Episode 179 | Keeping it SMALL - Steps to Create the Business YOU Want

hey everyone and welcome to a very rare episode of the custom apparel starburst podcast this is mark stevenson and this is mark villa and today we're going to talk about keeping your business small and profitable that's not even that's not even the news the news is that we're going to try to keep this episode 30 minutes that's the that's the challenge i've got a timer i just hit all right it's wonderful we're going to see how that goes but wonderful so i i'm getting over um being sick i'm on like day five um i spent 80 bucks yesterday to have somebody tell me i have the common cold that's exciting um so a short episode will be good because that's about as long as my voice will probably last but i think this is a great little topic that we have here and uh we should it is relatively a simple concept but um mark why don't you take us away with your inspiration yeah so uh we've gone through half a dozen different titles uh getting ready for this episode but um basically it's you know keeping your keeping your business small and profitable you know when you um when i think about you know a side hustle that i'm involved in that my friends are you know a lot of us aren't really looking for you know we don't want a two million dollar business or a five million dollar business cool if it happens but that's not really the goal and we know that a lot of you are in the same in the same boat you know for example um we're set we're asking a few uh customers to do some testimonial videos for us and so far i've talked to uh three uh nice folks great customers and uh two of them we have to do this after five because they've got a day job or we've got to do it on the weekend and we figure you're probably just like that yeah and it's it's interesting because the idea of um of a business or owning a business is very different for all different types of people you know so for some folks it's well why are you going to start a business if you're not going to try to make it as big and profitable as you can yeah right and and other folks that that concept is nightmare you know their idea of owning a business is them by themselves literally alone you know right with no other help um or minimal help and then and then every single thing in between that and they're all the right way to do business um so i think it's a matter of of you know figuring out if if you're this type of a person if you would like to keep your business small in size whether it's um just by yourself or it's just uh you know uh you and your spouse or it's you and your family or you and three friends whatever it might be um if that's the size that you want to be and you want to kind of keep it at that size that's the goal of this podcast while also maximizing profits making the most money you can out of it and getting the most out of that small business yeah i i like that like what you've got here and that's first of all you know of course it's always best to write this stuff down um so you know it's really all about is what is your dream what's your goal for for your for your business or your side hustle and it doesn't even have to be a dream i'm doing air co air quotes right now but it doesn't have to be a dream your dream could be to go on a vacation every year or your dream could be to buy a second home or pay off your current house or put in a pool you know and your business could be a means to an end you know but you really um you really want to define those goals so you can work towards them instead of find yourself a year later in a business that you don't want yeah and i know that that's been the case for a few friends of mine over the years and uh one in particular i can think of he started something 15 years ago and it grew and it was going pretty well and he was happy you know money was in the bank you know and stuff like that and then all of a sudden he was just called me up one day and he's just like dude i hate everything that i do and i was like why you know and he's like i've i'm managing employees i don't want to do that i'm managing this i don't want to do that i'm like i'm i'm fighting this i don't want to fight that he's like when i started this he's like i liked it because it was kind of me and my best friend roommate at the time it was our business and that's we were having fun every day and he's like i've lost all of that and um so he reset kind of with a new and different business knowing that the goal was to kind of keep it that way and yeah you got to you got to plan for that i think that's a common theme because you know i listen to a lot of uh podcasts and a lot of videos about uh you know online courses and starting an online course and things like that starting a consulting business and and almost universally all of those people that ended up doing courses online they started with their own marketing practice and just hated it they you know within within like a year as soon as they got past just a few customers that they really like they ended up hating the business so again they pivoted to something else so um if you're looking at or if you're already in the custom apparel business let's see if we can figure out you know how to establish your goals and how to um plan your business so you don't end up hating it yeah i know um i sold customer apparel equipment for a long time and the dream was it's very it's a very small amount of dreams that people have in this business um and especially when i'm talking about mom and pop small business style folks right there are businesses there's businesses out there that are huge and they're adding custom apparel to a really large business or