Episode 178 – Building Good Business Habits

Custom Apparel Startups

Episode 178 – Building Good Business Habits

This Episode

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Mark Stephenson & Marc Vila

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customapparelstartups.com

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CAS Podcast

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ColDesi

You Will Learn

• Daily, weekly, and monthly habits that can help you succeed
• Tools to help you stay organized

Resources & Links

• Colman and Company Blog
• ColDesi Learning Center
• Leasing Equipment

Episode 178 – Building Good Business Habits

Show Notes

Can you guess how success in your customization business is like success in a fitness, financial, or weight loss program?

• If your goal is to lose 20lbs by September 30th, you can’t start working on that on the 25th and expect to be successful
• If your financial goal is to save up $20K for a down payment on house, or pay cash for a car, you’re probably not going to pull that money out of that week’s budget to make the purchase.

Because with your health and your finances you’ve got to do small things right on a regular basis – or BIG things on a regular basis – in order to succeed.

You’re not very likely to win the lottery OR wake up with 6-pack abs after buying a scratch off and doing sit-ups one morning.

BUT, if you save and invest over time, every day, do some ab work every day, you’re very likely to end up in the place you want to be.

Let’s apply that to your Business Life and talk about the habits that will help you reach your goals:

Regular Habit/Organization

Have a calendar. Use it. Live by it.

• Billing schedule
• Production calendar

Daily:

• Machine maintenance
• Check job schedule & checklist
  • Product, blank and supply status
  • Art work status
  • …
• Check/Enter new orders
• Communications – emails, calls and chats
  • Create appt/task/call entries
• Wrap up
  • Machine shutdown/maintenance
  • Adjust calendar/tasks for tomorrow

Weekly:

• Marketing Basics
  • Website Check – Working?
  • Social Updates
• Business Progress Check
• Check your Financial Life

Monthly:

• Review Quarterly / Annual Goals
• Business check in
  • How were sales?
  • What problems did you have?
  • What success did you have?
  • What do you wish you did better?
• Clean up
  • Make sure shop is in tip-top shape
  • Delete that ‘downloads’ folder on the computer
• Inventory Check
  • Supplies / Blanks / Tools

Tools:

• Asana Project Management / BaseCamp / Trello
• Freshbooks / Quickbooks
• Google Calendar or CRM
• Stripe / Square
• Good old Excel!

Transcript

Mark Stephenson:
Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. My name is Mark Stephenson.

Marc Vila:
And this is Marc Vila. Today, we’re here to talk about building good business habits.

Mark Stephenson:
It’s an exciting topic.

Marc Vila:
Really? I was going to say it sounds boring. People are already turning it off.

Mark Stephenson:
It’s gripping. Maybe double your income by doing these five things every morning.

Marc Vila:
Okay. That’s the new name. Double your income by doing these five things. But in all seriousness, I think that this is a pretty cool episode. It’s going to be very informative, and you are 100% going to get something out of this. And if you’re the type of business owner or help to run a business and you don’t get something out of this episode, then you’ve already won. Why are you listening to this podcast?

Mark Stephenson:
Exactly. You’re probably not listening to the podcast, because everybody here wants to improve. One of the inspirations was this. Marc Vila and I are both big self improvers. I think it’s part of the marketing and entrepreneurial mindset that you’re always looking for a way to be better, to be healthier, to do better with our money, to do better with our business, to do better serving you guys, getting you better information. Thinking about that, I was on my walk this morning, which is part of my fitness program is that I walk four times a week. It just started me thinking about how there’s this set of things that you do every day that work over time versus things that you do at the last minute. If your goal is to lose 20 pounds in the next 90 days, you can’t wait 85 days and lose all that weight. It doesn’t work unless you decide to go to the hospital. Those are things that you do a little bit every day. There are things that it’s a habit that you develop that will lead you there.

Marc Vila:
Yep. That’s great. And just talking about the weight loss and health, I think I’ve mentioned on the podcast, at least that a good friend of mine’s a trainer and really into all of that. That’s always his mindset. This episode is his mindset, is “These are the things I do every day. These are the things I tell my clients to do every day.” And he said, “We make a list and you just do this stuff every day, because if you do it every day, you’re definitely going to reach your goal. One way or the other, you’re going to reach it because you’re doing these things every single day.” And not everybody hits their goal as quick as they want. Every single body is different. Some people, he’ll say the weight just drops off them and they get way stronger super fast. Other people, it’s slow going and you can’t see results quickly, but a year later, before and after pictures are crazy. And he said, “But it’s only the people who do it every day.”

Mark Stephenson:
Right. The same thing pretty much goes for financing, too. For finance, your personal finances, and your business finances. If you’ve got a goal of you want to save up 20 grand for a down payment on a house, or to write a check for a pool or a car, you are welcome to play the lottery the day before you need that money and try to see if you can win, but that’s not a great strategy for most people. You’ve got to take the financial steps. You’ve got to save your money. You’ve got to invest your money. You have to learn more about investments. You have to do these things on a regular basis in order to improve your financial situation. And both of those, personal fitness and financial fitness, the way you treat those things to be successful is the same exact way you have to treat your business to be successful.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s a good point. I think that as we dive into these, we’ve broken these up into things you should do daily, weekly, monthly, and annually. As we get into them, a lot of it is a bit of common sense, and you probably should have some aha moments as you listen to this and you take some notes and write things down and say, “I don’t do that. I don’t keep up on that.” What you should visualize in your head listening to this and going forward would be two things. “If I did this every day or every week, what would be better? What are some problems that I would’ve avoided in the past if I would’ve been doing this?” And then your future self would thank you if you’ve done that. Then the other, you could pat yourself on the back some, too. Say, “I do this every day already,” and then make yourself feel good that you are doing that stuff every day and then consider what would happen if you wouldn’t have done that in the beginning.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, I love that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Should we start with every day or do we have any other summary stuff before we do that?

Mark Stephenson:
I’ve got a couple more things that I want to point out and that is we’re going to give you the stuff that we think works and has worked for people that we know and works for us and some of the things work for us every day. But just like a fitness program or a financial program, they might not be for you. These aren’t your steps. These are steps that we strongly recommend. Some of them stronger than others, but the way you work might be different. Just like one of the ways I stay healthy is I’m a vegetarian.

One of the ways that you stay healthy might be that you’re on an Atkins diet, or you do keto, or you may work out every day. If you’re into finance, one of you may do real estate and another one might just invest in mutual funds or stock trading or something like that. You’re going to use your own methodology here to a great extent, but we’re going to give you some of the ideas, some of the frameworks that we think are going to help you. At least if not to follow them exactly to plan your business out to be more successful is to use them as a basis to develop your own hardcore, I do this every day, kind of habits.

