go through all those social media links and review those too.

Marc Vila:
I can’t tell you how often, that what an interesting part about this I guess is so often, we go to larger company websites in general, right? We’re going to Lowe’s website and Walmart’s website and Target and CVS and Walgreens and we go to all these websites that have massive teams of people that monitor and do things with the website. I mean, the teams are so big. I may have mentioned this before in the podcast, a friend of mine, his job for a large company website was he would get a report from somebody, and then he would make sure the ticket was entered in correctly and all the links were right in there, and it was spelled right and it made sense. And then he would make sure that it was in the queue properly. So he was a bit of that office space. So it’s like “So you deliver it directly to the engineers?” “No, I don’t deliver it.” So that’s what he did.

Mark Stephenson:
Now, I want to hire that guy. It sounds very useful.

Marc Vila:
And by the way, I think it was a six-figure job, and he was amongst the team. Now, the reason I bring that up is because you go to Target all the time and you’re never going to see on the top of Target’s website “On the 4th of July sale” still showing up in August.

Mark Stephenson:
Right. True.

Marc Vila:
Because they have a whole team of people who does this. But when you end up on small business websites and small business, I mean, meaning you don’t have a dedicated team of people who just look at the website all the time.

Mark Stephenson:
Right.

Marc Vila:
Small to medium-sized businesses, all the time, there’s stuff mentioning “We’re closed for New Year’s Eve” and it’s March. I mean, I just see this stuff always.

Mark Stephenson:
And I’m actually adding right now to our little bullet points. Check your phone message.

Marc Vila:
Oh, yeah. Voicemail message, email auto-replies. I got an email auto-reply from a business not too long ago when I opened up a support ticket, that was a three-month old thing about how an update to their software was coming in January. And I was like, “It’s like April.” So I replied back and I said, “If the software update didn’t come out yet…” And that was like, there was already three updates since then.

Mark Stephenson:
I would’ve just been “How’d that go?”

Marc Vila:
Yeah, how’d that go? So point being, I know this is all obvious, but you’re going to miss it if you don’t pay attention to it. So you should pay attention to everything we’re saying here, and you should write some of this down and put it on a calendar event and do it. Otherwise, the obvious things are what get past you.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And don’t forget, just the last bullet on this marketing check-in is to actually go through your social media profiles as well. If you have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, Instagram, if you’ve got TikTok, if you’ve got LinkedIn, even if you don’t use them regularly, you should go through once a month, just see if you’ve been spammed. Make sure all the information is correct, make sure you’ve got a picture, that the headline’s still appropriate. Even make any little changes that you want to. Tell them you’re now offering X, Y, Z, or there’s a promotion coming this month.

Marc Vila:
And some people will, or not some people, I mean, whatever you want to call it. Some people will put up a social post with the intention of not leaving it up forever, maybe it’s like, oh, all new or a product is on sale or I want to announce a temporary huge price break because of X, Y, Z. And then you post that on there, it’d be like “I just want to have this up for a week for anybody who might see it, but I don’t want to show it forever because I don’t want anybody know in the future I ever sold it for that price.”

And then you forget and it’s up there and you only post twice a month, so it’s only six things down, and December comes and somebody says, “Hey, I saw you had that T-shirt on sale for this price. I’d love to get that price.” Well, now the price has gone up twice and you sold it on a clearance sale for some other thing and you can’t offer that. So it’s another thing, it’s a great thing to go to your social media and do a little mini scroll. If somebody came here, what would they see in five seconds of scrolling?

Mark Stephenson:
That’s great. That’s a great tip.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And make sure that you’re still happy with that. And if you’re not, fix it.

Mark Stephenson:
So the next one is one that’s also very close to my heart because I’ve actually been doing this for years, and that’s doing a financial review. And I’d suggest you do it for your business and how that relates to your personal finances as well, especially if it’s just you or you’ve just got one employee, is to take a look back at the prior month and look at your revenues, your profits and your expenses. And by look at it, I mean, look at it, figure out how much it is if you can’t pull it easily. Is there anything unusual about it? Did you get a particular high bill you don’t recognize?

