Printavo PrintHustlers Podcast

After chatting with more successful shop owners, we've learned they all have something in common. Extreme optimism. Everyone started their screen printing shop in one way or the other. A band, clothing line, bought into a business. It didn't make much sense at the time, but you kept persevering past all odds to create a sustainable business. Between improving your workflow, managing a team, and growing sales, extreme positivity has been proven to help keep pushing you forward. Past the highs and lows. Lastly, your high amount of optimism funnels down into your staff. When things go wrong, the right attitude will help make decisions. Try Printavo - https://www.printavo.com

PrintHustlers Conf was a huge success! We had over 100 people from shops all over North America join us. In this highlight reel, Steven Farag, Co-Owner of Campus Ink, talks about five tips when automated his shop. Add all users to Printavo - Give full access to your account Automate people & technology - Allow pushing a button to print, transform data, and add data where needed. Hire a virtual assistant from Upwork to help with data input. Utilize Zapier to connect your website to Printavo to a CRM to your email newsletters, etc. Zapier is powerful and enables you to exchange data between 1,000+ apps on the web. Automate receiving positive reviews for your shop. Create a status called "Review Us" which triggers an email to the customer asking for a review. You can use ReviewPro to have positive reviews be posted to Yelp/Google Plus and negative reviews are emailed to you directly to handle. Try Printavo - https://www.printavo.com

Over time we found that sales is a team sport. It's a basketball team where the ball gets passed around with the end goal of a slam-dunk. This process requires the company to work together on the same goal together. If one sales rep creates a lead from a tradeshow, and someone back at the office closes them, you're working together to win. A company brand is the full customer experience someone encounters. This may warrant using a team-based commission structure for your sales reps. At Printavo, we switched over to a team-based commission and aren't looking back. As a customer can have multiple touch points with sales reps, we didn't want to worry about how to attribute commission. I first felt weary of this change as it doesn't highlight who is doing great work and who isn't. We ended up creating a team agreement to help clarify potential problems. For example, for the first two months of building a sales funnel, all commissions you generate are paid out directly to you. Only then will you partake in the team pool. If your performance dips under 50% of the median sales generated for a month, for more than two months, your commission is only based on the sales you created. We found it important to create these agreements before-hand to avoid issues down the road. Thus far, it's been easier to treat customers as a team rather than individually and we're pushing forward! Let me know if you're doing team commission and how it works! Try Printavo - https://www.printavo.com

Hiring A Customer Sales Rep by Printavo

Justin Moore started Barrel Maker Printing in 2009. They printed on a manual screen printing press for several years before they purchased an automatic press. Justin and his wife, Erin Moore, felt they could get a lot out of their manual press, but it was exhausting. Listen to Justin talk about how when he switched to an automatic screen printing press and how it helped their shop. Try Printavo - https://www.printavo.com

An untrained employee is likely to be unhappy due to confusion. They will underperform, and you will be frustrated because they're not doing what you want. Your new hire won't stay long and you'll have to spend time searching for another, which will cost you time and money. Quality of work delivered will be less than expected. Don't believe the new hire's deliverables will be exactly what you asked for since you didn't take the time to teach them properly. Not only that, you're going to have to do most of their tasks for them over again, which will, again, cost you time and money. Your customers are your lifeblood, and new hire mistakes will create unhappy customers. Here's how we onboarding our new hires at Printavo to give you some ideas! Try Printavo: www.printavo.com

Getting started with a reputable HR provider early on will save you many headaches down the road. Dealing with new employee documentation, benefits, taxes, offer letters, payroll, hourly, contractor, and full-time employees will drive you up a wall! At Printavo, when we first started hiring employees, we wanted to make sure everything was very clear for our team members. When was payday, how to enroll in benefits, etc needed to all be written clearly and easily comprehensible for everyone. In addition, you have enough on your plate and don't need HR issues added onto this. We did a lot of research when finding an HR/payroll provider that was simple to use and had a support team to help us. We looked into using our accountant, ADP, ZenPayroll, Gusto, Intuit, and more. After many trials, phone calls, and demos, we decided on Gusto. Gusto met our needs in the following ways: Onboarding new hires - They can allow you to create new-hire documents for signing. Support - Their live chat and email support has been amazing. They do have a phone number although we haven't needed to call it. Data - We can pull all types of reports, find old paystubs and connect Gusto with other services for reimbursements, detailed accounting, and time-tracking. Benefits - When we started to offer healthcare to our team, setting this up was unbelievably simple and required little work. They can handle 401k, transit benefits and more. We're not compensated by Gusto to write this but truly feel it can help shops grow and focus on printing. Any questions? Drop a comment below! Try Printavo: www.printavo.com

