This Episode

Mark Stephenson & Marc Vila

You Will Learn

  • How to define your goals
  • Why you should track your time
  • How to focus on tasks and jobs that help you meet your goals
  • How to be more efficient

Resources & Links

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

Show Notes

Maybe you never want to really grow bigger, just grow more profitable. For some people the idea of a big business with hundreds of employees and a big building with a huge sign is a dream.

For others it’s just to have a business for themselves. Maybe it’s a small family business. A business on your terms. It could be you just want to keep it as a side hustle.

But how do you make this business THRIVE and generate the income you want to live, to retire, to pass on to the next generation.

If you want to GROW while staying small, you need to optimize the business.

Ways to grow a small business, while also staying small

  • What’s the dream?
    • To have a side hustle that makes 40k profit a year
    • To have a family business that profits 250k a year
    • To have a business to retire in, eventually replacing your day job income

Just like with everything, you have to have defined goals to know how and when you’ve reached them.

  • Track your time
    • How much time do you spend taking to customers?
    • Delivering orders?
    • Running production?
    • Maintaining equipment?
    • Accounting?

Part of staying a small business is working with limited time. If you want to stay with 3 people running the shop, you could say you have 120 hours of work a week. You have to track where all that time is going from day one.

  • Clean House / Take out the trash
    • Don’t work with stressful customers.
    • Only take profitable jobs.
    • Stop taking on projects that don’t fit the dream.
    • Stick with what you like and what works.
    • Don’t work with technology that doesn’t fit the plan.

You will learn lessons as you take on clients. Certain jobs just won’t be profitable, others will be loaded with stress. Some work just doesn’t scale well (e.g. it takes a 2x the work for the same profit as other work). You have to know when to clean house, turn down jobs and follow the dream.

  • Don’t be cheap
    • Don’t waste time shopping around to save 50 cents on a cone of thread.
    • Do the maintenance, don’t skip out on a step to save a few bucks on cleaner.
    • Buy the better heat press.
    • Pay for software if it helps.
    • Upgrade your equipment when its time.

Trying to save a buck can end up costing you so much more. Remember that you are trying to reach a goal. Don’t let saving a few hundred bucks get in the way of reaching your goal. If you are trying to get to $100k a year, what’s $200?

  • Be efficient, everywhere!
    • Move your equipment and tables to save walking time.
    • Get good tools to save time.
    • Have a regimented plan for every order.
    • Get things like a sleeve platen.
    • Sharpen your scissors.
    • Weigh things instead of counting them.
    • Get smart software.

Efficiency is going to be the key to maximizing your small business profitability and revenue. Many times businesses get stuck because they have run out of time!

  • Hit your goals, then move to the next
    • If you want to get to $100k a year, start with $20k.
    • Look at what you did to get to 20k and do the math.
    • Can you scale that with the time/people you have?
    • If not, what can you do better?
    • Consider new ideas to scale it up!

You need to step by step to your goal. You may find that there isn’t enough time, or not enough profit. This allows you to FIX the problem through success! “I got to $20K! How are things looking? Ok, I know what to fix to get to $40k.”

  • Ask for advice, maybe take it
    • Ask people who have a business what they do.
    • Find out their goals.
    • What stumbling blocks did they have?
    • Share issues you have and see how they would solve them.

There isn’t a magic bullet, but knowledge is absolutely power. Look for inspiration from others, but be sure to not compare yourself to their business too much, remember this is your goal. Seek advice from others, but don’t look for exact answers.

Strategies to Plan, Run and Profit from a Business Built for YOU, by YOU. That’s the goal. It’s YOUR plan, it’s YOUR business, it’s YOUR goals. You have the ability to make it anything you want.

Transcript

Mark Stephenson:
Hey, everyone. And welcome to a very rare episode of the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. This is Mark Stephenson.

Marc Vila:
And this is Marc Vila. And today we’re going to talk about keeping your business small and profitable.

Mark Stephenson:
That’s not even the news. The news is that we’re going to try to keep this episode to 30 minutes. That’s the challenge. I’ve got a timer I just hit.