Did you check your credit card statement and see if one of your people subscribed to you to something, or if there’s something that you’re subscribed to that you no longer need? Maybe it’s a software, maybe you got overcharged for supplies or printing or something like that, doesn’t match your PO. Really just digging down and looking at this picture of “This is how much I made, this is how much I spent. Here’s my profits” with all the details in between is really vital to your ongoing business health.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And it’s one of those things that a really good habit of this is going to help you catch stuff before it’s too late or before it’s frustrating or annoying, and all different little types of things can happen in that financial review. You can realize that in your Square or Stripe app, you didn’t have it default to collect tax. And then you weren’t collecting your little 6%, 7%, 8% tax that you needed to, and you’ve lost out on that money now because the government still wants it. Also, in that financial thing, as we wrote down fees and dues and monthly fees and things like that, an interesting thing about this is you may be a member of the Chamber of Commerce and there’s an annual fee, and you like being a member, assuming. Then did you get an email about to pay that? Did you put that email aside because you’re going to pay it later because you’re about to walk out the door? And how do you know to check up on that stuff if you don’t have the scheduled review? And then next thing you know-

Mark Stephenson:
Or maybe you noticed that it was auto debited and you never go and you don’t want to be a member anymore but you just spent $300, $600 on an annual membership again.

Marc Vila:
Yep.

Mark Stephenson:
So I think that’s really important. And of course taxes, super important. You might want to get on the phone if you’re at this level with your accountant or your CPA, just talk over taxes. Did you pay your payroll taxes? Do you owe social security? I mean, do you owe all of those federal taxes that come along with owning your own business? Is there any licenses that you skipped? I know we’re going to get into that later, but it really is part of the financial review to see if you’re paying all your bills. It’s one of them.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Paying the bills, money is coming in. Also, overdue invoices is something that lingers so often. And side note on that, I mean, especially when you’re selling a tangible good, I wouldn’t put any money into anything unless you’ve got some money upfront, especially on a tangible good. That’s a complete side note but okay, you have a potential client and they wanted you to mess with something on the logo. And you said, “You know what? This is probably going to take me 15 minutes and I’ll do a good faith” type of thing. And you throw 15. I mean, I’m not going to tell you don’t do that. I think I do that.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
But “Oh, yeah. I’ll pay you tomorrow. Just get started. I’m in a rush.”

Mark Stephenson:
Right.

Marc Vila:
Don’t order those shirts because I’m telling you, the person who’s in a rush, who can’t pay you today to get order those shirts, is not going to pay you tomorrow.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes, because-

Marc Vila:
100% chance of that.

Mark Stephenson:
Right, because unless you’re selling $20,000 worth of stuff.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
They’ve got a credit card that has $200 on it that they could give you right now.

Marc Vila:
Immediately. “I’m driving.” “Okay, pull over a quick sec. Where are you? Are you on the Autobahn going 100 miles per hour with no place to pull over?” Like, “Oh, you’re stuck in traffic? Yeah, pull into that gas station parking lot real quick.” I mean, don’t let excuses on, don’t let people bog you with excuses because they’re going to try to manipulate you, those people who would do that. And next thing you know, you’ve got 100 shirts that you’ve made and somebody who’s still going to pay you tomorrow.

Mark Stephenson:
And the other reason why you want to look at this is because it’s super hard to collect on an old invoice. So for example, if you send out an invoice to a customer that maybe they put a deposit, they just owe the rest and they didn’t pay within the 15 days or 30 days. And you check and look, you send them a bill, you just send them a reminder email and they didn’t pay again. If you don’t see that until the next month, now, you’ve got something two months old. The person doesn’t even want to pay for it anymore. They may not remember the details of the order. It’s just there’s no motivation. You’ve really got to tighten that up. Part of your financial review, make sure no one owes you any money.

Marc Vila:
Yep.

Mark Stephenson:
And actively collect the money.

Marc Vila:
And it’s much easier to collect two weeks later than it is two months later.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes. Agreed.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Well, good. So I think a financial review is important. There’s a million other things we could talk about in there. I personally recommend you use software, something like FreshBooks or QuickBooks or something like that, something that will easily track it. Most of the online stuff now, I think FreshBooks is something silly, like $7 a month for the starter package. And it does all this smart stuff. Not that I’m advertising them specifically, but I’ve used them and you can auto-set stuff to clients. So just your quick reviews are very easy.

