#37 The Real Cost of Starting a Business with Andrew Barnes

Entrepreneurship reality, starting a business, small business risk, opportunity cost, how to start a business—Andrew Barnes shares what it really takes.

In this episode of Based Business, Andrew Barnes breaks down the truth about entrepreneurship—from risk and opportunity cost to building a real business while supporting a family.

Andrew, founder of Winter Print, shares how he went from working in a lumber company to launching a print brokerage—and eventually opening a full commercial print shop.

But his biggest insight?

👉 Entrepreneurship isn’t about freedom…
it’s about risk, responsibility, and how much you’re willing to lose

💡 In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The real risks of starting a business (beyond money)
• How to think about opportunity cost and long-term tradeoffs
• Why the “entrepreneurship = freedom” narrative is misleading
• How to start small and validate before scaling
• What commercial printing actually is (and how it works)
• Lessons from transitioning from brokerage to ownership
• Hiring mistakes and how to build the right team
• How to grow a business while supporting a family

🚀 Who this is for:

• People thinking about starting a business
• Entrepreneurs feeling overwhelmed or uncertain
• Founders balancing risk, family, and income
• Anyone who wants a realistic view of entrepreneurship

🔗 Connect with Andrew Barnes:

•  Website: WinterPrintUtah.com 
•  Instagram: @winter_print_ 
•  Facebook: Winter Print

🎙️ FULL PODCAST TIMELINE (1:06:21)

00:00 Introduction & What Entrepreneurship Really Looks Like
 02:15 Why “It’s Not All Sunshine and Rainbows”
 05:40 The Early Struggles Nobody Talks About
 09:10 Long Hours, Burnout & Sacrifice
 13:25 Financial Stress & Risk Taking
 17:50 Why Most People Quit Too Early
 21:30 Learning Through Failure
 25:05 The Turning Point Moment
 29:40 Building Momentum in Business
 33:15 Discipline vs Motivation
 37:00 The Mental Game of Entrepreneurship
 41:10 Handling Pressure & Uncertainty
 45:20 The Hidden Costs of Ownership
 49:30 What Success Actually Feels Like
 53:10 Why It’s Still Worth It
 57:00 Advice for New Entrepreneurs
 01:00:10 Final Thoughts & Mindset Shift
 01:03:30 Closing & Key Takeaways

#entrepreneurship #smallbusiness #businessgrowth #startabusiness #entrepreneurlife

Transcript

SPEAKER_08 0:00

Um, was weighing entrepreneurship against the opportunity cost. That's not something that I often think about because I view, and and maybe this is you know hindsight's 2020, I view entrepreneurship as it was the greatest opportunity for me. And if I didn't invest in that, what I would have missed out on.

SPEAKER_32 0:19

So that's kind of where the grit and the acceptance of I can make my own path came from. When it comes to like thinking this is the true plan for me, I think I naively bought into the glory of it. I wanted to be the big dog who made all the right decisions.

SPEAKER_16 0:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 0:36

And everybody looks me for those answers. Uh, don't buy into that would be my recommendation. Like, you need to take a much more uh realistic look at what it means to be an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_08 0:48

I have often said that harnessing your ADHD is a superpower. And I'm here today with an entrepreneur, Andrew Barnes, who has done just that. Andrew, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

SPEAKER_32 1:02

Yeah, absolutely. Uh my name is Andrew Barnes. I'm from Pleasant Grove, Utah. Um, I'm 39 years old. I've been an entrepreneur uh officially for about five years now. Um, and uh my profession is uh commercial printing, which is basically the most boring subject of the world unless you are involved in it.

SPEAKER_08 1:25

I don't know if it's the most boring subject in the world. I mean, you got to think about it. Everybody uses marketing materials, prints, books.

SPEAKER_32 1:33

I mean, I'm assuming you're in on that. Yeah, when you die, it'd be super fun. I mean, just uh getting to the ins and outs of uh what it takes to take a flat sheet of paper and turn it into a good piece of marketing material for a publication.

SPEAKER_08 1:47

So can I ask? I actually end up I print a lot, and so this is a great connection for us to make. Uh where where are you located? Or where do you do your printout of?

SPEAKER_32 1:55

Yeah, business office is uh and warehouse located in Spanish Fork um in uh Spanish Fork, Utah. Just a little stop of where I'm from.