Marc Vila:
All right. It’s wonderful. We’re going to see how that goes, but wonderful. I’m getting over being sick, I’m on day five. I spent 80 bucks yesterday to have somebody tell me I have the common cold.

Mark Stephenson:
That’s exciting.

Marc Vila:
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 it is relatively a simple concept. But Mark, why don’t you take us away with your inspiration?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. So, we’ve gone through half a dozen different titles getting ready for this episode, but basically it’s keeping your business small and profitable. When I think about a side hustle that I’m involved in, that my friends are, a lot of us aren’t really looking for, we don’t want a $2 million business or a $5 million business. Cool, if it happens, but that’s not really the goal. And we know that a lot of you are in the same boat. For example, we’re asking a few customers to do some testimonial videos for us. And so far, I’ve talked to three nice folks, great customers. And two of them, we have to do this after 5:00 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.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And it’s interesting because the idea of a business or owning a business is very different for all different types of people. 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? Right? And other folks, that concept is a nightmare. Their idea of owning a business is them by themselves, literally alone, with no other help, or minimal help. And then, every single thing in between that, and they’re all the right way to do business.

So, I think it’s a matter of figuring out if you’re this type of a person, if you would like to keep your business small in size, whether it’s just by yourself or it’s just you and your spouse, or it’s you and your family, or you and three friends, whatever it might be, 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 and making the most money you can out of it and getting the most out of that small business.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I like that. I like what you’ve got here and first of all, of course it’s always best to write this stuff down. So, it’s really all about, what is your dream? What’s your goal for your business or your side hustle? And it doesn’t even have to be a dream. I’m doing air quotes right now. 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, and your business could be a means to an end. But 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.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And I know that’s been the case for a few friends of mine over the years. 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, money was in the bank and stuff like that. And then all of a sudden he just called me up one day and he’s just like, “Dude, I hate everything that I do.” And I was like, “Why?” And he’s like, “I’m managing employees. I don’t want to do that. I’m managing this. I don’t want to do that. I’m fighting this. I don’t want to fight that.”

He’s like, “When I started this, I liked it because it was kind of me and my best friend/roommate at the time. It was our business. We were having fun every day.” And he’s like, “I’ve lost all of that.” And so, he reset kind of, with a new and different business, knowing that the goal was to kind of keep it that way. Yeah. You got to plan for that.

Mark Stephenson:
I think that’s a common theme, because I listen to a lot of podcasts and a lot of videos about online courses and starting an online course and things like that, starting a consulting business, and almost universally, all of those people that ended up doing courses online, they started with their own marketing practice and just hated it. Within 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, if you’re looking at, or if you’re already in the custom apparel business, let’s see if we can figure out how to establish your goals and how to plan your business so you don’t end up hating it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I sold custom apparel equipment for a long time, and the dream was… it’s a very small amount of dreams that people have in this business. And especially when I’m talking about mom and pop small business style folks, right?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Side hustles from the home.

Marc Vila:
There are businesses out there that are huge and they’re adding custom apparel to already large business, or they want to grow that size. 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, it’s always, “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. I became an electrician and I just don’t really like that. My knees aren’t what they used to be, crawling in attics.” All these things. So, if that’s kind of why you started this, you’ll remember that and then figure out what your goal is.

Do you want to make $40,000 in profit a year as a side hustle? Do you want this to be a family business that profits a quarter million dollars a year? And that’s your income, $250,000-

Mark Stephenson:
Notice that Marc Vila is making a distinction between sales and profits.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
So, it’s how much money do you want to make in your bank account? Not how much revenues that you want. Not the sales dollars. You’ve got to start with, “Yeah. I want an extra $40,000 in my bank account every year. Or I want $2,000 a month extra in my bank account.” So, you can start to do the math and okay, how many shirts do I have to sell at what price to get to those amounts?

