When it comes to growing your customization business we often talk about ‘finding a niche.’ What is a product / customer that you can focus on? This could be new moms, or local small businesses or tourists. However, you will find a point where growing that business becomes harder. This is why you will find a candle company that starts selling soaps, or why Bath and Body works sells 99 different ways to make your house smell good.
Diversifying your product lines is a great way to level up your business and make more money.
- You can sell to current customers
- You can find a new customer base
- You can become more stable (as one product line slows down, another might grow)
Types of business diversification
- Product diversification: you primarily sell clothing but you want to expand into other items that will create value for your customer like home goods and accessories
- Market diversification: you have a local business and start selling online or you open a new location across town
- Industry diversification: take you knowledge to a different industry or target a new niche
- Service diversification: you may only offer finished products, but may want to start doing training on how to make those products
- Merge or Acquire: a business that has a different product, service, market or industry
Why you would want to diversify:
- Want more revenue
- Core business is in decline or getting saturated.
- Less economic risk
- Increase competitiveness – offer a wider range of products to attract new customers and reach new markets that competitors can’t or don’t
Examples:
- Amazon used to be an online bookseller, then moved on to sell video games and other multi-media and before long, they sold computer electronics, software, homeware, toys, and more
- Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy in the 90’s and launched the iPod and iTunes software and a few years later the iPhone
Steps to Diversify:
- Do your research – have your customers suggested diversifying? Are they asking for more products or services? What can you do better than your competitors in your current or new markets? What type of diversification would suit your business?
- Assess your risks – while diversifying can help generate sales and increase your market share, you have to find a crucial balance between finding the time and resources to focus on the new venture without neglecting your core business. Diversifying with similar products in a familiar market may carry less risk than developing a brand new product for an unknown market, but both would create a safety net which will allow you to recover if one of your products or services fails.
- Audit your resources – what do you have and what do you need to invest in
- Plan – in many ways it is like starting a new business. You will need to understand your new market, your customers, competitors, and the new dynamics just as you would for any new business
What does your equipment do?
- You have an embroidery machine.
- Do you sell hats?
- Patches?
- Uniforms?
- You have a DigitalHeat FX printer?
- Ever used hard surface paper?
- Printed on cardstock?
What adjacent equipment you can add?
- If you have a a sublimation printer, adding a hat press is an easy upgrade
- If you do digitalheat fx, might be good to ad a sub printer or a cutter
- If you do embroidery, going to a cutter and press.
Transcript
Marc Vila:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. My name is Mark Vila. And today we’re here to talk about diversifying your business with Holly Wood. And the reason for this podcast today and the inspiration behind it is when you’re growing your customization business, we talk about things like finding a niche. We talk about what kind of customer should you focus on. It could be new moms or tourists or small businesses. And when you eventually find yourself getting to points where it’s harder to grow, it’s harder to expand, and a little bit of fear of where to start too. So we brought in Holly Wood who’s an expert on helping people start and grow their businesses.
So I’ll give you a brief introduction, Holly. Holly has been kind of a crafter, kind of side hustle type of a business for over a decade now. And then works over here at ColDesi and been with ColDesi about six or seven years. And then is recently the product manager of things like embroidery, white toner printers, and some other products as well. How did I hit that?
Holly Wood:
That was good.
Marc Vila:
Okay, because the first time we recorded this podcast, I got it wrong.
Holly Wood:
No, it’s all right.
Marc Vila:
So this is take two.
Holly Wood:
Take two.
Marc Vila:
The first time we had a huge technical difficulty, but I think that’s at the benefit of you, the listener out there because we’ve gone through this before. We’ve talked it through and we realized some things that we missed as well. So some really great information coming. And let’s go ahead and talk about when you were doing your research on this podcast, Holly, talk a little bit about what we mean by diversifying your business.
Holly Wood:
There’s a couple of different ways of diversion and maybe we can do the five different types. And then we can kind of go back and define each one.
Marc Vila:
Okay. Yeah.
Holly Wood:
Would you like that?
Marc Vila:
Yeah, that sounds good.
Holly Wood:
So the different types would be product diversion, market diversion, industry diversion. I’m saying diversion.
Marc Vila:
You’re just saying diversion. What word do you want to say instead?
Holly Wood:
Diversification.
Marc Vila:
Okay, good. All right. So product diversification.