Marc Vila:
Mm. That’s really good.

Mark Stephenson:
The next thing that I want to talk about is I’m reading this book called Atomic Habits.

Marc Vila:
Oh, my friend that I was just speaking about moments ago just told me that he’s reading that book for the second time. That was, I think, on Sunday this past week. He just told me about that.

Mark Stephenson:
Funny.

Marc Vila:
That’s a sign. That’s a sign from the universe that I should read that.

Mark Stephenson:
One of the things that I got immediately at it, is the author starts out by the… Because here’s what I imagine. You’re hearing us talk about this, you’re hearing habits, we’re going to give you stuff you have to do every day, and you’re saying to yourself, “I’m not the kind of person that does that. I don’t wake up early and do things on purpose. I don’t exercise in the mornings. I don’t save my money that way. I don’t track my spending.” You’re identifying yourself as that person. One of the things the Atomic Habits guy talks about is if you identify yourself as athletic upfront, and then figure out what you have to do to be athletic.

So if you hear something, you say, “Hey, the first thing you have to do,” we’re going to say this over and over again. “When you go in in the morning, is do machine maintenance.” “Well, I’m not the one that does maintenance. My husband does maintenance. My wife does the maintenance, and he’s only available every other Thursday or something like that.” You may want to stop anytime you start to say, “I don’t do things that way,” or “I’m not the kind of person that does things that way,” and be prepared to change it. Because if you change it in a positive way, you’ll be more successful in the long run.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. That’s good. Definitely, the way you define yourself is a really interesting thing that’s discussed across any book that you read about sales or entrepreneurship or parenting or anything that’s a goal oriented book. They will tell you that the way you define yourself, the words you use about yourself, determine your future. You create self-fulfilling prophecies in a way. I watched a video the other day, and it was about… This is a little side note, but I find it interesting, and I’ve got a microphone.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay. Podcasters are all very important.

Marc Vila:
No, but it’s true though, and it has to do with this. The gentleman said, “Stop saying that you’re bad at remembering names,” because as soon as you say that, you’ve given yourself an excuse to forget the person’s name that you’re about to hear. You’re going to forget it, because you’ve told the person, “Hey, I’m going to forget your name and it’s okay.” So then you just put no priority on remembering their name.

Mark Stephenson:
So you’ll never get better.

Marc Vila:
You’ll never get better at it, and you will always be bad at remembering names. And guess what? The other thing is there’s no such thing as people who are bad at remembering names necessarily versus people who are good at remembering names, Now, there are people who have a really good memory, and they just recall things much faster. They may seem like they remember names better, but the average person who remembers names, they remember names because they just focus on who the name is, they maybe repeat it back to the person. “Oh, is that Kathy with a C or a K?” And they say things like that. Anyway, I think that it goes right with what you said. If you’re the type of person who says, “Oh, I don’t operate like that in the morning. I can’t do this.” Well, why are you defining yourself that you can’t? Why don’t you say, “Well, what can I do?” Anyway, well maybe we can go into some of these things.

Mark Stephenson:
I love that. That’s great. Let’s jump into some of the habits for your business life that Marc Vila recommends that you do every day.

Marc Vila:
I don’t recommend any of these. Okay, I recommend them all, and Mark Stephenson, you have to get credit for this one, because I know I’m guilty of this type of behavior myself, but first, for one, I’ll back up a second. We’re going to talk about things you should do every day, things you should do every week, things you should do every month. We’re going to start on daily and move our way up as we wrap them up. The first thing you should do every day that you’re working is machine maintenance.

Mark Stephenson:
Surprise!

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I was like, “Of course,” but then when I really thought about it, you had said, “You’re going to get an email or a phone call that’s going to suck you into something, and then you don’t do your machine maintenance.”

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. This is really the best example of your priorities making a difference, because it’s probably not going to matter if you wake up and you start dealing with customers on Facebook or on your phone, through email, and things like that. Then, it’s noon and you’re already into your job and you never did the machine maintenance, that has serious consequences.

Marc Vila:
Over time, right?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
And this is going to be different for every machine. By the way, everything we name is different for every business. You’ve got to be cognizant of what your business is, what your equipment is, and what you do and not. That’s, I think, why Mark previously did a predesist? I don’t have a word for that right now.

Mark Stephenson:
I said it in the beginning.

Marc Vila:
You said it in the beginning. Don’t set yourself up with, “I don’t do that. I’m not that type of person.” Don’t allow these excuses to rule over the fact that you get to make individual choices. But if you have a direct to garment printer, your daily maintenance schedule is going be significantly different in what you’re needing to do than if you have all digital heat effects white toner printer. Vastly different.

Mark Stephenson:
And the consequences are different.

Marc Vila:
And the consequences are different. But just because you have a “maintenance free” printer, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make sure it’s free of dust, make sure that there’s paper inside of it, whatever things you might do. Check toner levels, things like that. But if you allow yourself to not adhere to a daily maintenance schedule, whatever that might be, then it’s so easy for you to get into a habit of getting sucked into other things every day. Then, it builds up over time, especially if you have something a DTG printer or an embroidery machine that you’re forgetting to oil every other day. Next thing you know, you have a big job, there’s a bunch of thread breaks happening, you don’t understand why, because you didn’t do anything wrong.

But the thing was was for the past two months, you were supposed to be cleaning out your rotary hook and bobbin case and checking the attention of your bobbin case and all these things and you weren’t doing it. And slowly things are building up in there. Next thing you know, you’ve got a big chunk of lint in the back of your rotary hook where your bobbin goes. You go to replace that, and you just jam the machine up and you ruin the jacket.

Mark Stephenson:
I’ll tell you that if you’ve got any kind of a liquid ink machine, if it’s a UV printer or a DTG printer, or one of our high volume direct to film printers now, let me tell you. If the machine breaks for some reason, because you didn’t maintain it, if you lose a head, you’re down and it’s expensive. That daily maintenance is going to be extremely important. Even if you’ve got one of the white toner printers, or you’ve got a sublimation printer, or you’ve got an embroidery machine, if you go to do a job for that day and you’re having problems with the machine, or it just doesn’t work for any reason at all, you’re closed. That’s why the daily maintenance or just making sure everything is working properly is number one. Roll out of bed, get a cup of coffee, check your machines.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s really good. It can even be because all other types of weird things happen, too, that don’t necessarily have to do with the machine. For example, if you wake up, pour your coffee, read emails, get sucked into a phone call. It’s 8:00 AM. By 1:00 PM, you need to start a production job, so you’re just doing your other stuff and you haven’t even looked at your equipment. You go to turn the machine on, it doesn’t turn on. You realize that the breaker in your office won’t stay on. It just broke. The breaker broke.