Marc Vila:
Yeah. This is why I like saying the word profit in here, is because there’s other goals tied to what the dream of the business is. So, in the one example, I said, you want a family business that profits, 250,000 a year, right? Why? Because 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. You can grow that with inflation over time, slowly and 250 to 260, and you’re kind of just going up over time. But your family and your life is living that way.

It also might be a dollar amount that you want to retire. You’re a fireman, firewoman 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 $75,000 a year in profit so when I retire, I have that as my new income.” So, there’s-

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I like that. Just to set the record straight, it’s firefighter.

Marc Vila:
Firefighter?

Mark Stephenson:
Firefighter, that’s it.

Marc Vila:
I wish that I could. I wish-

Mark Stephenson:
Non gender-specific firefighting individuals. But yeah, you’re right. I like what you said, the goal for the family business. One of the things that I talked 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, or my job as an accountant.” Or something like that. Actually, talked to an accountant just the other day.

Marc Vila:
Oh, yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Say, “I hate the work. I want to buy an embroidery machine.”

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Well, I mean, and that’s what these 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 30, 40, 50, is they went to school for accounting because their parents or uncle was an accountant, or they knew that the money in accounting was good when they went to school because they wanted to make good money. And they just realized that they weren’t passionate about it. Some accountants are passionate about numbers. Others did it because it was the job, and now you’d like to do something you’re passionate about.

So, 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 counting different things. You want to own a T-shirt business where you make shirts. So, that’s the first thing, just define the dream, write it down, set certain goals. I think goal-setting is always, in almost every podcast 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.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And this is the intention-

Marc Vila:
It’s rare if somebody has no goals.

Mark Stephenson:
… that 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 to find.

Marc Vila:
Yep.

Mark Stephenson:
So, let’s jump into some of these, because you’ve got some great stuff in here, just to kind of bracket your business. Some of it supports it up to a certain level. “How do I get to $40,000 in profit?” And some of it says, “How do I stay there? How do I optimize your business to hit those specifically and do it as efficiently as possible?”

Marc Vila:
Well, the next thing on the list after this is tracking your time. And it’s hard to do in a way, because 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’ve got to know how much time all of this took. So, if you’re working a side hustle and you’re doing this 10 hours a week, or you’re doing it full time and it’s 40 hours a week, whatever it is, at the end of the month, you’ve reached a certain amount of income, revenue, profit. How much time did you spend doing all of those things to get to that number?

Mark Stephenson:
Yep. And I think this is really important. I just read a little blurb in one of the many business books that I happen to be reading right now. It was about, 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. Everything was designed for each individual person to do their best, and it resulted in 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.” Whatever you’re doing. “These are the 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 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.

Marc Vila:
Right. Right. One of the things I would recommend to do in regards to seeing how this works is, watch some Gordon Ramsey stuff on TV.

Mark Stephenson:
Oh, yeah. That’s a great-

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Watch some Hell’s Kitchen, and if you haven’t already, and watch some Kitchen Nightmares, and I think 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, 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.

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, that little space is organized. It’s efficient so they can… but it only takes how much? Pasta, two minutes. They’re ready to go. In Kitchen Nightmares, you’ll see the same thing. There’ll be a restaurant with five orders, five tables, but not a single meal has gone out.

Mark Stephenson:
Can’t keep up.

Marc Vila:
They can’t keep up. And then they show in the back and you just see people running everywhere. You’ve got somebody prepping, cutting up chicken when it should have been done hours ago. Things like that. So, when you’ve got a business with, say three people and you’re going to all work full-time, that’s 120 hours of work a week. Is that right?

Mark Stephenson:
Yep.

Marc Vila:
If you’re all working 40 hours. So, you have to track where all 120 of those hours went, so you can find efficient spots.

Mark Stephenson:
Or maybe even more importantly, you’ve got four hours a night after your regular day job, and it’s just you.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
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’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 file digitized. You can’t lay hands on the blanks. This is a big deal. You’re going to find this 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, 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 don’t have time to mess around.