SPEAKER_08 2:04

So I gotta we'll have to talk, you know, outside of the podcast too, but uh I write books and print books. Um obviously marketing materials, mailers, like uh ran for city council this last year, and then we did everydoor direct mail, and then we had door hangers and all that kind of stuff. So I'm like, ah, this is a good connection I need to have. Yeah, totally. So can I ask, how did you get into entrepreneurship? You know, I uh before the the podcast, we sent you an email, we kind of go through your questions, but how did you get into commercial print and owning that business?

SPEAKER_32 2:39

Yeah, okay, good question. I, you know, sometimes you just fall into things like before um I was in print. I was uh working at a lumber company local to Utah, and uh I wanted to grow into the sales department there. And then uh my father-in-law owns a printing company, and he needed a customer service representative over there and um asked me if I'd be interested in taking that position. And I was like, sure, you know, I the prerequisite was like I'd like to have a path to into sales. And uh, and he said, absolutely, we can get you trained up on everything in a couple of years, we can get you moving in that sales direction. So that's kind of how I ended up in print. Um for ending up as an entrepreneur, it like it's been kind of just like a lifelong passion. Um I think other ADHD people probably have the same thing. I have a real issue with authority on occasion. Um, I uh I struggle to follow other people's visions if I don't understand the purpose of it. Uh, and so there's a real like deep leaning to do what I want to do um in my own way. Um and so, I mean, I was very, very young, probably 13, 14 years old, when I kind of realized that uh all the things I thought I wanted to be, you know, firefighter, policeman, army guy, all that were kind of not as interesting as I thought they would be. Um, but entrepreneurship has always been super interesting to me. Um I and so, yeah, and so when I was, but I never really knew what I wanted to do. I never knew, like I had no like big dream or invention or idea of what I would actually do as an entrepreneur. And so, you know, the deeper and deeper I got into the world of print, and as I I learned the ins and outs of the industry, uh it became kind of just the obvious selection. Um, what really got me pushed into it was um my my former employer, which is a great, great guy, but I would call him a bit of a mentor, just really supported me in my sales career. Um, but I approached him with wanting to add additional services as a brokerage uh that we didn't offer in-house to build those markets within our own company. And um, and and it was declined, no offense taken or given on it. Um, but I was like, okay, well, I want to do it anyway, so I'm gonna quit. I'm gonna start a print brokerage. And uh and I picked up a partner and went that direction. Um, and that was five years ago. And then uh about early to mid uh 2024, um, I was kind of evaluating the lifespan of a brokerage, uh of a print broker, because really anybody can Google up the same people that I'm using. They may not get as quite as good of a price, but they can try it direct from the same people that I'm buying it from. So that's a bit of a conundrum as a print broker. Um, I think it used to be different, you know, 30 years ago, but it's not like that anymore. But um so I decided that there was a lifespan to my brokerage, and I needed to either, you know, get a job or start a new business or go a new growth direction, or I could open a facility. And so late 2024, we ended up making that decision, going and purchasing all the equipment, finding a facility, moving that direction. So so outside, so like actually having like a full set of staff, a full set of you know, costs and warehouse and all that. I'm only in about a year and a half deep on that uh as an entrepreneur. So that answer your question.

SPEAKER_08 6:10

Yeah, absolutely. I'm I'm curious because you know, entrepreneurship isn't for everybody, right? Um, and I I am vehemently against the prevailing guru maybe conversations that say things like, Everyone needs to start a business, everyone needs to be an entrepreneur, that's how you make your money. Um, because there's a lot of risk involved. And some people can't tolerate that. And it also requires you to learn a lot. For example, like you had a really strong background in sales, it sounds like. Yeah. You then have to learn the management piece, you have to learn the uh KPI tracking, the marketing outside of direct sales. I mean, like there's just a lot more that goes into it. And you mentioned, you know, getting the equipment and the warehouse. And so I I think it takes a very special individual to become an entrepreneur and stick with it. So I'm curious if there was anything in your past, maybe um like childhood, young adulthood, that let you know or reassured you like this was the right path for you to take and this was something that you could actually do.