Marc Vila:
Market diversification.
Holly Wood:
Industry diversification, service diversification, and then maybe a merger or an acquisition.
Marc Vila:
And the reason that somebody would want to do these things is really going to be because you’ve started your business. And this could be if you haven’t started your business yet, this is something that you should keep in mind. Or if you’re already in business, then this is huge for you. But you started your business and you’re working in some sort of a sector with some sort of a customer because you talk to folks all the time and they’ll say stuff like, “I’m a member of local moms’ group and I want to do stuff with bibs and custom bags and things that go on strollers.” And they have this great audience and they’re busy and they start making a good amount of money. And then you typically will reach a plateau in that market. You’ll say, “Listen, I’ve kind of feel like I’ve reached and have sold as much as I’m going to sell to these mom groups and their friends and their friends or friends and I have to figure out how to grow the business.” And then that’s why you kind of get into diversifying your business.
Holly Wood:
Right, because you might want to pick up other customers, but you don’t want to lose the customers that you already have. All that is to keep us more stable, right?
Marc Vila:
Right, right, right. And that’s part of this too is part of it is growth because you’d like to make more money. You’d like to grow your business, you would like to have new technology in your business. And part of it’s stability too. You find that you do wedding type of stuff. And it’s crazy busy this time of the year. When we’re filming this right now, it’s wedding season. Come a few months from now, wedding season’s really slow. So then your business would be slow during that point in time. So diversifying can help.
Holly Wood:
Speaking of, congratulations on yours.
Marc Vila:
Oh, thanks very much. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Just been a few weeks now.
Holly Wood:
I know.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, fresh.
Holly Wood:
Yeah, no, but I agree with you. There’s different times like sports seasons and then we’re getting into maybe the holiday season or whatever. I mean, you have different products, which is a really nice to bring us right into that for the product. And I feel like that’s maybe one of the easiest things to do is maybe you are already selling clothing, but you want to expand into home goods or something like that. So just along those same lines of that same customer base. But we’re just going to offer more things for them.
Marc Vila:
Right. Offer more things. And this is something that you see all the time in day-to-day life if you buy products from certain companies. So if somebody buys skincare products for a company, they’re going to have a new product line come up consistently. They have a face cream. They’re going to come up with an elbow cream. They just add things down the line. And it’s why their favorite coffee shop might start selling food at some point in time. It’s why your favorite donut shop might start selling bagels. So you diversify your products and then your current customer base may just buy more stuff or they buy stuff as a season changes or whatever that might be. Right.
Holly Wood:
And it might be as easy as they’re already asking for it.
Marc Vila:
Right.
Holly Wood:
Oh, I’m a coffee shop. You want bagels? I’ll start carrying bagels.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Holly Wood:
You want ice cream? I’ll start carrying ice cream.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, no, that’s fantastic. And an example to consider in this would be if you currently are just selling t-shirts, that’s mainly what you’re selling and you know have a group of customers that they could potentially want more products. And we could talk about how to do research and things like that later on. But more so it would be, well offer hats, offer signs, offer stickers. You can offer all these other things that go to the same customers.
Holly Wood:
And the cool part is most of your equipment, whether that’s embroidery, white toner printer, direct to film, a lot of those are already equipped to do lots of other things.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Holly Wood:
You just have to get the right product for the customer.
Marc Vila:
Right. And just learn how to do it or whatever that might be. So it’s out there. So now we can move into the next one, which you said was market diversification.
Holly Wood:
And that would be if I’m a local business, say. It would be selling to a different market. So maybe I take my market and I start selling it online, or maybe I go to another location across town. So basically just opening up my business to a different sector of the market, if that makes sense.
Marc Vila:
Right. And when we’re speaking about market, in this sense we’re talking about either a physical or a virtual place.
Holly Wood:
Correct.
Marc Vila:
So if you’re selling on Etsy, you should maybe think about creating a Facebook group that you can sell on Facebook. If you’re selling just in a particular area of town and maybe you have a handful of schools you work with or a handful of clubs you work with, expand to a different area of town.
Holly Wood:
Or even online, because online’s huge. If you have a successful store, why aren’t you selling online? I know there’s some things that you have to get set up in the background, but man, it’s a huge opportunity. People already like your stuff.