they want to grow that size but but when we're talking on the small business side which is probably who's listening now since they realize what the topic of the podcast is um it's always um i'd like to have a little more money i'd like to quit my day job i'd like to have a business to pass on to my kids um i became an electrician and you know i just don't really like that my knees aren't what they used to be crawling in addicts you know all these things so if that's kind of why you started this you know you remember that and uh and then figure out what your goal is you know do you want to make 40 000 in profit a year as a side hustle right do you want this to be a family business that profits a quarter million dollars a year and that's your income 200. now notice notice that no notice that mark villa's um making a distinction between sales and profits okay so you know it's it's how much money do you want to make in your bank account not how much revenues that you want right not not the sales dollars you know you've got a you've got to start with um yeah i want an extra forty thousand dollars in my bank account every year where i want two thousand dollars a month extra in my bank account so you can start to do the math and okay how much how many shirts do i have to sell you know at what price to get to those amounts yeah and and i think that and this is why i like saying the word profit in here is because this is gonna there's other goals tied to what the dream of the business is right so in the one example i said you want a family business that profits 250 000 a year right why because um uh you and your family can live off that very nicely it's a good amount of money to be bringing in for the lifestyle you want to live and that allows you to grow and you can also um you can grow that with inflation over time slowly and and you know 250 to 260 you know and you're kind of just going up over time but your your family and your life is living that way um it also might be a dollar amount that you want to retire like you're you know you are a fi you know you're a fireman fire woman and you make a certain amount of money and your retirement comes at a certain point in time and you're going to want to retire but still make money and you like the creative outlet of the t-shirt business you think that apparel is just very interesting so you say i need to make seventy five thousand dollars a year in profit so when i retire i have that as my new income so there's i like that just uh just to set the record straight it's firefighter fighter firefighter that that's it i wish that non-gender specific fire fighting individuals um so but yeah you're right i like what you said the um you know the goal for the family business i one of the things that i talk to people a lot about recently is just their goal is replacement income and they don't say it like that what they say is i'm a nurse i'm exhausted i want to do something different i want to build this business up to replace my job as an electrician you know or my job as an accountant or something like that actually talk to an accountant just the other day oh yeah yeah say i hate i hate the work i want to buy an embroidery machine yeah well i mean and and that's what these um uh young young to mid to even older parts of life when you're in your say 30s 40s and 50s which a lot of folks listening are probably you know 30 40 50 is they went to school for accounting because their parents or uncle was an accountant or they knew that the um the money in accounting was good when they went to school because they wanted to make good money and they just realized that they didn't they weren't passionate about it yeah some accountants are passionate about numbers you know others did it because it was the job and now you'd like to do something you're passionate about so um what you don't want is you don't want the business to get to a point where you become an accountant again you're just account you're just counting different things right you want to own a t-shirt business where you make shirts right um so so that's the the first thing just define the dream write it down um set certain goals you know i think goal setting is always in almost every podcast you know we we bring that up but it's because every single book i've read podcast i've listened to no matter who it is they pretty much always say you should have some goals yeah and this is this will be intentional you have to do you're intending to have a certain size business that supports your lifestyle or your goals and you have to have that lifestyle or goals defined um so let's jump into some of these uh because you've you've got some great stuff in here just to kind of bracket your business some of it you know supports it up to a certain level how do i get to 40 000 in profit and somebody says like how do i stay there how do i optimize your business to hit those goals specifically and do it as efficiently as possible well the next thing on the list after this is um is tracking your time and this is it's hard to do in a way because it you know you have to think about it and you have to pay attention and you can get lost in the day but how much time do you spend talking to customers delivering orders running production doing maintenance doing accounting you know you've got to know how much time all of this took so if you're working uh side hustle and you're doing this uh 10 hours a week right or you're doing it full time and it's 40 hours a week whatever it is at the end of the month um you've reached a certain amount of income revenue profit um how much time did you spend doing all of those things to get to that number yeah and i i think i think