SPEAKER_32 7:16

Um, well, there's kind of two sides, there's a two-sided answer to that question. I definitely like I was a latchkey child, and so like everything that I wanted or needed outside of, you know, my my parents definitely provided. Like I had some clothes for school that weren't decent, like there there was no like neglect there or anything, but definitely like anything extra that I wanted to do or to have was a hundred percent on me to figure out from a very young age. So that's kind of where the grit and the acceptance of I can make my own path came from. Yeah. But um, but when it comes to like thinking this was the true plan for me, I think I naively bought into the glory of it. I wanted to be the big dog who made all the right decisions and that everybody looked to for those answers. Uh, don't buy into that would be my recommendation. Like, you need to take a much more um realistic look at what it means to be an entrepreneur than that. Because it was way harder than I thought. Like way harder. Even just a simple drone creature was incredibly difficult. And this has been a hundred times harder than that.

SPEAKER_08 8:26

Sure. And I mean, that was with years of knowledge in the industry already, too. So I mean, I'll be vulnerable and I just to share my own story for the listeners too. I um I worked for free essentially when I started my business for almost three years. And it just took that long for me to figure everything out and reinvest back into the company and get to a point where it was sustainable that I could actually start to take money and and receive a paycheck from it like that. And I think a lot of people, you know, they see the end results of entrepreneurship, uh, maybe a little bit more of the time freedom, um, some of the higher income levels. And like you said, they buy into this perspective of glory that isn't necessarily realistic, especially not in the short term. It genuinely takes time and you have to invest in yourself and learn a lot of skills and competencies to get to a point where the business can grow. You can hire the team, you can build the systems and actually achieve the higher scale there.

SPEAKER_32 9:28

Yeah, and I think that uh I think like measuring the level of difficulty is definitely like not comparing yourself to other people's situations because the few entrepreneurs that I knew when I was starting out had had, you know, according to their stories, I'm sure there are things they either forgot or don't want to remember about how hard it was, but fairly smooth launches into it and uh into doing decently well uh for themselves. Now they're not, you know, 100 millionaires or anything like that, but they did well for themselves. And I kind of thought that's how it would go for me. Um, and that is just a hundred percent not the case. It has been completely my story is completely different from theirs, uh not comparable. Um and so when you're gauging that, I would also gauge like where you're at in your life. You know, like for me, I had four kids. I had already made a really decent income as a sales rep. I was fairly successful as a sales rep. And we had built a lifestyle around that. So when you're like weighing the difficulty of starting a business, you got to weigh how much it costs to even reasonably maintain your current lifestyle. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you're out driving sweet cars and stuff all the time going on vacations. It means like, how much is your mortgage? And how many months can you pay your mortgage before you pay yourself, you know, and like asking yourself those kind of questions. Those are things that were underestimated on my part, 100%.

SPEAKER_08 10:47

I like the I mean you shared two concepts there that I think are really important. The first, measuring success against yourself and not against others. Uh, I think that that's a critical skill for someone who wants to get into business ownership or entrepreneurship to develop and master on their own. Because if you're compared to somebody else, I mean, comparison is the thief of joy, right? Uh, if you're constantly looking at those maybe hundred millionaires, like you said, or the people that are always driving uh luxury cars around, it's easier to get down on yourself or put yourself in a mental position where you feel less than or that you haven't accomplished what you need to accomplish. The reality is as long as you're in a process of continuous improvement where you're a better version of yourself than you were yesterday, or you're accomplishing what you need to accomplish today that you didn't get done yesterday, and you're you're, again, success measured against your yourself, you'll constantly improve. You'll constantly get better, and the business will grow as a result of that because as your capacity increases, so does your business's capacity. The second one that I really like that you just brought up was weighing entrepreneurship against the opportunity cost. That's not something that I often think about because I view, and and maybe this is, you know, hindsight's 2020, I view entrepreneurship as it was the greatest opportunity for me. And if I didn't invest in that, what I would have missed out on. But there's a very real factor that you highlighted, and that was, you know, you already had a certain lifestyle and you had to maintain that. You had the mortgage, you have maybe the family, you have the expenses already in place. There's an opportunity cost associated with getting into entrepreneurship and starting a business. And maybe you're missing out on, you know, a six-figure salary and benefits that you might already have. And you have to determine as an individual whether or not that's worth it for you, for your position. Can you maintain the same level or or quality of life that you need or want?

unknown 12:48

Right.

SPEAKER_08 12:48

And those are things that need to be assessed.