Marc Vila:
So you already have customers and it’s potential that your customers may not always be able to come to your store or they want to refer to their friends and family that may be out of town. So going from in-person to virtual could be a market diversification too. And I think that from the simplest standpoint, a good portion of people are selling small businesses. They’re usually selling within a certain set of zip codes or cities or even within just one zip code. And a simple way is really just to figure out how can you get one step further out? How can you get either into the next city or the next area of town? Here in Tampa Bay where we are, there’s dozens and dozens of little areas of town. There’s Carrollwood. And what do we call this area of town where we are? Do you know what name?
Holly Wood:
I usually say South Tampa.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, south Tampa. But even south Tampa, has a bunch of little areas in it.
Holly Wood:
Neighborhoods.
Marc Vila:
Neighborhoods.
Holly Wood:
Neighborhoods within.
Marc Vila:
Neighborhoods. And so you may be just selling within a couple of neighborhoods and it could be that you live in the suburbs and these are very named communities. So if you’re selling to a lot of people in one community, you could look to expand to another, join clubs in those areas, reach out to friends in those areas, advertise. You could advertise in either local print or just update your Facebook page or Google business profile and name the different areas. So here in Tampa we have Carrollwood and Town and Country and South Tampa as different areas.
Holly Wood:
Westchase.
Marc Vila:
Westchase. These are all in Tampa, but they’re little neighborhoods within Tampa that each one, I don’t know, probably has a million people in it or something. They’re actually huge.
Holly Wood:
But they kind of stay in your neighborhood though because those three miles to get outside of it may take you 15 to 20 minutes to drive. So maybe there’s other markets like that, that are, you know…
Marc Vila:
That are actually really close by. So you update your profile and list neighborhoods that you want to expand to, because this way when folks go to search online, they’ll find you. And also you can attend events, join clubs within those neighborhoods as well. So we’ve got product diversification and market diversification. And what’s next on our list?
Holly Wood:
Next one is industry. And I think the way we best described this last week was say you are marketing to a type of person that would like the same products. So say we’re already working with lawyers, then we have an embroidery machine and we’re doing their left chest and logos. But why not start servicing doctors too? Because a lot of those uniforms, the things that they like, the hats, the embroidery, a lot of those things are the same, but they’re in different industries.
Marc Vila:
And on the Custom Apparel Startups, I believe it was the last episode or the one before, Sarah Isom was on here and we talked about some things within marketing and one of the examples we used was somebody could be selling to doctor office, dentist office, and also golf clubs, like golf organizations. And how this works with the industry diversification is these are three different industries. Doctor and dentist could be considered very, very close. They both wear white coats and people wear scrubs. And having embroidered names or printed names or logos is typically important. It gives some authority when you see your doctor or dentist come in and it says their name or their company logo. It makes patients feel comfortable. Very classy. But at the same time, the golf clubs and organizations could be very, very related to that. You’re probably dealing with a very similar type of person because doctor, dentist, they’re going to typically dress nice. Golf is…
Holly Wood:
They might play golf.
Marc Vila:
They might play golf and they may very well may play golf. And in addition to that, it’s something that golf is known. When you play basketball, you wear shorts and a T-shirt. So that would be a great market if you’re going to sell shorts and T-shirts. But if you’re selling button-ups and golf shirts, polo shirts, things like that, those are going to be the same things that doctors and dentists wear. So it’s a very similar product you’re making for a different industry that’s very, very related. So I’d encourage you to look at what your customer base looks like now.
Holly Wood:
Another great example would be dance and cheer.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, dance and cheer. Ice skating. Ice skating. Yeah.
Holly Wood:
I forgot. We had another one too. But just same concept.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, they’re very, very similar to each other. So look at the industry that you work in now. And many folks will say, “Well, I don’t work in one industry. I work in a bunch of different little industries.” So I would look at some of your big customers or if you have two or three big customers that are in one industry, like you said, dance, maybe there’s a few dance studios that you make bags for and t-shirts for the parents and some other things like that. Well, you could say, “I have three customers that are like this. I wonder if I can find three more customers in a different industry.” So maybe ice skating. Ice skating is easy because they all go to very specific places, just like dance studios are very specific places. And you can go there and say, “Hey, here’s stuff that I make for a local dance. I can do similarly for ice skating.”
Holly Wood:
You’re probably doing parent gear too, with the kids. It’s kind of the same concept.