this is really important i just read um a little blurb in one of the many um business books that i happen to be reading right now um was about uh you know the um in the in the 80s the japanese manufacturing production methods were super efficient and it started to be imported into the united states because they could make cars three times faster than we could and they did that not because they had more people on the assembly line or even better assembly lines what they had was every single workspace and action was optimized for the best performance so they weren't reaching extra places for tools they were never leaving the line to go get something you know i mean like everything was designed for each individual person to do their best and it resulted in that kind of um and that kind of improvement so you've got an opportunity here if you track your time if you spend your time like okay these are specifically the things that i do in the three hours i have after work or every saturday morning or sunday morning or whatever you're doing these are specific things i have to do talk to customers i'm delivering orders i'm running production i'm maintaining equipment i'm doing accounting you need to know when you're doing all these things so you can and how long they take so you can address each one individually make it easier and more efficient so you can make more money every day or every hour with the time that you've got right all right and um one of the things with one of the things i would recommend to do in regards to seeing how this works is um watch some um watch some gordon ramsay stuff on tv oh yeah that's watch yeah watch some hell's kitchen if you haven't already and watch some kitchen nightmares and i think what the two lessons you're going to learn on both of these things is when you watch hell's kitchen you're going to look at the kitchen that they run and they don't talk about this on the show but you'll notice it yeah is there's the pasta station and if you look at the station they've got the right pots clean right there they've got the right type of stuff the pasta is in the fridge underneath there you know like they're not running across all the i mean they'll dramatize and show some of that but if you really pay attention to the snippets they're that little space is organized it's efficient so they can it only takes how much pasta two minutes you know right ready to go and in um kitchen nightmares you'll see the same thing there'll be a restaurant with five orders five tables that not a single quinoa has gone out they can't keep up and then you go and then they show on the back and you just see you know people running everywhere you've got somebody prepping uh cutting up chicken when it should have been done hours ago things like that so uh uh when you've got a business with say three people and you're we're gonna all work full-time you know there's a that's 120 hours of work a week is that right yep so if you're all working 40 hours so if you have to track where all 120 of those hours when so you can find efficient spots or maybe maybe even more importantly you've got four hours a night you know after your regular day job and it's just you yeah you know if you spend and you know you do because i do you spend the first 45 minutes just trying to find all your stuff you know you're rolling the embroidery machine out you're trying to find the order that you're supposed to be working on you can't find the digitized the file digitized you know you you can't lay hands on the blanks like this is a big deal this is going to be you're going to find this is a significant amount of time and if you're going to meet that 40 000 goal or that 250 000 goal or that quit your job goal like you've got to be able to come home after work maybe have dinner kiss the kids walk into your production area and just start making stuff you know you don't have time to mess around if you're working if you're looking to work 12 hours a week on a side hustle after work in between you know between work and such um that's it you know if you waste 20 minutes a day 30 minutes a day yeah you know that's two three of those hours you're talking you could be wasting 15 20 of your time just kind of being all over the place not being organized um or just like um one of the things that i find and i've done this too is i'll i'll fiddle with something for a while like i'll fiddle with a spreadsheet for a while or a piece of art yeah or whatever just fiddle with it fiddle with it fiddle with it and and earlier today i think we ran into this that called so we were um we're talking about artwork for a trade show coming up right right and yes yesterday there was like 30 minutes worth of comments from four or five people and what we should do and then again this morning there was a bunch of comments and i i looked at it and i was like we've got nowhere we've done nothing we're all fiddling with an idea so i said one two three here's the ideas here's what we're gonna do and then someone came in and said well i have this idea too okay great would you run with that idea then you know let's just move forward yeah otherwise you'll just fiddle fiddle and you're yeah yeah choosing artwork for the rest of our lives choosing artwork for the rest of your life and then what happens is you just never actually you never will reach your goal because in order to breach and surpass your goals you've got to actually take the time that you're planning on using and use it to get towards the goal rather than just pushing a button on and off over and over again you know what i'm going to um i think we should move on because time is burning i never realized how much we yammer on you