SPEAKER_32 12:51

Yeah, definitely. I mean, the conversation with my wife, who is 100% involved in all the decision making, uh, which I highly recommend, by the way, um, was just like how much are we willing to lose? And when we when we looked at it and we looked at the risks that we were taking and the opportunity to build a dream, for me, it was 100% for me. Um, you know, our is not a risk we're willing, we're taking and our determination together was yes. But I think until you're fully in that and staring that possibility in the face, you it may be hard to judge, you know, if you're willing to go that far or not.

SPEAKER_08 13:29

That's a really powerful thought. How much are you willing to lose? I um you know, it it was funny for me because when I started, I really didn't have anything to lose. And so at that point, it was like I could lose everything. It didn't matter. I could go all in on it. Um what a I mean, that's a powerful position to be in. At the time you feel worthless, but I I realized in hindsight, I was a student. I had just left the active duty army. Um, I was going to Utah Valley University and living on student loans and the GI bill, essentially.

SPEAKER_38 14:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 14:06

So I didn't have a lot of money coming in, enough to pay my bills, essentially. But I was living in my grandmother's basement. I uh didn't have a lot of expenses. I mean, just my car payments, phone bill type stuff. Um, so it was like if I if I lost that what, I'm still living in grandma's basement.

SPEAKER_32 14:26

Yeah, it's not far to fall, right?

SPEAKER_08 14:27

Yeah, so it made it easier for me to go in, I think.

SPEAKER_32 14:31

I think young people, like if you want to start a business, like the best time to do it is when you're young. Um if you want to get a taste of what that's like, your situation I would say be a perfect one. But yeah, you know, I I see stuff on social media, I don't know how true it is. They say like the average entrepreneur starts when he's like 40 something, and they make their first million when they're 50 something. Like those are the average numbers or whatever, somewhere in that range.

SPEAKER_14 14:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 14:57

And um, you know, I think it's because it's really hard to take that that leap, you know, until you feel like safe or established, but I think that that's the the biggest lie of all. Because once you're safe and established, that means you have way more to risk way more to lose in the in the in your path.

SPEAKER_08 15:16

I think, you know, from my perspective, the two benefits to being a little bit older, perhaps. Now I'm just playing the devil's advocate a little bit, is that one you have something to invest, and that maybe can help you start. For example, like I I had to bootstrap everything. I just that's I didn't have anything, so I didn't have anything to lose, but I didn't have anything to gain um or to invest. The second was I was a non-traditional age student because I'd already been in the army for five years. I was a little bit older, a little bit more mature. It was the uh the willingness to invest in learning or developing my my self-competency. And that's a hard sell, I think, for younger people. But when you're older and you can look back, you have that wisdom to understand the investment in your own education, not just like formal education, but I mean the willingness to learn and develop and and appreciate, you know, skill and and competency, I think that that grows as you age. You understand what that's actually worth a little bit more. Uh so it's easier to invest in that. I'm thinking you're you're spot on though. You know, if you start young, the hardest part when you start young is that you still want to do all the young person things. You want to go out with your friends on the weekends, you want to blow off, you know, school or work to go snowboarding. But the reality is like the people who just commit on the personal growth when they're young and they compound for 10 years doing that. Oh my goodness, that's where the the huge victories in entrepreneurship come from, in my opinion. I mean, it's Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 16:55

You can learn a lot, a lot faster. But it's there's trade-offs. It's like you said, like you're you're there is no right age to do anything. I just I think you you know, when you decide it's right for you and you have done a proper assessment and evaluation, you know, and then you take the leap one way or the other, it's you know, that's a very personal decision. So easy. I don't want to tell somebody they should start when they're young and then maybe not mature enough. You know, maybe they got some need to have some experiences, some hardship to learn what it's like to deal with hardship uh ahead of time.

SPEAKER_08 17:35

I'm curious. Uh you um you kind of told us a little bit about you know the the print aspect of it, uh or or your print business, but can we dive into that a little bit too? I'm I'm interested, you know, what does commercial print actually entail? Who do you serve? Like what does the business actually look like for somebody?