So now, you’re either going to Lowe’s and buying a new little breaker switch, or you’re calling an electrician. But it’s 12 o’clock and you were going to start at one, versus if you would’ve just checked everything at 8:00 AM, you could have realized the problem then and either gone and fixed it or called somebody to come fix it way early. So that’s just goes to, “Is everything turning on? Does everything look clean? Does everything look right? Are all my levels fine?” It is just really good, and it’s so fast for the most part, for most equipment.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. You go in, check your equipment, turn your heat press on, do the whole thing, make sure everything is working, and that will pay off. This is the one daily task. One of the daily tasks that I think you and I are both on board with. I don’t really care what your pattern is. If I wake up in the morning and my internet is not working, I’m closed. So make sure that you’re on top of that stuff.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Yeah. I agree. It’s just really important, and it’s so simple. So don’t give up on that one and don’t brush it off. The next thing on our list, if we’re ready to move on…

Mark Stephenson:
Yep.

Marc Vila:
… Is check your job schedule, check your calendar, go through what do you have going on today? That should be a daily thing right after you do your maintenance. You should just pick up your phone, pick up your computer and say, “What’s on deck?”

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I envision you do all your maintenance checks and everything, and then you turn on your computer and you open up your calendar, which has your to-do list in it. The first thing you do is you check off that you did your machine maintenance that morning. The second thing you do is you take a look at all the other pre-planned activities that you’ve got. What are the jobs that are due today? Is there a checklist for each job that I need to go through? Et cetera.

Marc Vila:
Yep. Today, I’ve got to do my maintenance. I’ve got to make 20 hats. I’ve got to make 15 T-shirts. We’re making a sign. Then, I’ve got a phone call at 2:00 PM with a potential buyer. I’ve got a follow up phone call at 4:00 PM with a previous customer who wants to discuss next year’s plans. Then, I’ve got to get to the bank and do something.

Mark Stephenson:
Hey, I’m just going to say this, an unpopular opinion. If you’re doing all this on a legal pad, you’re not doing it right. I understand that maybe your preference to just write things down on a piece of paper, but there’s no reminders built into a piece of paper. You can’t move a task automatically from one place to another. You can’t communicate with your clients from that piece of paper. You can’t add notes if you’ve done a one through 10 to-do list of your day, you can’t add notes if things change or other things that you want to remember. If you’re running any kind of a business that relies on you doing things properly on a regular basis, Google comes free with a calendar. It’s not tough.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Something electronic is good, and it does allow you to easily take it portable. So you do something on your desktop, it’s immediately going to be updated on your phone or on your tablet, too. You could also share that calendar with your spouse or your coworkers or your clients even potentially and add people. It’s a great thing, but having a calendar/task list is really important, and you should just check that early in the day. I know that every day that I forget to check my calendar or check my list is a day that I get surprised that I have an 11:00 AM meeting. And I’m just into doing something and I’m just staring and typing away and going. Then, I get a popup on my computer that says, “You have a meeting in 15 minutes.” I’m like, “Dang.” Now, I got to stop what I’m doing, check that, and it’s only on the days where I don’t just quickly… And it takes seconds. I get my phone out, and I just go. I’m walking to my office and I just pull up my calendar. And I say,” 2:00 PM today. 11:00 AM.” Perfect.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. If you’re not somebody that already uses one of these calendars, then there’s a couple reasons it’s worth it. One of them is what Marc Vila said, because that happens to me normally when I’m writing articles for one of the websites or a side client or something like that, is I’m in the middle of writing and I forget that time is passing. Even if I know that I’ve got that 11 o’clock meeting, the automated popup that I can set for five minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes before, a day before, it really doesn’t matter, you can set it. Saves me from missing that meeting or being late 100% of the time. If you didn’t know this, if you’ve got an appointment with a customer, if you send them a calendar invitation, you can also set their reminders.

It doesn’t just remind you that you’re supposed to talk to somebody on the phone in 10 minutes. It reminds them, too. It’s much more efficient, and they could be in the same situation. Now, they’re expecting your call, and you can use these reminders for, “Hey, you need to start this job at one o’clock. It’s noon.” It’s a reminder to make sure everything is ready. It’s a big deal, and I promise if you make it a habit, it’ll be super useful.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s great. It’s great, and it’s a simple thing. Keep on it, get the apps. If you get an app you don’t like, or you use a program you don’t like, just pick a different one. Get a different one. It’s fine to change it. It might be a pain in the butt to switch through a few, but eventually you find something you’re really into, you use all the time, you don’t mind, and you get used to everything, too.

When we first started using Asana as a task manager that we use often, I was used to other ones and I just didn’t like the workflow as much. But other folks on the team did, so I said, “Hey, if you guys like it, I’ll learn it.” And I know it now. It’s easy to me now. It took some time, but at first, I wasn’t into it, but I did know that if I just stuck with it, then it would make things easier. Now, it’s great to be able to just pop in there, make a task, assign it to somebody or share it with somebody else, and everybody’s on board and all the communication’s right there.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. If you don’t know, a project management software is almost like a next level calendar, but for jobs and longer term projects. We use it at Coldesi. When we publish a video, there’s about, I think, nine individual tasks that are set up in advance so we can do that video. It includes the same things you have, which is order the blanks, make sure the blanks are in, get the artwork done, make sure that we’ve got all the supplies necessary to do this particular job. Shoot the video, edit the video, publish the video on YouTube, publish the video on Facebook. All those things are set one right after the other. So if you want to get that complex, we can go into more Asana and applications like that later. But the baby step version of that is running your calendar for your business.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s great. That’s great. So right after you’ve checked what you’ve got going on today and make sure that stuff’s today, you made a note in here, which is similar. It’s just check and enter in any new orders that have come in. So if you haven’t put something on the calendar yet, if you haven’t put it into your production, if you have a way of managing production, either through software or something like that, make sure that any new orders are getting entered into that system.

Mark Stephenson:
Right. I do want to point out that one of the important things that you need to make a part of your job schedule or checklist, and what reminded me is because we do our videos on Wednesday. When we come in on Wednesdays, we expect the blanks that we ordered to be there ready. About 25% of the time, they’re not. And we get a little angry about that, because it’s not all ready to go so we have to make last minute changes and moves and stuff. But it’s because we didn’t check that they were going to be shipped. We didn’t check that they were shipped. So if your schedule looks like, “I’ve got a 16 piece jacket order that I need to do today,” now is not the time to check to see whether you have them in stock. Every day when you look at your calendar, you’ve got your production schedule there, have the blanks shipped yet? They were supposed to ship. How about supply status? Am I going to have the supplies that I need for the following day or the following job?