should really try to be more efficient good um i like i like what you said here next the next thing that we're going to talk about is um don't be cheap and that's not just a self-serving statement right it's uh oh no it's take out the trash don't be cheap is next but we can it doesn't have to be in that order okay let's do don't be cheap then don't i feel very strongly about good don't be cheap i do too because we say this all the time specifically this example don't waste time shopping around to save money on thread it's dumb don't obsess about how much your replacement toner is for your white toner printer if you're making four thousand dollars a month in profit on t-shirts um do the maintenance don't skip don't skimp um buy the better heat press up front you know because it will save you time down the road even though it may cost a little bit if it not only you've got a pay for software if it helps don't try to don't trip over pennies don't trip over pennies to save dollars something like that don't trip over dollars to save pennies we did a podcast on don't trip over pennies we did like five i've never done before i've never they're pretty low to the ground no but you know what i i i just i slide my feet a lot so i do yeah i do but i've stopped because i listened to our episode from like five years ago just around the house yeah so what will happen is um we had uh well if somebody say like um well can't i uh open up the wasting container for my rolling bn20 and take a sponge out and wring it out and clean it really good and then dry it and put it back in and then put it back and glue it shut and then put it back in my machine can i just do that and i would say like i mean i guess like roland doesn't say to do that so i'm not going to advocate for that but i mean in theory it does it sounds like you could but how much time you're gonna spend in the sink and drying and getting ink all over your hands and on the floor cleaning it up you know gluing it shut making sure it's shut it doesn't fit in right because you didn't glue it right so you got to fix it you're like you spent to save like 30 40 bucks yeah you know and and it goes back to the time thing you you spend an hour fiddling to save 30 dollars when when you've got a production run waiting to happen you've got your printers waiting to print money yeah and instead you know you're looking to save 30 bucks that's a good way to look at it yeah and i understand that part of being in business and doing well is obviously not wasting money too right so you don't want to just you know you don't want to just throw caution to the wind everywhere but there is a healthy balance and trying to save 50 cents on a cone of thread um is like where is that going to get you and the time it takes to find another website find another dealer match the color of thread up and all in all in the end in the end maybe you saved even 50 dollars right but you know there's all these other unknowns that come into place and then and in the end if your goal is to make 40 000 a year what's 50 bucks yeah like what's 50 bucks out of 40 grand yeah i know and that's a new way to look at things for a lot of people but really there is a difference between um working for yourself and running your own business and working for somebody else so um you've definitely got to be willing to um spend the money and just don't be cheap where it makes sense yeah when it makes sense and and then i put pay for software when it helps too um like a software like uh freshbooks or quickbooks or or any of these accounting software um a lot of them will sync together between like your payment processor and that so you spend like 10 bucks a month on this software and when your customer pays you with a credit card it just recognizes who paid you and it sends it right to that customer's account and it marks the invoices paid you're done you spend zero time um for 10 bucks a month and uh and yeah i mean 100 bucks a year again it adds up but in that time that you spent you know going through the credit card or doing it on your phone app and then you know trying to tie it all together you just you can waste a whole bunch of time and um it's just really important to not get stuck in these in this cheap trap which will kill you on time and so many other things but that's another episode great episode avoid the cheat um so you've also got another section here that is called clean house and take out the trash and the first line is one of my favorite things in life and that is don't work with stressful customers just don't work with them there are tons of people who want to buy custom embroidery custom t-shirts there's a lot of people that will pay good money for good quality work um find nice ones you know i'm not saying you have to jettison somebody that's half your forty thousand dollars a year in profit you know but you should make moves to be ready to jettison them you know it's not it's not worth it it'll take up a lot of your time take up your emotional energy and will not get you closer to your goals yeah so you know it's important to work with the right type of customers these means um customers that are the right type of profitability for you that allow you to work efficiently um that fit the dream you know if if you're if you want to work with us because this is also not just about time and money and profit but it's also about the kind of philosophical dream too i quit being an accountant because it was boring because i want to make t-shirts for people in the fishing who aren't efficient right i want to make fishing shirts or do you want to design i want to talk about fishing i want to make apparel for fishing i want to put a fishing