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- My name is Mark Coudray. I've been in screen printing over 50 years. I started my first company when I was 19 and that was 46 years ago. Company's still running. We're still producing product. So, my number one piece of advice for new and growing screen printing companies is begin with the end in mind. Figure out what you wanna do and not about the process that you're doing but how do you wanna exit the business. You know, are you gonna build this to sell it, or are you gonna build it as an investment that runs on its own? Look at the big picture overall and that will shade your decisions along the way. The biggest challenge that I see with companies is just becoming overwhelmed with business as usual, business that walks in. It's not a good fit, they take it to pay the bills, but it doesn't move you towards your objective. When you know what you have a clear picture of where you're going, then it makes it much easier to make good decisions to get there faster. How would I approach it differently? So, if I'm growing it to sell it, I would grow it fast and exit soon, as opposed to doing it as employment situation. A lot of people wanna be entrepreneurs, but they wanna work in their business, which is totally fine. Entrepreneurs that do that tend to slow their growth. They don't grow as fast as if they were focusing just on getting it to the point where it has maximum value, and they have a purpose for that value on the backend of it. So, if I'm growing it to sell it, I would do it quicker. I would put systems in place faster. If I was growing it for myself, I would do it in such a way that I would progressively remove myself from the operations over time. In the beginning, you wanna do everything, because you know what works and what doesn't work, and you basically create your own recipes to the taste that you have for your own business, and that takes a longer time to do that. It's more of a self-employment situation there, and as you get it dialed in in each area, then you can hire someone and replace your activity with that individual. And then at some point, you remove yourself from the operations and just focus on the vision of the company and driving the company forward with sales and with new client relationships. The production side of the business handles itself. That's a good one. Everybody starts off that way. I started off that way. I built my first press with $200 in my parents' garage. So, I started like everybody else does, and in the beginning I was very ambitious, so I would go out and sell to anybody. I'd just walk in and pitch 'em on doing shirts, and I wasn't really too concerned about the people that didn't wanna buy stuff. I was only concerned about the people that did. That was my goal. I worked pretty well. I would say the biggest, single challenge from going from manual to automatic is not having a plan. If you're just taking work in to be busy, you'll find that that is not the right kind of work for an automatic. You want to have work that's gonna grow with you and grow with progressively larger orders. And automatic is really fast compared to manual printing. You can knock out work, the same job, 10 times faster than you can manually, and when you're selling small orders, you're blowing through a ton of small orders, which impacts your screen making and your art and all these other areas. When I bought my first automatic, I had enough work to last 16 hours a day for three months, and I was just overwhelmed. Three weeks into it, I was completely out of work, and I was out of money, 'cause I'd converted all my cash to accounts receivable, and it literally took me five years to get my feet back on the ground, 'cause I grew too quick. So if you're going to automatic, do it in a controlled way. What I would recommend first is find a good contract partner to work with and start contracting out the larger orders to the contract printer, make it conditional that you're there on site when the jobs are printed so that you can supervise your job. In the process you'll be able to observe and see what's working for you, and then when it gets to the point where your monthly contract work on a consistent basis is two to three times what your monthly payments would be to put automation in place, then that's the point at which I'd pull the trigger. So if you're trying to find an employee that cares enough about the business as you do, you're finding a competitor, because that person has entrepreneurial tendencies, and they are gonna learn from you and then go off and do their own thing, because they've got that drive. What you're after is you're after a personality type, and I recommend using the Myers-Briggs personality profile and find people that are going to adhere to the rules and want to satisfy their superiors. So essentially at that point, you can instill your values in them, and you set their goal to be the satisfaction values that you're looking for, and they'll be plenty happy doing that. And they'll feel fulfilled, and they'll feel like they're an important part of the business, but they have no aspiration of owning the business. So, it comes down to the personality profiles. I use 16personalities.com. It's free. Whenever I have somebody come in, I do that. I would also go through a couple of the personality profile books on Myers-Briggs and get familiar with the different personality types. Do it for yourself, so you understand who you are. I didn't do this until just maybe 10 years ago for myself, and it was stunning, my self discovery. Now I can understand why people would