Marc Vila:
Yep. Yeah, no. That makes good sense. And I like that it’s a bit of checking on orders that are happening today, checking other orders that are happening in the future, and making sure that all of the individual checklists for those things are on deck, including our supplies ordered in stock, things of that nature. I think that it’s a scale. In the beginning, it’s very easy because you don’t have a lot of orders. And then you get to a breaking point where now you have to think of, “Here’s all my orders, and here’s all the ink I’m going to use. Do I have enough to last this period of time?”

Because it’s no longer just, “Do I have enough ink for 50 shirts?” It’s, “Do I have enough for 50, and then 100, and then 50 and then 250?” As each day of production moves along. But now that we’ve gone through and we’ve checked our orders, our production, and everything that goes along with those from supplies to blanks, next is communications. That’s next on your list that you’re going to do. So answer emails, schedule calls, chat, whatever. Live chat with folks, whatever you’re going to do, create appointments, schedule tasks, whatever they are. But you should be focusing towards the beginning of your day of responding to things.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I like that. Please notice where this is in the order of things, because what you’re going to do is you’re going to open up your email, and there’s going to be 57 emails in there. 45 of them are going to be spam. But the rest of them, you’re going to have, “Okay, somebody emailed in an order or placed an order with me. Let me get that entered in. Okay, this vendor said they’ve got a new deal. Let me respond and find out what that is.

“I’ve got somebody that asked for a quote.” For the ask for a quote in the new order, you should stop after you read that email and create the associated appointments and tasks that go with it. So I got a new order in. What’s my new order procedure? I order the blanks. I put it in the production schedule. I do all these things. I’ve got something else going on. I’ve got to call this person back on Tuesday who’s going to be out of town this week. Okay, so I’m going to set up a task to call on Tuesday. Right there while you’re in that email before you move on to the next one.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It is tricky, because emails and calls and communication like that can turn into little mini rabbit holes that you get sucked into and eat up a lot of time. Sometimes, it’s good and it turns out to be something good. Other times, it is good, but it’s not productive. Other times, it’s just bad that you did that. You just wasted time, and it’s hard to discern that stuff. Sometimes, you don’t know what it’s going to be. Personally, what I do on my daily stuff since I don’t do production on a daily basis, but answering emails is not the first thing that I do. Sometimes, I will look at my task list, and then I will look at my emails. Personally, this is what I do. I look at my emails to see if there’s a new task I’m going to add today. So I saw one here, which is about Coldesi graphics that I saw this morning, and I knew it was going to take me an hour. Now, the easy thing is if I need to handle this, I’m going to jump in and handle it.

But that doesn’t fit into the production of my day. I also see some emails that need a quick reply, and I know that they’re only going to take a minute to reply to, but again, there were some important things that I knew needed to happen, which are my machine maintenance maybe and scheduling some things that were first. And then come nine or 10 o’clock, then I was ready to respond to these emails, because I knew nothing was on fire. I knew that there wasn’t anything on fire. There wasn’t any emergencies. There was no difference on this person saying that a vendor was delaying sending us a product. There was going to be no change if I responded to him “Thanks” now or tomorrow. But it is important to manage communications every day, and part of it is you just shouldn’t allow more than 24 hours to go without responding to somebody.

Mark Stephenson:
So I like that a lot, and I think it’s good to talk about this, because we’ve both got different procedures. The first thing I do is my version of machine maintenance. I check our incoming leads and inquiries. So I’m responsible for making sure that if any of you inquire about equipment, that it gets into the system properly, and we track the number of people that inquire every day and how many people got reached out to and things like that. One of the first things I’ll do is I’ll look in our CRM, and I’ll make sure that everything is okay. The next thing that I’ll do is I will go to check my box. I will go to YouTube and see if there are any comments that I need to answer. I will go into social media and see if there are any urgent requests or any things that I need to change, make sure everything is operating properly.

That’s before I do my emails. At that point, if I determine that everything is working properly, and these are priorities. If I look in the number of inquiries we got coming in yesterday was 50% of what they were the day before. Then, I have a different set of stuff that I prioritize. Just like if you come in one day, and you go to do maintenance on your sublimation printer and it doesn’t turn on like Marc Vila says, well, you’ve got some more important stuff to do in the next 20 minutes to get that handled. So this is the way my day starts, and then I go on to the rest of the stuff.

Marc Vila:
Right. For example, that machine maintenance, and this is just something to tie it together, is making sure that machine is going to be up and running for production that you have to do over the next couple days. It takes precedent over a customer inquiring about an order that they want to place for the fall. Even though it doesn’t always feel that way, because it’s like, “Listen, if I respond to this customer, they’re going to know I’m very attentive and I’m going to get that order, which I’m going to get that money. And if I don’t get that money, I’m not in business.” That logic is all true. However, if your machine’s not working, you’re not going to fulfill the orders that you have promised to fulfill today, which is going to make you look way worse than if you responded to an email at 11:00 AM instead of nine. Because nobody noticed that you responded at 9:00 AM or 11.

Mark Stephenson:
I’m trying to go back to those two examples with the fitness and financial health kind of thing. If you’re on the track where you’re investing in mutual funds in your 401k, and you’re doing that, and that’s how you’re going to end up incredibly wealthy, then buying those lotto tickets, spending that initial cash in someplace else, like on dinner or a new car or something like that, that takes you right off track. It’s a little negative, but even getting spun up or involved with a customer right in the beginning, even though it may eventually be a good thing, gets you off track and it breaks that pattern. Makes it less likely you’re going to do the right thing tomorrow.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. I just love this whole concept of the day. It’s so simple, and it actually works. This isn’t something that I feel like I invented or anything like that. But this is something that I’ve read consistently over the years and reading books about organization and things like that. They talk about all the way from what are the habits that you do in the morning? Why do you do that first? Why are you brushing your teeth and washing your face and drinking water first thing in the morning? Because these are basic human health things that you should do first. You should wake up and drink a glass of water and hydrate yourself, and then brush your teeth and clean up, because cleaning up is going to prevent infection and brushing your teeth is going to keep your teeth clean. Everything else in life will get messed up if your health goes down.

Mark Stephenson:
See, now you threw me for a loop, because what I usually do is I just reach over and I turn on the caffeine IV.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, okay.

Mark Stephenson:
… That I have that I sleep with in my arm.

Marc Vila:
At least you didn’t say gin.

Mark Stephenson:
No, that’s at night. Speaking of wrapping things up, there’s a daily wrap up procedure. It’s not just what happens in the morning that starts your day and cements your habits for success. It’s what you do at the end of the day. In a lot of the business books, they’ll talk about this in terms of making sure you get to sleep properly. What do you have to do the hour before you get to sleep? Turn off all your screens, you drink water, you eat something like this, or you meditate or you stretch, or you do something to put you in this position. There are things that you do in your customization business to wrap up a day that will also contribute maybe not the same, but really close to the same amount to your success as what you do first thing in the morning.

