hey guys I'm Claire from Bella+Canvas today's video is all about growing your
screen print business how do you know when it's time to invest further into
the business to hire more staff and to upgrade your equipment we're talking
with stoked on printing on how they started it in a spare bedroom then grew
into the operation we'll show you today my name is Kevin Oakley and I am
co-owner of stoked on printing and we're based in Las Vegas Nevada we do screen
printing embroidery and direct to garment
Shan my co-owner and I started in about 2007 we were in high school when we were
in bands we had a hard time obtaining band merchandise so we decided to just
start doing it ourselves in a spare bedroom currently we have about 40 team
members we have four automatic presses we have eighteen heads of embroidery we
have director garment we have a fully automated screen room
we constantly invested from the very beginning we were both very young guys
so we had the luxury of doing so most of the profit and most of the money that we
didn't make we bought another piece of equipment we invested into a larger
space we invested in two people we invested in the processes and what's led
us to go from that point to this point is procedures software technology and
just good equipment we were approached by promotional product distributors as
there was kind of a hole in the town in Las Vegas that we live for actually
supplying them with contract printing and at that point we took on those
accounts not really knowing what contract printing was and once we picked
up two or three of those accounts we realized that we needed a little bit
more space to fulfill them as well as another machine at the point where we
had moved into the shop we really didn't have too many orders we probably had
about four to five orders a week which averaged about 20 shirts or so it was
definitely a very scary move and we when we moved we've had one manual and a very
small dryer we upgraded to an automatic within the first four months of being in
that space we did not have enough business to
keep that thing going a full eight hours when we first started it was usually I
would make the screens Shane would set up the press and we would just meet in
the middle and we print a couple jobs that we had and then we would go back to
answering emails answering the phones and then later in the day go back to the
press start printing again so buying new equipment is super scary because there
are so many options out on the market and you really just have to find the
type of machine that is right for your business there are some machines that
are very intuitive they're very in-depth and then there's some that are more user
friendly so you have to distinguish what type of company you are if you're an
owner operator who is on the machine themselves you might want something
that's gonna be very in-depth and you can get into the Machine and get into
the settings and change a bunch of stuff all the time
or if you're a company that has employees running the press you might
want something a little bit more usability that has you anybody could hop
on the press and figure out how to do it within minutes and so you don't have a
huge learning curve once you have a new employee coming from another shop that's
used to using another machine when we were looking to buy equipment we were
completely switching brands it was very scary to move from a brand that we knew
that had great support and we knew the machines ran for a long time to switch
to a more another newer company that hadn't had that long of a track record
so that was the biggest concern that we had was support
if I were to go back and change certain things I would have probably bought new
equipment sooner it's hard for me to think that way because back then I
probably wouldn't listen to myself and I would also have been destined into a
shop management software way center earlier on we were doing things through
spreadsheets we were doing things through handwritten work orders whereas
a shop management software is a very there are some that are low barrier to
entry and will save you tons of time making way more efficient and save a ton
of money my best advice is just to keep going there's an investor his name's
Paul Graham and his best advice is don't die it's just to keep going as long as
you keep going there will be opportunities there will be things that
will come along that will make those hard days and those hard times you know
up within the past investing in your business without
knowing the outcome to be scary so we hope this video encourages you to take
that next step in growing your business have you made an upgrade recently that
shifted your business forward like stoked on printing what was your
experience like we'd love to hear from you in the comments below and don't
forget to like this video and subscribe to our Channel Be Different