When it comes to running a successful Columbus t-shirt printing company, there are many different directions one can go. Personally speaking, I’m a fan of whatever works best. Sometimes it takes a little while to figure it out. I heard it said, that experience is the best teacher, but that doesn’t work in the world of business. I would much rather learn from someone else’s mistakes than make my own, especially when some mistakes are much less forgiving than others. Any route to go is going to be a very calculated risk because there are certainly are no for sure in the world of business. You go forward with a good plan after doing your homework and hope for good things as a result.
Here’s something to consider. Instead of starting out by incurring a large overhead that is consisting of the normal overhead of starting a digital t-shirt printing business, such as seeking out a brick and mortar facility where you can do your production and going out and buying expensive state-of-the-art equipment, consider surrounding yourself with a network of people who are great at what they do and letting them do it for you. Take production for example, there’s a lot more to it than just owning the correct machinery. You have to know how to use it! It doesn’t just happen overnight and you’re going to probably have to pay a premium, to find an experienced screen printer that goes along with all the other virtues you would be looking for such as honesty and integrity.
It also gets even more complicated if you’re going to cater to offer custom embroidery. If you’re going to also cater to that market, you’re going to need experienced operators to stand behind those machines as well. When you break it down, as expensive as the equipment is, what’s even more expensive are the people running them. Instead, you might want to consider outsourcing all your screen printing and embroidery production. The key here is to find a company that you can depend on. A great company can make you really look good and a bad one can make you look very bad just that quick. The reason I mentioned integrity earlier concerning employees, the companies you network with are no different. Make sure you have an agreement up front that they’re not going to steal your clientele. If you can find the right folks to work with, it will not only drastically cut your overhead of monthly expenses, but it allow you to concentrate on marketing as well as sales.
There are just so many hours in the day and only so much energy in your body so this would give you a way to prioritize what’s most important. It’s always been my opinion that the most important component of any successful digital t-shirt printing business is the ability to sell it. This is what sets the contract printers apart from the rest of the crowd. The folks that do the contract work are normally high volume low profit. More than not, the only reason they tend to go that direction is because it’s very difficult for them to sell their own jobs. Therefore, they depend on others to keep a steady flow of blank apparel coming in constantly.