Marc Vila:
If you’re looking to work 12 hours a week on a side hustle after work and between work and such, if you waste 20 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day. 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. Or one of the things that I find, and I’ve done this too, is I’ll fiddle with something for a while. I’ll fiddle with a spreadsheet for a while, or a piece of art. Or whatever, just fiddle with it, fiddle with it, fiddle with it.

Earlier today, I think we ran into this at ColDesi. We’re talking about artwork for a trade show coming up. 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 looked at it and I was like, “We’ve gotten 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 going to do.” And then someone came in and said, “Well, I have this idea too.” “Okay, great. You run with that idea then. Let’s just move forward.” Otherwise, you’ll just fiddle, fiddle, and you won’t get anything done.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, yeah. Choosing artwork for the rest of our lives.

Marc Vila:
Choosing artwork for the rest of your life. And then what happens is, you never will reach your goal, because in order to reach 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.

Mark Stephenson:
You know what, I think we should move on because time is burning.

Marc Vila:
There you go.

Mark Stephenson:
I never realized how much we yammer on. We should really try to be more efficient.

Marc Vila:
Good.

Mark Stephenson:
I like what you said here next. The next thing that we’re going to talk about is, Don’t Be Cheap. And that’s not just a self-serving statement, right? Oh, no. It’s Take Out the Trash.

Marc Vila:
Don’t Be Cheap is next, but we can… It doesn’t have to be in that order.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay. Let’s do Don’t Be Cheap, then.

Marc Vila:
Don’t Be Cheap.

Mark Stephenson:
I feel very strongly about-

Marc Vila:
Good.

Mark Stephenson:
… Don’t Be Cheap.

Marc Vila:
I do too.

Mark Stephenson:
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 $4,000 a month in profit on T-shirts. Do the maintenance, don’t skimp. Buy the better heat press upfront because it will save you time down the road, even though it may cost a little bit. Not only, you’ve got a pay for software, if it helps, don’t trip over pennies to save dollars. Something like that. Don’t trip over dollars to save pennies.

Marc Vila:
We did a podcast on don’t trip over pennies.

Mark Stephenson:
We did.

Marc Vila:
Five years-

Mark Stephenson:
Which I’ve never done before. They’re pretty low to the ground.

Marc Vila:
No, but you know what? I slide my feet a lot. So, I-

Mark Stephenson:
Do you?

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I do.

Mark Stephenson:
That’s terrible.

Marc Vila:
But I’ve stopped because I listened to our episode from five years ago.

Mark Stephenson:
Just around the house.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. So, what will happen is, we had, well, somebody say, “Well, can’t I open up the wasting container for my Roland BN-20, and take the 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’t I just do that?” And I would say, “I guess. Roland doesn’t say to do that. So, I’m not going to advocate for that, but in theory it sounds like you could. But how much time are you going to spend in the sink and drying and getting ink all over your hands and on the floor, cleaning it up, 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 spent to save like 30, 40 bucks.”

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
It goes back to the time thing. You spend an hour fiddling to save $30 when you’ve got a production run waiting to happen. You’ve got your printers waiting to print money.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes.

Marc Vila:
And instead you’re looking to save 30 bucks.

Mark Stephenson:
That’s a good way to look at it.

Marc Vila:
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 throw caution to the wind everywhere, but there is a healthy balance, and trying to save 50 cents on a cone of thread is like, where’s that going to get you? In the time it takes to find another website, find another dealer, match the color of thread up. And all in all, in the end, maybe you saved even $50. But there’s all these other unknowns that come into place. And in the end, if your goal is to make $40,000 a year, what’s 50 bucks? What’s 50 bucks out of 40 grand?

Mark Stephenson:
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 working for yourself and running your own business and working for somebody else. So, you’ve definitely got to be willing to spend the money and just don’t be cheap where it makes sense.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. When it makes sense. And then, I put pay for software when it helps too, like a software like FreshBooks or QuickBooks, or any of these accounting software. A lot of them will sync together between 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 invoice as paid. You’re done. You spent zero time for 10 bucks a month. And yeah, I mean 100 bucks a year, again, it adds up. But in that time that you spent going through the credit card or doing it on your phone app and then trying to tie it all together, you can waste a whole bunch of time. And it’s just really important to not get stuck in this cheap trap, which will kill you on time and some of the other things.

