Episode 184 – Your Business Butts In Seats

Custom Apparel Startups

Episode 184 – Your Business Butts In Seats

This Episode

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Mark Stephenson & Marc Vila

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customapparelstartups.com

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CAS Podcast

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ColDesi

You Will Learn

• Why cross-training and a plan for unexpected events are vital
• Types of lists to create and keep updated
• Easily overlooked tasks that must be on your lists

Resources & Links

• Colman and Company Blog
• ColDesi Learning Center
• Leasing Equipment

Episode 184 – Your Business Butts In Seats

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.

The post Episode 184 – Your Business Butts In Seats appeared first on Custom Apparel Startups.