- 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?