Hiring the right people is the single most important job you have as a shop owner. As the business grows, your team is the most important asset of the company. It's what you should be spending a significant time on in regards to hiring, training, 1-on-1's, improvements and more. Hiring can be tricky as the goal is to fully vet candidates to make the right choice. Candidates may not tell the full truth, exaggerate responsibilities or not just be the right cultural fit for your shop. If you hunt for candidates, phone interview 20 people, and have 3 in-person interviews, that can add up to 50+ hours of work. Multiple that by what you value your time at hourly and it adds up quickly. Let alone the training for this new candidate, plus what if they don't end up working out and you start over? Point being, we want to get as many new-hire decisions right from the getgo. At Printavo, we've found a neat trick that helps us vet candidates by using a 3rd party interviewer. We have found that having someone external, with interviewing experience, helps the candidate open up more. They don't feel as up-tight as talking to the business owner and reveal a lot more about their personality. We've been able to use this to decline candidates and avoid costly hiring mistakes. At Printavo, we use Balance HR Solutions (http://bhrspartners.com) to interview all of our candidates. They will ask questions such as: - Salary expectations - Missing resume information - Stumping experience questions - Dive deep into goals Plus they'll deliver a summary of their opinions and anything odd that may have come up. They bill us hourly for the time and we can talk through candidates' summaries on the phone. Of course, there are many people with experience interviewing. The point is to have someone outside the company talk to the candidate and get a different feel for their fit. Have any other tips you use? Leave a comment! Try Printavo: www.printavo.com

We can all agree that we'd like to be more productive each day. As a business owner, you probably feel many days escape from you. You'll start off with a task list for the day and end up completing little to none of it as the day winds down. Putting out fires is a constant reason for not being able to execute on the things you need to complete either in your screen-printing/embroidery shop. The long-term solution is to continue to hire for the tasks that you do every day. With people that you trust, you can delegate. Of course, this isn't easy. You're used to handling everything yourself. But your goal is for the business to run without you. But what can you do today? What can you implement right now to help make yourself and others more productive? Here are two tips that I use every day to increase productivity. Limit your day - That's right, shrink the number of hours you're giving yourself to work. If you normally come in at 7am and leave at 7pm. Leave at 6pm, no excuses. What this does is force you to complete higher priority tasks. You will have no choice but to pick higher value items to complete and push off lower priority ones. It also makes you fully understand the value of delegating more of your day to complete what's important. This also helps to waste less time. How much time do you feel is spent on email, Facebook, Instagram? Instead of waiting for a response for 10min and taking a break by scrolling through Facebook, you'll be forced to knock out another task before leaving early. To-do List - Every morning, before you start answering email and going through jobs, write down the tasks you need to complete for that day. If your list is longer than 5 items, draw a line and only focus on those top 5. This truly helps to visualize your progress and understand if you're behind or not. Bonus Tip: Write down what you actually did that day next to your to-do list and you'll be able to visualize your progress and understand if you're behind or not. This also helps to know the tasks to start delegating off if you're seeing recurring items that push your off track. Let us know how it works and if you have more tips! Try Printavo: www.printavo.com

Shelby Craig, Founder of Rocket Shirts is a marketing guru. “Making Shirt Happen and Getting Shirt Done.” Shelby’s LinkedIn quote perfectly describes him. Shelby dives into how facebook marketing works to help your screen-printing shop suceed. He gives you easy steps on how to get started! PrintHustlers Conf 2018 is the second annual conference for the decorated apparel industry organized by Printavo. This conference will provide a unique opportunity to grow, develop, learn new ways to expand your business and increase profitability! Become exposed to industry leaders, thought-provoking tips and tricks and an abundance of resources to assist shops with running a viable business. Try Printavo: https://www.printavo.com