My goodness, it is a great day to be alive in the year 2015. I can remember being a young kid in high school her back in 1978 trying to figure out now that I’m 18 years old it’s probably time that I should try to get a handle on what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. The problem is no 18-year-old has enough life experience to figure that out. All they can do is try to make an educated guess. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing except for the fact that you or your parents are going to invest in a costly college tuition and you would like to get it right the first time instead of continually changing your major and starting over. There’s an old saying that reads users wasted on the young. They have all this energy but very little life experience.
I wasn’t always in the custom T-shirt business. As a young man I used to own and operate an asphalt company. It was a very difficult way to make a living especially living in the Midwest. It gave the illusion that you are making a lot of money fast but then when Winter would come along and you would have to shut down for four months. So when you add it all up and really didn’t average out to a whole lot of money. What took me eight months to acquire would rapidly disappear in less than four. I can remember praying to God to help me discover a better way to earn a living and live up to my full potential. One day I was hanging out at the mall just people watching and bored out of my mind when I happened to notice that almost everyone who walked by was wearing something with a logo on it. I thought to myself, I think I could sell that but I don’t know the first thing about it. Shortly after that, I got some business cards made that said something to the effect of Columbus Ohio T-shirt printing and Columbus Ohio screen printing company. I started cold calling on every business that I could find and asking if the owner was available to speak to me. I didn’t just start talking to the secretary because experience has taught me earlier that she’s not the decision-maker and even if she likes what I have to say, she doesn’t have the authority to give me the go-ahead to start the order. This was very challenging because the owner was not always available. I learned things like you don’t want to call in a restaurant during lunch hours because I got in the way and they were too busy to talk to you. If I was fortunate enough to catch the decision-maker while he was in, I would simply ask him that the next time that he was in the market to purchase some custom T-shirts and when he was looking for screen printing or embroidery, if I could just simply have a chance to give him a quote. If I could give them a better deal than the company they had been using previously great, but if I couldn’t, then there’s really no reason to use us. I would try to put together a scenario where he was as comfortable using us as we were providing that type of service for him. I felt that if we could impress him by giving him this product on time for a fair price, then the repeat orders along with the good referral should simply take care of themselves.
Today we have the advantages that technology has given us such as the ability to cater to digital T-shirt printing. This enables us to cater to smaller quantities with multiple colors and not having to go through all the time-consuming set up and cleanup of doing things the old traditional way. It doesn’t matter how many colors the images are composed of. It literally does away with all of the normal set up requirements normal silk screening applications required previously. Technology has had a tremendous impact on almost every sector of our lives and we are most certainly in the digital age.