So I’m going to recommend getting off those Excel spreadsheets and getting onto some software that will be a little smarter, and include some email reminders, have colors of things that are paid and not paid automatically and stuff like that. And maybe it even syncs with your credit card software, it’ll make your financial reviews much easier. And if you’re really bad at financial reviews, it’s easy to give an accountant or somebody who is good at that stuff permission into one of those pieces of software to be a viewer or something like that so you can have somebody review that stuff for you and let you know if there’s a problem.

Mark Stephenson:
So that brings us to doing your sales review, which I like that it’s separate from your financial review. I mean, you should be looking at what your numbers were last month versus this month, last year, make sure you’re either growing in revenues or profits or you’re at a comfortable level and you’re happy with your current performance. And the way that sales review should break down is you should know how many customers you’ve got, how many new ones came into your business. And this will give you the early signs, like at ColDesi, we very closely track how many people made inquiries about our equipment. So we track that on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis so we can see our new potential customer trends over time. So you should be doing the same kind of thing. Even if it’s one or two a month or five a month, you should know.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. I think another cool thing about the sales stuff is it’s an opportunity to get excited about stuff that happened. Just looking at that money that came in again and being like, oh man, I remember that lady just called me up out of the blue because I went to a lunch party of some sorts, an event, and I said, “Hey, I do custom mugs.” And then I got a phone call the next day, that was so cool. That reminds me. I should probably do more stuff like that.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
I think that’s very cool.

Mark Stephenson:
Actually, what they’re probably thinking about themselves is “I remember when I listened to the podcast, the CAS Podcast, about networking and how to approach people, and I did that. Then a lady called and ordered custom mugs.” Okay, so that’s the good news, is how many new customers you got and think about how you got them. And like Marc said, whether or not you want to do more of that. Also, take a look at any customers that you may have lost.

Marc Vila:
That’s good.

Mark Stephenson:
And I’m going to break that down into two categories. Those are deals that you had expected and quoted on that did not close. So I feel like that’s a little personal review. If you’d expected to get two orders from a local high school and they did not come in, then you should know why, because it may be a lost customer. You may have lost that business or there may be something you can do to close that order now.

Marc Vila:
I think that that’s a really good part of the monthly review, especially as you are, if you’re a business that’s still of the size where you can individually review orders like that to find out why you lost deals. You can’t win them all, and that’s okay. And you should be happy to only win the deals that are the best for your business. But if you lost a deal because of pricing and you realize that that low price is just something that you reasonably won’t work with, then that’s okay. And you then look at that profile of customer and you realize maybe that’s not the right type of customer. If you lost a deal because you didn’t follow up because you forgot to follow up via email, and makes a case for having a CRM or a reminder system to remind you to follow up.

Mark Stephenson:
I mean, honestly, feel free to beat yourself up a little bit about that.

Marc Vila:
If you didn’t follow up, yeah. That’s the worst.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. If you didn’t follow up and there’s a deal out there that you didn’t get because you forgot, then you should reexamine your whole life.

Marc Vila:
What you should do is you should say how possibly can other businesses remember to follow up? How do you remember everything? And then you don’t remember everything. You have software or tools that help you remember, like a CRM, and we have episodes about CRM, but a customer relation management software. And that is something that you can email a customer a quote and then set yourself a reminder in that software to remind you in 48 hours to ask if they have any questions or whatever it might be.

Mark Stephenson:
Absolutely. I love that.

Marc Vila:
Yep. That’s a great part of the sales review, is understanding that any loss deals in general, why you lost them. And then if you’re okay with the loss or not. Like I mentioned, if the price was too low, well then I’m not going to sell for that price. That’s okay. I forgot to follow up with the customer. Shame on me.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, there you go. So I think also, to take a more global look and figure out when we’ve talked about this before for a year, an annual recap is just take a quick look and write down what your best sale of the month was and your worst sale. So your best sale might be measured in a couple of different ways, could be the one that you made the most amount of money on in profit, could be the one that was the most profitable, which means maybe you sold five shirts and you made as much money as you would normally sell 10 or 20 shirts.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
Right? Or it could just be you enjoyed the heck out of it.

Marc Vila:
It was fun.

Mark Stephenson:
It was a multimedia thing that you were really excited about doing. You had to do it, so that’s the best sale of the month.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s something that you would hang up on the wall to show of future customers. Another best sale of the month could be you’ve got a really small order, but for a customer with huge potential.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, I like that.