Mark Stephenson:
Cheap trap. That’s another episode, great episode title, Avoid the Cheap Trap. 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, find nice ones. I’m not saying you have to jettison somebody that’s half your $40,000 a year in profit, but you should make moves to be ready to jettison them. 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.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. So, it’s important to work with the right type of customers. These means customers that are the right type of profitability for you, that allow you to work efficiently, that fit the dream. If you want to work with a… Because this is also not just about time and money and profit, but it’s also about the kind of philosophical dream too, of, “I quit being an accountant because it was boring, because I want to make T-shirts for people who are into fishing.”

Mark Stephenson:
Right.

Marc Vila:
“I want to make fishing shirts.”

Mark Stephenson:
Or noodling.

Marc Vila:
“I 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?

Mark Stephenson:
Right.

Marc Vila:
And then it turns out that through word-of-mouth, you got some big attorney firm that they want you to do a custom embroidery for them on shirts, and great, but they’re also… I mean, you have to work with attorneys all day. That wasn’t the dream. The dream was to work with-

Mark Stephenson:
That’s terrible.

Marc Vila:
… was to work with fishers.

Mark Stephenson:
Nobody’s dream. Man, I wish I could work with attorneys all day. No offense guys, if you’re an attorney. I also like 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. Or maybe sometimes it’s just to be nice. I mean, take whatever your goal is and just paste it above your phone or your computer monitor, so you do a little gut check 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 money it’s going to make, look up at that number and see if those two things relate.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s it. And if they don’t make sense, then you just don’t take that type of job again, don’t charge that money, whatever it is. It’s a balancing act.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep.

Marc Vila:
It’s a balancing act. The last one I just put on here was, “Don’t work with technology that doesn’t fit the plan.” 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 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. And you might find that, 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 sublimation, or whatever it might be.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I think that’s sound advice.

Marc Vila:
So, I think the next one kind of ties all this up together in a bit. But it’s just, Be Efficient Everywhere. Everything. 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 kind of pick it up and put it there, and you’re not running around. If you keep bumping your back into a wall every time you print, move it. Because every time you bump it, it’s interrupting you.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep.

Marc Vila:
Get good tools that save you time. If you cut a lot of transfers, you can get a little cutting board that we have on Colman and Company. 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.

Mark Stephenson:
But if you do use scissors, you should have sharp scissors.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Sharpen your scissors. If you’ve been using the same pair of scissors that you’ve had since college or high school or elementary school, in kindergarten, your kindergarten scissors.

Mark Stephenson:
Kindergarten. I have the rounded tip scissors. They’re only an inch. My fingers don’t even fit anymore.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. There’s somebody out there cutting transfers with scissors like that. And they’re dull. I mean, realistically-

Mark Stephenson:
Because they’re cheaper.

Marc Vila:
Because they’re cheaper. Yeah. Or they don’t have to buy new ones or whatever it is, or good scissors are actually expensive. They actually are. And I mean, relatively speaking. So, yeah. So, sharpen your scissors, do anything that just make 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. Stop trying to make things work that eat up time, because your goal is to kind of maximize this time so you and your business partner, the two of you want to make a certain amount of money. And part of getting there is going to be being able to produce a bunch of apparel that you’re going to sell to folks. Right?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I think it’d be a great idea 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 are advising someone getting into the business. How would you set things up? And as you go through a job, well, why is my computer way over here? My computer’s in another room. Why is that the case? So, I have to leave to answer emails while my embroider machine is going. I can’t tell if it stops. When should I turn on my heat press? Should I turn on my heat press before I make dinner so it’s ready to go by the time I’m printing, or so I don’t have to wait 20 minutes for it to warm up?

Marc Vila:
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, well, I spend 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 whatever it might be.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I like that.

Marc Vila:
Go ahead.