So those last things include, believe it or not, there’s maintenance that you do at the end of the day on a lot of equipment. For example, if you have one of our direct to film printers, the high volume stuff, then there is a morning turn on procedure that takes a little time, and there’s definitely an end of shift or end of day procedure that you’ve got to follow where the machine does not work right for the startup procedure the next morning. So every machine or some equipment has a shut down procedure that you need to follow.

Marc Vila:
That’s great. If your equipment doesn’t have any big type of stuff to do, again, there’s the really simple things you could do. If you have an embroidery machine, maybe at the end of the day, there’s really not that much to do. But the simple stuff you do is you make sure it’s dust free, you blow some air in spots where dust and fibers can connect with a little can of air and you make sure it’s turned off. And that’s it. Literally 30 seconds of work, but that’s your shutdown procedure. I make sure the machine’s put away. I make sure I blow out some dust from a couple of these spots. I make sure I wipe this down. I turned it off and I unplugged the machine. Whatever your procedure is for your day for where you are, that’s what you do. Then, the same is going to be true even outside of the equipment maintenance side.

Something that I do as my daily wrap up is I check my calendar and my task list, and I’m just like, “Did I do everything? I did everything I wanted to get done. I didn’t do this. But why?” The million excuse is why you didn’t do it. You literally couldn’t, you were waiting on somebody else, an emergency came up and now you just chose that that’s a task and you have to move it to the next day. But then make sure that all that’s done, and then I’ll go through and then I’ll usually do an email wrap up again. I’ll just go through the emails and, “Is there anyone else I should respond to? No. I’m not going to get sucked into a rabbit hole because the day is ending.”

Mark Stephenson:
Right. I’m not going to start anything new.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. I see something that’s a little bit of a concern. Will it make any difference if I handle it now or tomorrow? No. Why? Because the person that I’m emailing is on vacation.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. So then what do you do? You go through it, and you set up a task for when the person gets back from vacation. If there’s something you didn’t accomplish, and you’re using a digital calendar that you’re supposed to do today, then you just click on it and you drag it to your next available slot to make sure you accomplish it.

Marc Vila:
Yep. That’s good. Now after you’ve done that, your daily wrap up, it’s time to move on to weekly stuff.

Mark Stephenson:
Hey, I do have one piece of equipment thing that you really have to do at the end of the day.

Marc Vila:
Okay.

Mark Stephenson:
Turn off your heat press.

Marc Vila:
Okay. That’s a good one.

Mark Stephenson:
Turn off your heat press and your electric bill will thank you. Also, if you have a coffee machine in a bigger office, how many times have we come into Coldesi and there’s just a ruined coffee carafe, because it’s been baking overnight? Even if you’ve got an embroidery machine in the back of your house, just walk through and make sure everything’s good.

Marc Vila:
A nighttime checklist for your personal self is a great thing for your office and your business as well. Nighttime checklist would be turn this off, turn that off, check this, make sure this is good. Maybe it’s not turn it off. Make sure it’s on. Like your sublimation printer, you want to have it on overnight, because it’s going to maintain itself. Make sure the coffee pot’s off. Make sure the sublimation printer’s on. Make your list.

Mark Stephenson:
Good. I like that.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Weekly, what’s great is daily’s the busiest thing, because if you’re doing stuff every day, your weekly list is nice and short.

Mark Stephenson:
You’re right. Should be short.

Marc Vila:
For weekly stuff, Mark, you put here, which I think is great, is marketing basics. Why don’t you tell us about it?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. We’ve got whole episodes on doing marketing checkups. I would, every week, make sure your contact forms are working on your website. Make sure somebody can actually place an order on your Shopify store. Dial your phone number, and make sure that’s working and the answering is working. When I talk about the marketing basics, that’s my maintenance. Like I mentioned, I do that stuff every day. I check on our incoming inquiries every day. If there’s any error at all, I’ll go through the websites and make sure all the forms are working.

Marc Vila:
Yep. That’s good. It’s just a weekly checkup to make sure that everything is up and running similar to equipment. I don’t think you should be checking your website and forms and phone numbers every day, because the chances are it’s almost never going to be broken or go down. But you shouldn’t go weeks and weeks without just checking to make sure some things work, because it takes only a couple minutes. This may be a time where you do your social updates. Depending on your business, you may be on social media every single day and that’s your task list. You might not, but if you’re on LinkedIn and you want to keep your LinkedIn profile up or your Google profile or your Facebook page, then once a week, you should schedule to do that. Share something, share the work you did, share an article you write if you do writing or if you do vlogging, make sure that your YouTube video is uploaded and your page is up to par for your standards. This is all just so dependent on the business.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. For example, we have people posting on Facebook and Instagram all the time. I post in LinkedIn about weekly. That’s one of my Sunday morning tasks when I do reports and things like that on a weekly basis. I’ll usually do a post for Coldesi talking about a particular product or a new video that we’ve done. I think that’s pretty good. I don’t know how often we’re posting on TikTok. Marc Vila?

Marc Vila:
Weekly. At least once a week.

Mark Stephenson:
There you go. So you should have something similar. If you’re not on any social media profile, maybe part of your marketing basics is to do that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, exactly. There’s just a little note in here in regards to all of these things. The marketing basics checklist. It’s extremely important to understand that your business is unique. It just is unique. It is its own thing. It’s different than 100% of every other business out there. So if you read some posts about, “Well, you should be posting the TikTok three times a day.” Somebody will say that. I’m not even going to argue that that’s a wrong statement, but why? Coldesi’s goal is not to, and we don’t get most of our business from TikTok and from social media. We get more business from people going onto Google and saying, “How do I sublimate something? What’s the best machine to buy for this? That’s how we’re answering questions and providing education, just like this podcast.

That’s more important to our business and how we treat our customers and our philosophy than it is to posting interesting and cool things on TikTok. But we still think it’s important to do it. So we’re choosing, “Well, we’re just going to post once a week for people who want to follow us and who enjoy it. And they can see what we’re working on, because that’s how they want to keep up with us, and that’s how we do it.” So your business might be the same way. Somebody might tell you, “Oh, you’re not on TikTok? You’re missing out on so much stuff.” Okay. Well, you can stop and look at that as a marketing task and say, “Do you want this to be part of your marketing? Is it important? Why?” If you’re complaining, “I have no business, I’ve got nothing to do,” okay. Then maybe you should consider that as something to try.