Marc Vila:
So it’s different. It’s maybe different. And the dance, maybe they don’t want anything warm, but in ice skating they do. So you’ll adjust the type of apparel, but the decorating, the style, and just the fact that dance and skate moms are just willing to spend a ton of money on their kids’ apparel. So keep it going. Okay, great. So what’s the next one that you’ve got there?
Holly Wood:
Service diversification. So say you offer finished products, but now you want to start maybe a training class or where people pay you for training. Or some of our other examples were maybe we had a bakery where people come in, but then we start offering delivery service. I can’t remember some of my other ideas.
Marc Vila:
You had mentioned about, was it your husband started doing or was thinking of doing something?
Holly Wood:
Yeah, so my husband, he’s a mortgage broker. He owns his own mortgage company and he goes out and teaches. He specialize in renovation financing. So he teaches his program to the realtors associations. So I would like for him to capitalize that and try to put that into a class where he can put it online and people can pay for it.
Marc Vila:
Right.
Holly Wood:
But he also does mortgages. So that’s him diversifying, basically not having all your eggs in one basket, right?
Marc Vila:
Yeah. One could say that selling a mortgage is offering a service. But separate from that there is a good that’s being given at the end, like money or a house. That is part of that transaction. And the service side of it is actually just the knowledge.
Holly Wood:
That he’s training the realtors on how to help them serve the program.
Marc Vila:
So I think that if you’re in the customization business where you do t-shirts or signs or anything like that, one of the ways you can use your knowledge is through brand consulting, right? That’s one. So what I see often here-
Holly Wood:
Oh yeah. Logos.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I look at support tickets. And I look at what comes through in ColDesi graphics, which is our graphics department where you can order custom graphics. So many times, just frankly, I’ll see terrible logos that they’re very, very outdated. They don’t look nice, they don’t make sense, they’re hard to read. And you as the customization business owner should recognize that. If you’re skilled, you would recognize, gosh, this logo just isn’t nice. You can offer as a service to do some brand identity improvements for your customers. So say, “Hey, I can take your logo and I can put it on a shirt for you. I’m happy to do it. It’s going to cost you X amount of dollars a piece. However, I do offer a level up service if you really want to kick it up a notch.” And you can show examples of others that you’ve done before and after.
This is a shirt before and after that it did for another customer and say, “So I offer a package.” It’s whatever amount of dollars, $500, a thousand dollars, whatever you think it’s worth for the time. “And we’ll go through and we’ll look at all of your logos. We’ll look at your colors and we’re going to redefine your brand. Come up with a new logo, new branding concept.” And even include in that you can offer other services and design letterhead, envelopes, thank you cards, business cards. These are all things you could do. And you don’t necessarily have to own the equipment.
Holly Wood:
Or you don’t even have to do it either. Places like ColDesi Graphics, we’ve got tons of logos made there.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Holly Wood:
So you could have someone else do it, but kind of pass through. So you look like a rockstar, but you didn’t actually do it.
Marc Vila:
You’re just offering the service. So you’re offering the service of your expertise of being somebody who knows about customizing things and how things should look great. And you use a service like ColDesi Graphics. You use services like online print services to actually order anything printed, if you want to get them pens or envelopes or something of that effect. And this whole package that you offer them, you can include finished goods or it’s just the consulting side of it. And there are just so many businesses out there that are going to come to you with a bad graphic or a bad logo that you can actually offer a service.
Holly Wood:
They just don’t know any better.
Marc Vila:
They don’t know any better. Or they don’t think about it, right?
Holly Wood:
Yeah. Because somebody did this for them 20 years ago and that’s all they’ve been using and they don’t realize that it’s outdated. And they could…
Marc Vila:
Mortgage companies, plumbers, electricians, landscaping, even dance studios and things like that. If they don’t spend some time updating their branding. And pick any, if you want to try to sell this to your customers a little bit, pick any major brand that they can think of. I mean, say, “Name the first brand that pops into top of your head.” Right?
Holly Wood:
Doritos is one for me.
Marc Vila:
Doritos, right? Google Doritos logos over time.
Holly Wood:
Back in the eighties, our logo’s different. Remember?
Marc Vila:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Holly Wood:
It was just orange and yellow.