shirt on and go fishing with people who bought my shirts right and uh and then it turns out that through word of mouth you got um some big attorney firm that they want you to do uh uh you know uh custom embroidery for them on shirts and and great you know but they're also i mean you have to work with attorneys all day that wasn't the dream and the dream was to work with it's terrible story with fisher nobody's dream man i wish i could work with attorneys all day no offense guys if you're an intern um i also like um the your next line here which is only take profitable jobs and i'm always amazed at the number of people that will take jobs that they either break even or lose money because they think they need to you know or maybe sometimes it's just to be nice you know i mean take whatever your goal is and just paste it above your phone or your computer monitor so you you do a little gut check you know when you're when you're adding up the job and how long it's going to take you what it's going to cost and how much your money it's going to make look up at that number and see if those two things relate yeah yeah and that's it and if and if they don't make sense then then you just don't take that type of job again don't charge that money whatever it is and um you know it's a balancing act yep it's a balancing act um so uh and the last one i just put on here was don't work with technology that doesn't fit the plan so somebody might tell you it's a really good idea to get a certain type of printer or a certain type of machine or whatever it might be or you heard that doing this type of work is great but if if the work that it takes and the profitability that it takes and the size of the business doesn't fit then it doesn't work yeah and you you might find that like well listen i started to do it this way screen printing doesn't fit it it doesn't fit the space it doesn't fit the time it doesn't fit this it doesn't fit that i'm really more in the lines of you know sublimation or whatever it might be yeah i i think i think that's sound advice um so i think the next one is uh kind of ties all this up together in a bit but it's just be efficient everywhere yeah everything you know and this it ties up everything we said but your printer should be the right amount of distance from your table and your heat press so you can pick it up and put it there and you're not running around um if you keep bumping your back into a wall every time you print move it yeah because every time you bump it it's interrupting you yep um get good tools that save you time you know like just do like if you if you cut a lot of transfers you can get a little cutting board that that we have yeah holding a company and it's just like it and it has measuring on it and it's flat and you just put the paper in there and you slide slide slide and it's cut rather than using scissors all the time maybe that makes sense for you but if you do use scissors you should have sharp scissors yeah sharpen your scissors if you've been using the same pair of scissors that you've had since college um or high school or elementary school in kindergarten your kindergarten scissors kindergarten i have the i have like the rounded tip scissors they're only an inch my fingers don't even fit anymore yeah there's somebody out there cutting transfers with scissors like that yeah i mean realistically because they're cheaper because they're cheaper yeah or we don't have to buy new ones or whatever it is or good scissors are actually expensive yep there actually are and i mean relatively speaking you know okay um so yeah so sharpen your scissors um do anything you know uh that that just makes sense to kind of be efficient if you do a lot of sleeves and legs get a sleeve leg platen for your heat press machine yeah you know stop trying to make things work that eat up time because your goal is is to kind of maximize this time so you and and your business partner the two of you want to have make a certain amount of money and part of getting there is going to be be able to produce a bunch of apparel that you're going to sell to folks right yeah i think it'd be a great idea if you know if you just stop in the doorway to your office or wherever you produce stuff and just look at the layout of what you have in front of you and pretend you were advising someone getting into the business like how would you set things up and as you go through a job you know well like why is my computer way over here you know my computer's in another room you know why why is that the case so like i have to leave to um answer emails while my embroidery machine is going i can't tell if it stops you know um is my you know when should i turn on my heat press you know should i turn on my heat press before i make dinner so it's ready to go by the time i'm printing and or so i don't have to wait 20 minutes for it to warm up yeah no that's great i mean it's all about little efficiencies because in the beginning we talked about this you're measuring your time and then you're going to look at it and say okay oh i spent a bunch of time doing this if i did this i could probably save 10 of my time that means i could prospect for more customers or or whatever it might be yeah i like that um go ahead no i i mean i'm really fascinated with the way things instead of counting them because i had never thought about this until you said something about it the other day yeah that's one of those things where uh um you could i think we mentioned about pre-treat you know uh being a liquid it's hard to know how much you have left over so weigh it when it's full and then weigh it again and then you know if you've used half of it yeah and it could be