I’ve heard it said that knowledge is power. Working hard to achieve one’s goal is certainly admirable but let’s face it, when it comes to the end of the month, and it’s time to pay your bills, nobody cares how hard you actually tried. All your creditors are concerned with this one thing – where’s their money! If you happen to be a young entrepreneur with a lot of energy and ambition that’s trying to make a name for himself in the Columbus t-shirt printing industry, then I would certainly recommend you pull up a chair, get comfortable and read this carefully.
There are many different ways that you can go when starting a Columbus screen printing and custom embroidery company. That being said, there are no for sures in business and every approach you take is going to be a calculated risk. I happen to be a big fan of low risk and high reward. The first thing you need to do is pick your battles. One needs to be very discriminating regarding where he or she is going to direct the lion’s share of their effort, as well as where to allocate their initial investment. The traditional way of starting a digital t-shirt printing company for most folks has been to go out and buy some very expensive equipment. You are also going to need a place to put it and do your production. If you choose to take this path you are also going to require employees that know what they’re doing and standing behind those presses. We’re talking huge overhead here! As I mentioned earlier, the employees have to know what they’re doing.
There’s a lot more to screen printing and embroidery then just owning the machinery. You need to know how to use it and there’s a huge learning curve to it. That being said, the good folks and representatives at the trade shows make it look so effortless. I can assure you that it’s not that way when you’re first starting out. Be expected to ruin a lot of different T-shirts. Relax, it’s all part of the learning process. My recommendation would be to start out by just forming a marketing plan. No matter how good you are at whatever it is you do, nothing happens before the sale and without that, you’ll quickly be out of business. I also recommend not incurring that huge overhead when first starting out. Instead, why don’t you consider finding a good contract embroiderer to do the work for you? Using this method, you will be able to do a feasibility study and see if you can actually be successful in sales and build a significant clientele before incurring a huge monthly financial responsibility.
The fact that we live in the digital environment that we do, this will give you a huge advantage when reaching out to new potential customers compared to the old days when people did mass mailings and just walked around knocking on doors. Instead I would start out with a very targeted social media campaign. Work on building a following on several different social media platforms. I hope this is helpful!