Marc Vila:
And I was thinking of Coca-Cola was one. They’ve had tons. I mean every brand from Pizza Hut and Marlboro cigarettes, I mean every single major brand will have logo changes over time. And that’s to stay modern, to stay fresh and let their customers know, hey, we’re still the same company we’ve been, but we’re also evolving to be better and be with modern time. So there’s plenty of research you could do in how to sell that. One more service I just wanted to mention is if you do something like printing signs or graphics or anything like that, you can offer the service of helping them design their space.
Holly Wood:
Or installing. We talked about that too. That’s a great thing. Hey, I made this for you. I made this car app for you. I can also install it.
Marc Vila:
So some businesses will just… A friend of mine has a business and he just prints the signs and he does a lot of photos that go on walls in doctors and dentists.
Holly Wood:
It’s hard to install.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Exactly.
Holly Wood:
Sometimes.
Marc Vila:
And he just sells the product, right? He sells it. And these places have a facilities person that will install it and he just provides that and they figure out how to install it, which is fine. But an additional level up on his service would be, “Hey, what I can do is I can help you design it.” Service that you pay for. Make it, the physical product you sell. Secondary service, do the installation for you. So you have two options or three options even. It’s a hundred bucks for the sign. It’s a hundred bucks for the consultation. And then we’ll pick the signs and we’ll figure out how many you want. And then there’s upsell opportunities. And then the installation would be this. And you can offer your customers potentially three packages, the 200, 500, 900 for the three of these packages.
Holly Wood:
In some cases I would think the installation would even be the most expensive because it’s labor.
Marc Vila:
Absolutely. And again, these are all things you don’t necessarily have to do yourself. You can find somebody who’s good at doing that stuff, a contractor that you can pay and of course markup. Okay, great. So we have one more, which this one I find to be the most interesting. So tell us about this last one.
Holly Wood:
Just merge or acquire another business. So we had chatted about maybe you have a business and you either look at a business that’s maybe about to go out of business or retire. Let’s say they’re going to retire. And you may want to scoop them up. Maybe they offer the same products as you, or they may offer different products, but both of you are strong and you can come together to diversify yourself.
Marc Vila:
And I think that’s the best opportunity for a small business owner to really fast jump up, potentially gain equipment, customer base, reputation, all of these things.
Holly Wood:
When we did it here at ColDesi, I think it was a great example of Belquette. They are amazing engineers. But weren’t so good at the sales and marketing side. And we are excellent in our platforms across the internet and we’re able to reach a lot of people. So when we came together, it was the best of both worlds.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. And so that was a great one of merging where the folks at Belquette Technologies, they had made direct to garment printers before that were just cutting edge. And we were a company that was great at selling and training and supporting products. And the owners of that company really just wanted to engineer. That’s what they loved. So they-
Holly Wood:
They didn’t like that part of it.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. They didn’t like that as much. That wasn’t their favorite thing to do. Their favorite thing to do was engineering and building and designing. So now they’re here at ColDesi engineering things like the vacuum platen for the G4 direct to garment printer. Just industry changing technology.
So a couple quick examples of that would be, you mentioned somebody retiring. So what I would say is in your area, if there are similar businesses as yours that have been around for a really long time, I would probably want to meet those folks. And if you walk in there and it’s a couple old timers that run a print shop and you just say, “Hey, I’ve got an embroidery business. I’m kind of a startup, but I’ve been growing and I don’t know if we could ever partner together or if you guys have any sort of retirement plan or anything like that.” But I’d be just open to the conversation of what if in the future maybe something could happen with this relationship where potentially they could sell you the business.
Or “You know what, it’d be great. We would love to retire, but not give up the business yet. What if you did all the work and we worked out some sort of an arrangement where we still get some money.”
And a friend of mine did that with a roofing industry. He didn’t have the cash in the bank to buy a business and he wasn’t going to take out a loan of that size to buy a business. But he made a deal with the owner of this company. And just over the course of time, they worked on a payment plan and they came to an arrangement that they were both happy. And now that was, gosh, that was 10 or 15 years ago.
Holly Wood:
And he was going to retire eventually, so he just kind of…
Marc Vila:
Yeah, that guy’s now retired. He’s fully retired. And my friend owns the business. And it was just a conversation. The guy said, “I’m thinking about closing this business one day.” And he said, “Well, what if I could buy it somehow? I don’t have any money though.” But I mean that’s a conversation that you have. So a look to potentially merge with businesses that are local that they don’t offer embroidery or you do.