the same as lots of other things um if uh you can weigh a shirt and you know how i mean shirts is hard because they're small and extra large and stuff but it's consuming some things um you know use use your scale to help you out if you can you know just in in general be creative about finding ways to just save some time and be efficient yeah i like that and getting smart software is is actually a really good idea we've got a conversation going in the custom apparel startups group about how you manage your life like what kind of software or systems do you use to manage your jobs and organize everything and and at cold sea we use asana task management software for most stuff internally we're using monday dot com as another way to do that but uh we've got a lot of people that just have a whiteboard with post-it notes on it you know but whatever is the smart way to organize what you have to accomplish that you think you're gonna do i mean that is um efficiency squared yeah you're organized that way yeah that's great well we've got like five minutes and two more things okay and i think we'll probably pass 30 minutes but we got five we are my alarm went off several minutes ago well we got five minutes before i'm gonna hang up so got it um the next thing is um so set a goal hit the goal and move on to the next one and what we mean by that is if you want to get to a hundred thousand profit a year just make your first goal getting to twenty thousand dollars in profit when you hit that look at what you did do the math track the time look at the customers that you worked with and then say could i have done five times the amount of this in a year yeah i like that now if you hit that twenty thousand dollars in two months then you're the answer is kind of theoretically yes yeah if you hit it in a longer amount of time you know the answer theoretically is no but um maybe maybe you just didn't put in enough work well i was only working like five hours a week i could work 15. okay well boom you know so you got you just have to ask the question now i'm gonna i'm gonna take the other way and let's say that your goal is forty thousand dollars and you made it this year you made it this year now it's time to dial in the other direction okay how could i reduce the number of hours i spend to make that you know by being more efficient by not being cheap can i afford to invest in better systems you know do things differently this time yeah so next year i spent 15 hours and now i can spend five hours a week yeah yeah yeah and if it's a side hustle that's fantastic what if you could work 15 hours a week and take it down to five yeah and make the same amount of money i mean that's that would be a definition of success if you wanted it to be there um on the flip side you just completely go the other direction and say i made the 40 000 i want working 15 hours a week if i can improve my efficiency by twenty percent maybe i can make fifty thousand dollars yeah i like that um so uh just kind of i think it's important to take steps in your goals um look at the profitability look at the time look at problems you can fix and just figure out if you're heading on the right direction and uh and it's not it doesn't necessarily need to be a race right um you just figure out what your timeline is and what it looks like and remember it's your timeline it's not anyone else's yeah i'd go back up to the top of the podcast and just kind of take a look set your goals uh work towards them with that goal in mind remember you don't have to like keep growing you don't have to be big to be successful you set your goals where you want them to be for your side hustle or your main business and then you work towards that not towards what somebody else thinks is thinks is something and uh and then the last one is um ask for advice and then and maybe take it like that not from us just in general you know like ask other people who are in business what do they do what were their goals what problems did they have um here's a problem i'm having how would you solve it yeah and then listen maybe take the advice maybe not maybe just say okay i see what they did doesn't fit for me or i see what they did i don't want that it doesn't hit it doesn't reach my goal yeah it's not part of my plan you know because maybe they said um i just started just working with a lot of lawyers and then you say okay not gonna do that one but maybe i should just adjust my customer base and not just work with people who fish maybe i can go into boating and doodling really i'm always disappointed when you don't use noodling if you don't know what that is look it up it's fun um all right folks i um i really appreciate everyone that listens and shares our podcast we get new listeners all the time it's been really successful for mark veal and i um it's been very rewarding to um to talk to you guys on sometimes a weekly basis about how how we can improve your business and if you like that then uh and if you benefit from it just um share it with friends yeah absolutely we and and and to wrap this up my final thought on this is um you know there isn't any there's no uh magic bullet there's there's no um uh exact way to do business you know so find out what your kind of goal is what you want to do build it out make it happen and uh keep listening to this podcast and um you know maybe sometimes take our advice but i think over a bunch of episodes you'll learn a bunch of different things that'll really help you out and i think hopefully we can keep doing that for you all right this has been mark stevenson and mark villa you guys have a great business

2022-08-02 20:20

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