Marc Vila:
Like I only did five shirts, but it’s for the national such and such society, which I know has 10,000 members and 20 chapters, and I’m in now. How am I going to advertise to that group so I can get deeper into that group later? So that’s another potential best sale of the month. Those are really opportunities for growth.

Mark Stephenson:
I love that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And the worst also could be just terrible customers.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. It could be a terrible… it could be an unprofitable job, somebody you hated talking to on the phone.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the best things you could do as a business owner is not do business with jerks. You have that opportunity.

Mark Stephenson:
If you are in an owner ownership position, then you can definitely do that. And I encourage you to do that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I think that’s one of the best things.

Mark Stephenson:
Unfortunately, if you’re not in an owner position, like some podcasters I know, you’re just not allowed. You’re just not allowed.

Marc Vila:
No, it’s true though. And all of it, I think that the best part about if you’re in an owner position or is this best and worst sale of the month, you get to define all that based on your goals and dreams. And I think that that’s the kind of thing that gives me no chills type of stuff, is like gosh, you get to decide what the best sale of the month is. If you’re profit-driven, it’s that. If you’re happiness-driven, it’s that. Whatever it is, so I think that that’s super cool.

Mark Stephenson:
Cool. So we should probably revisit the legal stuff again.

Marc Vila:
Yes. Legal stuff, just being the last one on the list. I just define the stuff as the stuff that can get your business shut down, the stuff that can prevent you from doing business in the future, the stuff that can cause you to have to pay fines or being able to stop you from growing or doing something that you want. So tax filings, certificates, licenses. What else?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. So I think that you need to make sure that you have your local business license, I mean, the basics for setup because a lot of people will get started and they’ll get a little bit busy and it’ll just fall by the wayside. You probably need to pay sales tax every month, you need to-

Marc Vila:
Or every quarter, or you have to determine what your State and local rules are, right?

Mark Stephenson:
Yes. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
So you figure that out or have somebody figure it out for you and make it a part of either your monthly review or your quarterly review, however it has to be done. But if you don’t have somebody doing it for you, then you need to make sure that you’re reminding yourself somehow. And if you’re not paying attention to things on a regular basis, you’re going to get lost in it.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I’d also maybe, and I’m stretching here to say that you have to do this every month, but if you write up a quote or if you have an order that people fill out online, just make sure that all the language in it is legally appropriate and hasn’t changed. So if your quote says net 30, make sure that that’s what you mean. Make sure that you’re not violating any local ordinances or laws, especially if you are a… I’m going to say this and it’s going to make people angry. If you’re a traditional screen printer that uses traditional screen printing ink, you need to make sure that all of your legal stuff with, am I really allowed to do this in my city or county or location? Am I disposing of all this stuff properly? Because in the beginning, when I wasn’t using much, it was no big deal to put it in my garbage can, but now, I’m filling up two garbage cans a week out of the back of my house. Someone is going to notice. So whatever business you’re in, just make sure that you’ve got all your legal stuff tight.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, and that stuff can be a little tricky too. I mean, mentioning the chemical stuff. How do you know if your city or county or State has changed some environmental laws?

Mark Stephenson:
Right.

Marc Vila:
I’m not asking you necessarily, but it’s not an easy answer to say. How would I know? I’m not sure. So if you have an attorney that you work with or there’s a website you can go to, or if there’s a hotline that you can call for the State, you can ask questions like that. And again, maybe monthly is too much for something like that, but in regards to your legal stuff and your monthly check and maybe every quarter or every six months on that particular event, hopefully, you’re putting this stuff in a calendar you’re putting. Check for any changes in laws in regards to the type of business I do.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
And that-

Mark Stephenson:
Actually, I think maybe on a monthly basis, you just decide that you’re going to think hard about the legal stuff. You’re going to pay attention. You’re going to say-

Marc Vila:
And just analyze it a bit. Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
Taxes, licenses, anything changed, I’m good. All my quote language, my order language is all good. I’ve got terms and conditions on my website. All that is still taken care of. We’re good.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Good. And I think that that covers everything. I mean, Mark put a note in here, no homeowners associations. Do you run a business from your home? If you do, be sure you’re not doing anything that’s in violation because it would suck to get a letter in the mail and just be like, what am I going to do?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. “Hey, Marc Vila. I noticed when I was driving by your house, you had the garage open and there was commercial manufacturing equipment, which is what apparel decoration equipment is sometimes categorized and that’s against our HOA regulations. You have 72 hours to shut that down.”