Mark Stephenson:
Try that.

Marc Vila:
But if you’re already busy and you’re doing a lot of things, then it’s like, “Okay, well. Listen, I get a lot of business from here. I still want to post on LinkedIn though, because I’d to let my customers know what’s up. But I’m not going to do TikTok. Maybe another day when I have more time.” Not another day, but another point in time of many days where you make a decision to do it for a long period of time. Anyway, this weekly marketing basics are your marketing basics and only yours. So like you said, check to make sure things are working, do your social updates, do your LinkedIn updates, do your Google updates, check your reviews, respond to them, figure out all the marketing basics that you’re going to do. And then do those, make sure that those are updated at least once a week.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep. I like that a lot. The other thing that you want to do is you want to check in with your business finances every week. By that, I mean on a small scale. So if you were owed money this past week, if you had invoices come due this past week, did you pay all your bills? Maybe once a week, one afternoon or evening or morning every week, you sit down and you open up your accounting software and your bank account, and you make sure that no one owes you money and you don’t owe anybody else money. “I made money this week, and I didn’t make money this week. Where am I on that business progress?” Like for an exercise program, maybe you do a weekly weigh in or weekly blood pressure check. Or you see how your stocks or investments or your home rentals have done for the prior week.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Good business check is pretty good though. What’s happened this week? And I don’t think it necessarily has to be a formal written down thing necessarily. This could just be just a progress check. Look at some things. How are things looking this week? What did you do bad? What did you do good? Stuff like that. And you mentioned finances in here. Checking on your financial life for your business is important, too. If you use software like Stripe or FreshBooks or QuickBooks or anything that you’re doing to manage incoming and outgoing money, you should make sure that that’s reconciled to a degree. In software like QuickBooks and FreshBooks, when you go in there, if it’s synced to your bank account and stuff, automatically there’s going to be a list of charges ingoing and outgoing that aren’t connected to anything yet.

And they’ll just let you know. Sometimes, it’s literally 10 minutes of you just drag, drop, make a note, check it, and then you say, “Okay, clean.” I remember the first time that I jumped into a software like that. For me, it’d been two months, I’d done none of it. Or three months maybe, and then I had this list. It wasn’t crazy, it was only an hour or two maybe, but still, it’s preferable to not let that stuff pile up, because you don’t want to be the classic movie character, maybe not nowadays, but from eighties and nineties where they show up to their accountant, they have a box, and they open it up and receipts are pouring out. You never want that to be you. You want to be the person that if at any point in time, you could easily go into your software where you check your money and just have an idea of what’s happening. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be pretty good.

Mark Stephenson:
And I would say that for Coldesi and our businesses, every week I take a look at what are sales? How many inquiries did we get in? How much did we spend on advertising? And we communicate that with our partners, with the management team. If it’s personal, my wife and I talk about it. So that whatever your financial check looks like, do it every week, and you’ll just feel more comfortable about what’s going on in your business.

Marc Vila:
I definitely feel more comfortable about… I run the online store for Coldesi, our e-commerce store, and I feel much better when every day or every week I do my various checks. I just go in there, I see if there’s anything that looks like there’s an error, we go into our various feeds and look at different stuff. I just feel really comfortable, and then at any point in time, if somebody just says, “Hey, how’s this doing? Hey, what’s the update on this?” I’ve got a pretty good idea, and sometimes I know it off the bat. I could tell you exactly. Other times, I say, “Give me two seconds. I’ll find out,” because I’m just used to going there. I’m used to knowing where things are and how to do it, and I make it a habit to go in there consistently.

So you should be doing something like that with your business as well, especially on the finance side. Or have somebody doing it for you if you don’t do it personally. I think that it’s an important thing to distinct, that we’ve made an assumption in some of the words we’re using that you are the jack of all trades and you wear all the hats. So maybe you don’t do any of the maintenance personally. That’s your business partner or your husband or wife or kid. In that case, either you need to make sure it’s checked off or you need to have somebody in charge of making sure it’s checked off.

Mark Stephenson:
Then, you make sure that they made sure.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, there’s this balance that you build between trust of people and your business over time. You’ve got to figure out what that balance is for you.

Mark Stephenson:
Cool.

Marc Vila:
All right.

Mark Stephenson:
I think it’s a good transition, because some of those things that we talked about, you may decide to move to monthly or quarterly. I am super anal retentive about finances and numbers, so there’s no way I would let our ad spend go for 30 days without checking it. It’s just not going to happen, but maybe if you’ve got a program set up for advertising for your business and you’ve got somebody taking care of it, you really don’t want to look at it that often. You just want to do that. Maybe it’s the same way with your accounting and meeting with them about your expenses and your income. Maybe you don’t want to do that weekly. You move it to monthly if you’re comfortable with that.

Marc Vila:
That’s how we work, Mark. I don’t check the numbers and the ad spend personally every day, because you are. I will check the ad spend and the numbers twice a month with something like that.

Mark Stephenson:
We get together for our monthly report and take a look at all the financial numbers for the companies and talk about those then.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And in the same as with your business, why do you need to check the maintenance every day if your business partner is? But maybe once every couple weeks, you are peeking at the equipment room, looking at it, or you talk to them about it. I think that’s how Mark and I have gotten to do it. I know that he is in there every day, checking the numbers and every week, he’s checking them again. Then, he sends a report out, and I check the numbers from his report. And then every once in a while, probably twice a month, I go into the systems myself and I just look for myself.

And then, every once in a while I message Mark, and I’ll ask him a question. “Hey, what about this? What’s going on here? Did you notice that this isn’t performing as well?” Then we have a conversation about it together. So you should just be thinking about that with all the stuff in your business, too. What is more of a monthly task and a checkup for you? But next for monthly would be I think it’s important that every month you should just review what your goals are. Quarterly, your annual goals. Are you on pace? Do they need to change? Why do they need to change?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Think about this. This is your monthly weigh in, or this is your personal financial report for the month. Did you hit your savings goals? Did you hit your weight loss goals? Did you hit your number of pushups goals? Where are you in this journey that you’ve decided to take? I opened up my own business, I invested in equipment, I’m doing marketing, and people are trusting me with their money to deliver shirts. How’s all that going?

Marc Vila:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s really good. Then, while we’re talking about those goals and stuff, this is the time every month you do your next business check in. Our sales this month-

Mark Stephenson:
I’ve got to just jump ahead here, because this is something really disturbing on this list. Under cleanup, Marc Vila has written, “Delete that downloads folder on your computer.” And if I did that, I wouldn’t know where any of my work was. I literally keep everything in my downloads folder. That’s all I have to say.