Holly Wood:
Or maybe a sign business across town.
Marc Vila:
A sign business.
Holly Wood:
They’re getting requests for other types of printing and you’re getting requests for a lot of signage. Maybe find that person. Could be a young business that you just maybe want to merge with and merge your strengths.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, merge your strengths together. And also they may find that they do signs and trophies and their business has been slowing down. Online’s been killing us. Business has been slow. And you could say, “Listen, I am doing T-shirts and I can’t keep up. I’m wondering if there’s some sort of partnership we could build together.” And that could really grow your business. You can help each other. Now all of a sudden you’re selling the signs and awards to your T-shirt customers because you’re doing T-shirts for the dance as an example. And then they like to give out some sort of awards to all the kids at the end of the year.
Holly Wood:
And as you mentioned earlier, it could be cyclical. So the signs and awards may pick up at a different time of the year where your T-shirts may hit a different time as well.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s all great.
Holly Wood:
But all that gains more customers for each.
Marc Vila:
And now we’ve got maybe about five more minutes that we’re going to put into the podcast. So I’d like to just talk about real quick the steps to diversifying your business so we can kind of spend a minute on each. And then if you go to CustomApparelStartups.com and you find this episode on how to diversify your business with Holly Wood, then you’ll read a little bit more that we’ll put in there. So what are the four steps that you outlined for us?
Holly Wood:
I have do your research, assess your risk, audit your resources, and then plan.
Marc Vila:
Okay.
Holly Wood:
So under research, my notes here, just a few questions. Have your customers suggested diversifying? Are they asking for more products or services? What can you do better than your competitors in a current or new market? And what type of diversification would suit your business?
Marc Vila:
Okay. Yeah, that’s excellent. What I love are the first one you said, have your customers suggested something? You should sell hats. Why don’t you sell hats now? I mean, it could be various reasons. You don’t know how to do it. You don’t have the equipment. You tried before and failed. But if your customers are asking you to diversify, like, “Hey, we want hats too.” You’ve got an opportunity, so jump on it, learn how to do it, purchase a hat heat press, figure out how to get it done on your embroidery machine if you haven’t done it before. But listen to your customers because they will ask you for what they want you to diversify in. And then the other is similarly is you can just ask them. You can survey, do an email survey.
Holly Wood:
Yeah, that’s a great way to do it.
Marc Vila:
After a sale, say, “Hey, what other products might you buy?” And I’m just a fan of just being straight up honest about it. Just, “Hey, I’m thinking about diversifying my business. Not sure what else I want to bring on next. I’ve got a handful of ideas. Could you just take this. On this piece of paper, just check the ones you might be interested if I offered in the future.” And then if you can get 20 people to fill that out and you look at it and you’re like, gosh, 17 of these people said hats. I mean, you’ve got it.
Holly Wood:
I need to figure that out.
Marc Vila:
And then I think you also said what diversification suits your business. That’s a great one too. If you do shirts, hats obviously seems to go well together with that. I don’t know if I would go from shirts to awards. It might not, unless of course you’re in some sort of industry where shirts and awards are together a lot.
Holly Wood:
Like you just said, yeah.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. So just figure out and just do your research by asking your customers, looking at your customer base, surveying people and figure out what else just seems to go well with your customer base. Now you said assessing your risks.
Holly Wood:
Which goes right into what you said about maybe you don’t want to go into trophies. Because diversifying can help generate your sales and increase your market, but you have to find the balance of that new market or diversification and not losing focus on what we’re already doing good. So you have to be careful with that. And then it may carry less risk, as we said, just doing T-shirts, then we’re going to go to hats or something like that versus going to a whole nother sector of awards or signs or something that’s completely different. So you just have to figure out what is the best risk, like you said. Maybe what people are asking for or-
Marc Vila:
Yeah. What people are asking for-
Holly Wood:
What the need is.