Marc Vila:
Yeah, which is why I recommend in front of your house, you put a series of flames that shoot up and hide your garage. That’s a way you can open the garage and nobody can see in beyond the flame wall.

Mark Stephenson:
I like that.

Marc Vila:
I mean, that actually, then my HOA flame walls are approved. I just don’t know about yours, so check. But you are going to have neighbors like that, that are just ruiners. They’re the same type of people who are jerk customers probably, but-

Mark Stephenson:
Probably.

Marc Vila:
And in all seriousness, it is important to just understand and know those things and know where you’re sitting so you don’t have any surprises.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep.

Marc Vila:
There’s something we don’t have on the list that I think is just worth a brief thing. Cleanup.

Mark Stephenson:
Oh, interesting.

Marc Vila:
Go through your shop, your room. If you have a full business or a full warehouse or you just have a single room that you’re working out of, whatever it is, sweep, mop, pickup, scrape, paint stuff off the floor on empty buckets, whatever it might be. Just do a quick little monthly cleanup. Also, electronic cleanups are good, too. Empty that downloads folder, move all the invoices to the proper places, go into your accounting software. The cleanup is a part of the accounting stuff too. Just general cleanup is good, electronically, physically, and then mentally too. Probably not a bad idea to meditate on a little bit of your ideas and dump out the stuff in your head that’s driving you nuts and take in the new thoughts or energy that are going to make you strive to do something great next month.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I love it.

Marc Vila:
A gut check.

Mark Stephenson:
I’m writing things down.

Marc Vila:
Great. So all this stuff is going to be in the show notes on customapparelstartups.com. Mark’s typing some of the things I’ve added in right now. So if you’re listening to this and you want to see a list like this, go to the podcast website and you can find episode 183 and you’ll see all these notes and all the other episodes that we’ve got on approximately 180 plus other topics that you might find interesting for your business and a bunch of notes on those topics as well. So definitely buzz through if this is your first episode, you’ve listened through. Thank you. I think we’ve got a bunch of great stuff out there. And the really old stuff’s probably potato quality because it’s seven years old or something, but it’s still pretty good content.

Mark Stephenson:
It really is. We still refer to those early-

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I’ve thought about us going through some of those old episodes and doing redos.

Mark Stephenson:
Of course, it wasn’t video. We were just holding up pieces of paper in front of the camera with our notes. There was no audio. We used a flip chart, like when you’re doing a presentation.

Marc Vila:
All the math was abacus.

Mark Stephenson:
There you go.

Marc Vila:
So well, great. The purpose and the final note we put here, the purpose of the monthly check-up is not always just pricing or paying bills, but that gut check is important. And it’s really though, I think from a highest level, it’s creating consistent habit of checking all of the important things on a regular basis, making sure you don’t forget details, making sure you don’t misplace thoughts, ideas and things you wanted to do. And what happens is humans in general, people with the human brain, you will recognize patterns and oddities without actually saying you’re trying to look for them. It’s just something that we can do. So if you’re looking every month at all of these things, things will stand out as a good pattern, a bad pattern or an anomaly. And then you get to address that because you’re used to looking at this stuff, which is going to put you ahead of all the people who don’t do that and let it get away until it’s too late or it becomes a big mess.

Mark Stephenson:
I agree. And I have a final challenge for everyone.

Marc Vila:
Okay. I’m ready.

Mark Stephenson:
Is to go through at least 20 episodes of the CAS Podcast and look at the wall behind Marc Vila.

Marc Vila:
Okay.

Mark Stephenson:
And let us know if you notice any changes. That is your goal for noticing anomalies.

Marc Vila:
Have you noticed any changes?

Mark Stephenson:
I won’t say because I really just want people to listen to 20 episodes of the podcast and pay close attention.

Marc Vila:
Now, I’m very curious.

Mark Stephenson:
There may not have been. All right. Anyway, that was great, Marc. Thanks for this episode number 183. I thought it’s really useful. Hope you all got something out of it.

Marc Vila:
Absolutely. If you have any ideas for episodes or something you’d like us to cover that we haven’t or revisit, please reach out to us and let us know and we’ll turn it into something.

Mark Stephenson:
Sounds good. You guys have a great business.