quit, or why I'd be so disappointed with people. We had personality types that were never meant to be, and I was hiring for somebody that was like me, and the worst thing you can do is hire for somebody that matches your own profile. Biggest mistakes, gosh there's so many. I don't like mistakes, and I don't like failure. Those are two terms for me that are, they don't help you. These are experience issues that we're talking about here. We're finding ways that don't work, and we're finding ways that lead to extra costs. That's ultimately what a mistake does, is it leads to extra cost. So, the challenge that I see, probably the biggest one is not having a mechanism in place to evaluate and correct errors when they occur. Every business in life, our existence in life, is about facing challenges, and the people that are successful get through the challenges faster than the ones that don't get over those challenges. So, if you approach the problems as a challenge and an opportunity, I know it sounds cliched and trite, but it's true, is that our job is to get over, under, around or through that obstacle or barrier once and for all, not once and then have to go back and repeat it. So, put that in place, so that you can solve a problem permanently, so that you don't have to repeat it again. First of all, organization. Now organization doesn't mean it has to be neat. You can have an organized shop that's cluttered, but you wanna have processes that are in place. We wanna have, if I pick up paperwork, and I can see all the information is there and the information is correct and people have signed off. There's been checkpoints and things along the way, milestones that have been recorded, that tells me that you've got somebody that understands that this is a process. And duplication of the process is what gets you to profitability faster than anything. Pricing theory. You know, if you go out and you look at the mechanics of pricing, and you look at it as a traditional, economics or an accounting prospect to it, if you do price accounting or cost accounting, you're gonna get yourself in trouble, and the reason is, is that when people calculate their price, their cost accounting, it's based on a percent of utilization. So if you say okay, my total cost for the shop is $20,000, and I've got 20 days in the month, I've gotta do $1000 a day. And so, if I divide that $1000 a day by eight hours, that's $125 an hour, right. Well, that's assuming that you're working 100% of the time, and in reality when we measure shop efficiencies, and we've done this hundreds of times, the shop efficiency typically is between somewhere around 24 to about 33%. When you take out lunches, breaks, approvals, packing, changing the press over, setting the press up, your actual production time is about 24, 25 to 33%, and that triples or quadruples the cost per hour. So if you're basing your cost on $125, it's gonna end up being more like $375 to $500 an hour is your true cost. So by using cost accounting, you actually set yourself up for coming up on the short end of the deal. I tend to price jobs based on value, and value, there's many, many components that go into value. The really powerful aspect about using value-based pricing is that you eliminate your competitors when you do it. You are defining what value is, and you're defining it in the terms that your customer is looking for. Your competitors are all about themselves. They're about their cost, their methods, their prices, and they're not satisfying the client, so there's no connection there. But when you start talking on the customer's terms, and you're delivering value based on what's important to them, then your pricing becomes much more elastic and you're able to charge much more for what you do. New customers? - [Interviewer] Yep. - Be very careful about your new customers. Again, we talked about this earlier, and that is target your customers. Understand which niche that you wanna do business in. I recommend that you pick three to four niches to be, not just competent but expert in that area, to know everything that there needs to know about that, not about how the garment is decorated or the types of garments that are being used, but how the garments are being displayed. How are they being distributed? How are they being sold? How are they being accounted for and transported? How are the events being promoted? Are garments being part of the promotion? You know, there's so many different things that you can incorporate into the knowledge of how garments are used in those particular niches. If it's a safety niche, does it have to be fire-retardant? And if it's reflective, does it have to be ANSI reflectivity quality? You know, there's all these different kinds of things that if you're not focused on a niche you would never know. Lack of organization, and really what it comes down to is information flow. So, it's getting better with programs like Printavo, because they're helping to manage the information more accurately, but there are still holes, things fall apart. The approval process is one of the biggest challenges in the entire sequence, because if you don't get approvals from your client and things aren't crystal clear, there's gonna be mistakes, and mistakes are gonna come back to hurt you. Or it's not gonna be clear, and it's gonna take time. Time is really the most important thing we do. People talk about return on investment, I talk about return on time. If we look at the work that we're doing, how do we put a value on that time that we spend? How does it come back to us? Is this the best way that we should be spending that time?