Marc Vila:
… is super low risk. If you have a white toner printer and you’re not doing anything with hard surfaces like mugs or ceramic or glass, metal signs, it’s pretty low risk to get some paper that does that. A hundred bucks or so. Get some product, some wooden signs that are blanks and make some for your customers if that fits your market. And that’s just reasonably low risk compared to immediately jumping into a new piece of technology or trying to get into a market that’s significantly different than what you do. That’s much higher risk, not only in the amount of money you’ll invest, but in time, effort, percentage of failure. If you have current customers and you just kind of try something new that they might buy, very low risk. You ask a bunch of people, you try to sell it, it works, you made money. It doesn’t work, you don’t do it anymore, and you’re not out that much.
Holly Wood:
Right. Right. It’s just something that didn’t work.
Marc Vila:
And then you said, audit your resources, which-
Holly Wood:
That one’s pretty easy.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Holly Wood:
What do you have now and what do you need to invest?
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Holly Wood:
Do I need to borrow money or do I have enough in the bank, or am I just adding a simple hat press to make hats and I already have it? That’s pretty easy.
Marc Vila:
And the resources would also be time. So maybe you don’t have a surplus of money yet, but you do have a bit of a surplus of time. So how can you grow your business? Mentioning adding hats. Well, I’ve done embroidery. I’ve only done shirts. I tried hats a little bit. I failed. I broke needles, so I gave up. Well, you have a surplus of time. Embroidery machines absolutely embroider hats. So you get on the phone with ColDesi, you figure out what you’re doing wrong. You watch some videos, you practice a bunch, buy some hats. It’s low risk to buy a couple dozen hats. And you spend that time, the resource that you have of time to learn how to do it. And now you have a new product.
Holly Wood:
And maybe that was back right before when you just started embroidering and everything was new. And now A, I know how to embroider, so now the hats aren’t going to be as big of a deal.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s excellent. And then the last one is just a plan, which I think is just essential. It doesn’t need to be formal. You don’t have to Google search how to write a business plan for adding a new product. You just kind of write out, I’m going to learn how to do hats first. How am I going to do that? I’m going to contact ColDesi. I’m going to go through my training videos. I’m going to buy hats to practice on. I’m going to get hats. I’m going to get my logos digitized for hats on purpose, and I’m going to go through that. Then I’m going to go and start talking to my customers about hats. I’m going to provide some free samples. Or maybe before that, you would build out a pricing sheet and you just kind of step by step say what you’re going to do. How are you going to do it? And then you can just start to follow that plan. And it doesn’t have to be hard. And if you’ve gone through and done your research and assessed your risks, and-
Holly Wood:
You did it one, like the first time. It’s much like doing a new business. So you’ve already done it once. Right.
Marc Vila:
You’ve already done it once before.
Holly Wood:
So it’s not that difficult.
Marc Vila:
Yes, exactly. That’s the less scary part. But so many folks kind of get stuck and I don’t know how to make more money. I’m not sure what else to do. I feel like I’ve tried everything. And that is, if you feel like you’re at this plateau and you either are not sure how to grow or what to do next, then I would recommend for one, taking some of the notes on this podcast and bringing it into real life. Go to CustomApparelStartups.com, read the notes that we put down in here, and just start writing down some ideas. Just start with just free thinking ideas. What else could I sell? What other markets could I get into? If I were to, what’s the risk?
Holly Wood:
And how can I advertise it? One of my favorite-
Marc Vila:
How can I advertise it? How can I market it?
Holly Wood:
… podcast that you did was saying just throw something in. If you’re doing a T-shirt, maybe throw in a coozie. Or maybe you just started embroidering hats and you just, I mean, hats are only three or $4. I mean you can get pretty good hats. Maybe you throw that in with a shirt. Oh, you do this too. So opening their eyes to I can do other things too.
Marc Vila:
Right, right. So that’s fantastic. Well, we went through a lot of information in a short period of time here, but I think it was really great. This is actually going to help you succeed if you do some of these things. So if you have questions about how to diversify your business more, or what type of equipment you should get, or what equipment you own may already do, then you can go to coldesi.com. You can reach out, live chat or call, talk to one of our pros. And you can just ask. Say, “Hey, listen, I’ve got a cutter. I’m trying to figure out how to grow my business. This is what I’m doing. What should I do next? What could I do next?” And we have folks that have those conversations every single day here that will help you out. So thanks for joining us and Custom Apparel Startups. Can’t wait for you to come back. And jump on ColDesi.com and talk to us about how we can help you diversify your business.
Holly Wood:
Yep. Thank you.
Marc Vila:
Thank you.