Marc Vila:
We’ll get to that, but the next business check in stuff for the month is how were our sales? What problems did you have? What success did you have? What do you wish you did better? This doesn’t have to be a formal report that you’re doing. This could be a mental check in. Just look at some numbers, look at some problems, think about some problems. What were you really happy about? Sad? And this is just a monthly check in you should be doing for your business all the time. We’ll do that, and because we’re in marketing, ours can be pretty analytical. It could be a lot about numbers and 100 things to dive into, but when you’re dealing with customers and customer service that you might be dealing with, some of this stuff is going to be just thinking about conversations, thinking about interactions. “Gosh, we had this one customer who was really upset. Why? Because of this and this. How could we have done it better? We should have done this and that. The next is a really happy customer. How can we replicate that?”

Mark Stephenson:
That reminds me. Maybe you want to check to see if you’ve got any reviews. If that’s one of your goals is to get a good review every week or five every month or something like that, maybe there’s something like that you want to check on.

Marc Vila:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s good. Then, we have cleanup. Okay. So you have your daily maintenance and cleanup stuff, but you should also have a monthly where you’re going through, and you’re making sure that your shop is in tip top shape. You do everything every day, but is there a corner that’s piling up with some stuff? Maybe you have waste that you need to get picked up, and you need to schedule that to be picked up, because the trash company doesn’t pick it up or something like that. These are things that you just want to make sure that you’re not having things pile up. Then, I did write delete that downloads folder in your computer. Electronically, you should be cleaning some things up, too. For example, I got a notification a while back that my Gmail was almost full, that I need to buy more space. And I was like, “Gosh, probably this entire year, I haven’t looked in my Google Drive or any of that stuff. How much in there is junk?”

And I went in there and I deleted probably about 20% of the stuff that was just… I shared a video with somebody that was from my phone, but it was really long so I couldn’t text it to them. So I just put it in Google Drive and gave them the link. Well, that’s done. There was a bunch of pictures from a trip. We had already done things with those pictures, so why do I have them in here again? And there was a bunch of emails in there that could just be deleted. So you should just be checking your computer, and that downloads folder is one where, like you mentioned, things can just pile up in there and it’s like, “Do you have a bunch of files from customers that you downloaded that you have no use for anymore, because you’ve already put them into tasks?”

You’ve already put them into your file manager, you’ve already done all these things, but you still have a copy hanging in your downloads folder. That’s junk in there that piles up, and what you don’t want to do is every six months, hit control A to select all and hit delete, because you may be deleting things that are important. So if you’re checking that stuff every month or whatever it might be on your computer, phone, things like that as well, then you’re more than likely to not have a big mess to have to handle just like with anything else.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay. Now, that you’ve explained it, I do support that.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Good. Very good.

Mark Stephenson:
I’m probably not going to do it, but I do support that. One thing that I just remembered and I added it, I think, to the notes is hey, guess what? Maintenance. Some of your equipment has monthly maintenance, You should know that. So every month you’re going to keep to your maintenance calendar if you have have things that you need to do.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s really good. And I like that. I just really think it’s important that you separate these things into weekly, monthly, because some of this stuff just doesn’t need to be done every day or every week. Then, you just don’t do it until it’s a problem.

Mark Stephenson:
I do like what you said here about doing this master inventory check on a monthly basis.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s a really good thing too, because some things you should check, but they’re not as obvious that you should be checking, too, when it comes to blanks and supplies and tools and stuff like that, too. For example, some folks use accessories for their heat press. Like the flexible finishing sheet, Teflon pillows and perfect print pads. These are all little heat press accessories that you use. Gloves, these are all things that people use. Well, your flexible finishing sheet, for example, isn’t something you run out of.

Mark Stephenson:
Right, but it does need to be replaced.

Marc Vila:
It does need to be replaced, and same thing with your Teflon pillows and things of that nature. They do need to be replaced over time, so if every month you’re checking this stuff… How’s the heat press doing? Do a calibration check on the heat press. How are all the pads? “All right, this one’s getting kind of flat. I should put it on the list that this needs to be replaced.” Stuff like that. These are those things that you don’t need to check every single day. You’ll drive yourself crazy, but once a month, it’s a good idea to go through all of your shop inventory. This also will give you an opportunity that goes into other things we’ve discussed, like do you have a box of shirts that’s just piled up in there and there’s no use? Well this can be a marketing opportunity or a sales opportunity to get rid of those. And that’s another podcast, but we’ve talked about that before.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Yeah. I like all that. I had a thought with something else that you might do in your shop monthly, other than just clean it up is check those persistent supplies that might sneak up on you. If you’ve got a roll of backing that you use all the time, you might look at it and still think there’s a bunch left, but there’s really not, because it’s on a roll and things like that. Things like backing and things like pretreat and ink, those are all really heavy. So maybe you want to take a good look at what you might be doing for the month and do this master supply inventory look. And say that, “If I have to two day ship backing, it’s going to suck, so maybe I’ll just order an extra roll,” if I use the rolled stuff. “Pretreat is getting a little low. I don’t have any jobs planned now, but it’s going to last for a while anyway, so let me place an order.” Take a look on a monthly basis, and you’ll have that extra in stock.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s really interesting. Scales are actually a great way, a little pro tip, on how to check all of this stuff. If you have a nice commercial scale, you can weigh ink, pretreat, rhinestones, vinyl. You could weigh everything and use a weight as a way of determining how full something is if visual doesn’t always make sense. Bottles of pretreat, depending on what you’re using, you might not be able to see it. So you have to go by weight and feel. So if you physically weigh it, that’s a good way to check that inventory,

Mark Stephenson:
Man, that’s a pro tip there.

Marc Vila:
I got another pro tip. This one’s an interesting one, I think. Rolled material moves faster as you get down the roll. So if you visually look at a roll of vinyl and it’s a very large roll, you may have six inches of vinyl from the core to the top if it’s a really thick, big roll. Well, the time it takes to unravel from 12 o’clock all the way around the clock, back to 12 o’clock during that first row is maybe two feet of vinyl or whatever it is. Well, when you get down to that core, that wraparound from 12 o’clock to 12 o’clock again, it may only be six inches. So when you look at it and you’re like, “Oh, yeah. I’ve got a quarter of my vinyl left,” visually, you have a quarter from the original length.

Mark Stephenson:
Super smart. Yeah, that is correct.

Marc Vila:
But you actually maybe have 10% left, and that last little bit just will go in a second. You’ll just be like, “All right, I’m good,” and you put a vinyl job in. So this is true of vinyl, backing, anything for your roll end. Don’t allow just necessarily the visual thickness of your roll to understand how much is left, unless you’re really good at judging that, which is going to take time. So this is why weight can be something that can really help you out in understanding.