Mark Stephenson:
No, I’m really fascinated with, weigh things instead of counting them, because I had never thought about this until you said something about it the other day.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s one of those things where you could, I think we mentioned about pretreat being a liquid, it’s hard to know how much you have leftover, so weigh it when it’s full and then weigh it again. And then you know if you’ve used half of it.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
And it could be the same as lots of other things. If you can weigh a shirt… Shirts is hard because they’re small and extra large and stuff. We’re assuming some things. Use your scale to help you out, if you can. Just in general, be creative about finding ways to just save some time and be efficient.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I like that. And getting smart software is actually a really good idea. We’ve got a conversation going in the Customer Apparel Startups Group about how you manage your life. What kind of software or systems do you use to manage your jobs and organize everything? At ColDesi, we use Asana task management software for most stuff internally. We’re using monday.com as another way to do that. But we’ve got a lot of people that just have a whiteboard with Post-it Notes on it. But whatever is the smart way to organize what you have to accomplish, that you think you’re going to do, that is efficiency squared. You’re organized that way.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s great. Well, we’ve got like five minutes and two more things. And we’re probably past 30 minutes, but we got five minutes.

Mark Stephenson:
We are. My alarm went off several minutes ago.

Marc Vila:
Well, we got five minutes before I’m going to hang up. So-

Mark Stephenson:
Got it.

Marc Vila:
… the next thing is, 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 $100,000 profit a year, just make your first goal getting to $20,000 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?”

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I like that.

Marc Vila:
Now, if you hit that $20,000 in two months, then the answer’s kind of theoretically, yes. If you hit it in a longer amount of time, the answer theoretically is no. But maybe you just didn’t put in enough work. Well, I was only working five hours a week. I could work 15. Okay. Well, boom. So, you just have to look at all of it.

Mark Stephenson:
Now, I’m going to take the other way, and let’s say that your goal is $40,000 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, by being more efficient, by not being cheap? Can I afford to invest in better systems, do things differently this time? So, next year-

Marc Vila:
Yeah, especially if it’s a side hustle.

Mark Stephenson:
… I’ll spend 15 hours and now I can spend five hours a week.

Marc Vila:
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, and make the same amount of money? I mean, that would be a definition of success, if you wanted it to be there. On the flip side, you could 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 20%, maybe I can make $50,000.”

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I like that.

Marc Vila:
I think it’s important to take steps in your goals. Look at the profitability, look at the time, look at problems you can fix and just figure out if you’re heading in the right direction. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a race. Right? 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.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I’d go back up to the top of the podcast and just kind of take a look, set your goals, work towards them with that goal in mind. Remember, you don’t have to 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 successful.

Marc Vila:
Yep. And then the last one is, Ask for Advice and Maybe Take It.

Mark Stephenson:
I like that. Not from us.

Marc Vila:
No, just in general. Ask other people who are in business, what do they do? What were their goals? What problems did they have? “Here’s a problem I’m having. How would you solve it?” 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 reach my goal. It’s not part of my plan.” Because maybe they said, “I just started working with a lot of lawyers.” And then you’ll say, “Okay, not going to 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-“

Mark Stephenson:
Noodling. I’m always disappointed where when you don’t use noodling, for instance. If you don’t know what that is, look it up. It’s fun. All right folks. I really appreciate everyone that listens and shares our podcast. We get new listeners all the time. It’s been really successful for Marc Vila and I. It’s been very rewarding to talk to you guys on sometimes a weekly basis about how we can improve your business. And if you like that, and if you benefit from it, just share it with friends.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. To wrap this up, my final thought on this is, there’s no magic bullet. There’s no exact way to do business. So, find out what your goal is, what you want to do, build it out, make it happen, and keep listening to this podcast. And 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-

Mark Stephenson:
There you go.

Marc Vila:
… hopefully we can keep doing that for you.

Mark Stephenson:
All right. This has been Mark Stevenson.

Marc Vila:
And Marc Vila.

Mark Stephenson:
You guys have a great business.

 

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