Mark Stephenson:
Man, I feel like there’s a apparel decorating supply hacks article video coming.

Marc Vila:
This also works well for the restroom, too.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay, good. Good to know. Thanks. In emergency situations. All right, so speaking of that, let’s talk about some of the tools that we use and that we might recommend people to use to keep track of all this stuff and to stay on track.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, sure. There’s a ton of good stuff out there. We mentioned Asana already, which is a task management tool. Basecamp is another famous one. Trello is another famous one. There’s a ton of task management tools, project management tools out there. There’s a ton that are for free. You know what I don’t know 100%? Does Google have something in the Google Suite?

Mark Stephenson:
Not really.

Marc Vila:
Not really, right? Not that I know of.

Mark Stephenson:
Calendar. They lean heavily on calendar.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
But I’ll give you the basics. What you want to be able to do is you want to be able to look at your projects or your job in some kind of a visual flow. That’s going to be the easiest. And it could be an order, like a list that you can just drag something and move it around. Or a lot of our customers use a big whiteboard to track their order progress, and they’ve got rows. It could be a computer version of that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s what Trello is like.

Mark Stephenson:
Where you can drag something from one category to the other. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Trello is like that.

Mark Stephenson:
Asana is like a two in 1.

Marc Vila:
Asana’s like that, too. Is Asana free to start?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Okay. I think Trello is as well. You can start these for free. A lot of these are free or almost free to start, because they want to get small businesses when they’re nothing, when they’re nobody. So they give it to you for free, you get into using this system, and they just know that 1% of people are going to blow up. Then, one day they’re going to send you an email that says, “Hey, by the way, that software that’s $10 a month? That’s actually going to cost you $500 now because you make a million bucks.”

Mark Stephenson:
Do you know how many times that’s happened at Coldesi?

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
It just happens like, “Oh, that’s a cool new software. Cool. You want to try it? It’s like $18 a month. Great. Now, you want to add 57 users? Oh, okay. That’s great.”

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Three grand. But it’s good. And FreshBooks and QuickBooks are similar, too. I think FreshBooks is $4 a month or something for a starter plan, and it allows you to do what most small businesses will do. You can do up to 500 transactions in a month. And you may be thinking when you’re first starting, “I can’t wait to get to 500.” So for $4 a month or whatever the number is, it’s cheap. Google Calendar, which you mentioned, Mark, is a great tool. Within Google, there’s Google Drive if you want to use that.

Mark Stephenson:
For storing art.

Marc Vila:
For storing stuff. Storing and sharing and collaborating, it’s a pretty simple tool that’s pretty easy to use where you can write up an order, put it in Google Drive, and then send a link to a customer in their email. They can click on it and they can see it there, and there’s even spots where people can make notes and stuff like that.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep. It’s all good.

Marc Vila:
For accepting money, Stripe and Square, PayPal. These are big ones that are used out there, and most of those will integrate with the other pieces of software we’re mentioning.

Mark Stephenson:
And they’re very easy.

Marc Vila:
Super easy

Mark Stephenson:
Surprisingly, easy to use. I think it took me five minutes to set up Stripe.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. It’s very easy. I put it, but good old fashioned Excel can still be something that’s super useful. A lot of folks will say, and I’ll say this, “I don’t track anything in Excel, because it’s all manual,” unless you’re super, super smart at it. But gosh, I’ll take anybody tracking things in Excel over not tracking them at all or putting them on a piece of paper.

Mark Stephenson:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
So tracking your orders in something like FreshBooks or QuickBooks and tracking your projects and things like Asana or Basecamp, I think are better, but if you can do it in Excel, do it in Excel at least.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Or again, talking about Google, if you’ve got the Google Business Suite, you’ve got Google Sheets, which is basically the online version of Excel. Same thing.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And you don’t have to pay for that.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep. That’s right.

Marc Vila:
Which is nice. All right. Well, we went through probably about an hour’s worth of stuff here.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Daily, weekly, monthly, and I think the most important takeaway I have at all is this is a framework of things you should be doing, but you’ve got to make this your own, one. And you have to have just the mental awareness to understand that don’t allow excuses of, “I’m not that type,” or “My business isn’t that type,” to stop you from doing something you know you should be doing.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep. I love that. Once you decide on what your pattern is going to be, what your daily exercise, what your daily diet, what your daily, weekly, and monthly financial life is going to be like, you can schedule that all in a calendar super simply. Whether it’s Microsoft or whether it’s a Google Calendar, or whether it’s a CRM, you can set that every day at 8:00 AM, machine maintenance, Monday through Friday. You can set all this stuff up, and then just get reminded of what you’ve already decided that you’re going to do.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that the wrap up reason why this is so important, really why it’s so important, is because more than likely, if you’re like most people in our industry, this business is not just for you to make money by yourself alone. And then one day, you’re just going to have a million dollars and shut the business down. That’s probably not the goal for most people. Most people, you want to grow to build wealth for yourself, wealth for your family, maybe you want to grow the business big and sell it one day. Maybe you want to grow it big and pass it on to your kids.

You want to grow it to maybe have some employees, so you say, “Right now, I wear all the hats. But one day I would like to have a production person, and I’d like to have a salesperson and I’ll be the manager.” These are the things you have. If you don’t have systems built and ways to track things and ways to make sure other people do it right and it’s only all in your brain. And you’re a business owner, you’re smart, you’re a smart person out there. You can remember all this stuff, and it’s all in there. But if it’s not built into a system, then when you go to try to hire somebody, you have to figure out a way for them to figure it out. But if it’s all in FreshBooks and all your finances there and you have a system for doing it, then you can bring in somebody into the business and you say, “One of the things you’re going to do is handle this. Here’s the software. Here’s how you use it.”

Mark Stephenson:
Here’s how it all works.

Marc Vila:
Here’s how often you do it. Any questions? No? It’s yours.

Mark Stephenson:
Go ahead.

Marc Vila:
Go at it. The calendar says all the updates of things you need to check. Stripe has all this. So you’re actually building a business that you could do something with later, whether it’s sell it, pass it off to your kids, hire people, or just the fact of you get sick and someone’s got to come help you.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Good.

Marc Vila:
All those.

Mark Stephenson:
It’s all good. All right. I think this has been a good one, and this has also been Mark Stephenson.

Marc Vila:
And Marc Vila.

Mark Stephenson:
You guys have a fantastic, well-organized, maintenance intensive business.

Marc Vila:
Yes. I hope you enjoyed the five things that will double your profits.

Mark Stephenson:
Triple. Triple.

Marc Vila:
Triple.

Mark Stephenson:
Bye.

The post Episode 178 – Building Good Business Habits appeared first on Custom Apparel Startups.