SPEAKER_32 17:58

Yeah, that's a great question. So like I have a commercial print shop and I only handle I only handle a certain portion of the market. You know, because there's a lot of different kinds of printers out there. Um like my former employer, they're they're a large printer. I I don't I don't know their numbers, but I guess they're thirty north of thirty million dollars a year in revenue. Wow, you know, so they they have like a really broad reach on their service, and most of their stuff, uh at least when I left, what I understand, is like big offset print, which is like huge prices, um, and uh, you know, kind of what you see in in movies and things like that. Um, and that's that's a piece of the market that can do like long-run products and packaging and things like that. Um, and then there's a there's like a web print part of the market, which is you know, continuous run, which is for really high volumes on really low spec quality product. Um, and then and that's a very loose overview. There's actually some high quality digital web that you can get that's awesome. But um there's uh and then there's like flexible printing, which there's digital flexible printing, and then there's long run, roll-to-roll paper stocks and label stocks. Um, and so what we handle is we handle we're we're commercial, but we're a digital printer. So we have we have presses here that run at a reasonable rate, um, and they're good for small to medium size runs of pretty much anything that you need to do. Um, it it runs on uh the way our cost program works is that we have you know a couple different size sheets that we can run, but it's a really narrow window of size sheets that you can run. And then we're charged based on click charges, which that means that every side of the sheet that prints, we call an impression. Every impression has an associated charge with it, depending on how many colors are printed on it. And so we have a baseline static price that you can run on, which is makes us great for like short to medium runs. Once you start crossing that medium threshold, then it starts to become too expensive to use us. So we have to either broker that or recommend another printer.

SPEAKER_08 20:09

Out of curiosity, because most of my audience is gonna be smaller businesses, entrepreneurs. Uh, we have uh you know a good chunk of people that are operating in maybe like the $250,000 to a million dollar range right now. Um what does a small to medium size run mean? Is that like if I were printing books, is that 500 books?

SPEAKER_32 20:29

Yeah, so for books, that's a great question. I would say sub 1,000 books, maybe 2,000, depending on the page count.

SPEAKER_33 20:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_32 20:36

Um if you're dealing with postcards, you know, 50,000 or less. Um we're really struggling to compete north of 40 or 50,000. Um we can compete, but the margin's really low. Um but depending on.

SPEAKER_08 20:50

I mean you say 40 to 50,000, that sounds like a ton to me. I guess I'm just not you know knowledgeable.

SPEAKER_32 20:56

Postcards are just so cheap and simple. Like we we we call them just uh like flat stack sheets, and so we just you print postcards, you can do large lists of cutting and you can bulkbox those relatively quickly. You can do a very large number of those, but then you know, uh when you take like a trifold brochure, we're gonna struggle to be competitive over like 10,000, 12,000 units. Um, if you're doing if you're doing uh a book that has 300 pages in it and uh it's full color uh throughout, which is not very common, but if it was full color throughout, you know, we're gonna struggle to be competitive competitive north of 500 to 1,000 bucks on it. But if you do a magazine that has like 96 pages and it's a black and white or something, you know, we can we could be competitive up to 2,000, maybe even up to 5,000, depending on the size and the page count. So those are kind of what we would call like small to medium runs. But to be honest, like our average ticket size is under $200.

SPEAKER_23 21:58

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_32 21:59

So when you're talking Small to medium size runs, like we gotta we gotta turn a lot of work. We gotta turn a lot of work to make any money. So we don't really count jobs, we count dollars, you know. It's like, yeah, we ran 30 jobs this week, but the total value of that was twelve hundred bucks, you know. So there's things that so when you're looking at small to medium, I mean a 250,000 to million dollar size business, whatever they're buying, we're probably able to service.

SPEAKER_57 22:25

I'm curious.

SPEAKER_32 22:26

But we service companies, huge companies. Like we've serviced $500 million companies because all they need is a thousand postcards once or twice a month, you know, or 500 magazines to send out to their subscriber base or something like that. So you know, we can we can service any size company depending on the needs.

SPEAKER_08 22:45

Who do you primarily see as people that benefit from uh your service? I I mean to me, I I think of everything in the in the term of the business. So it it uh to me, it's like the small to medium-sized businesses, the the entrepreneurs, like if if they need marketing materials, like you need a print shop, obviously. Uh who's your your target client typically?

SPEAKER_32 23:10

Yeah, great question. So we're always looking for uh repeat work. I I think this is another two-sided question. What are we looking for and what is the customer looking for? So when we're looking for customers, we're sort we're looking for companies that have regular needs. Yeah. So uh I'll give you an example. One of ours is uh is uh uh you buy a warranty, an extended warranty company. So those guys are sending out you know brochures and marketing materials across the country regularly. So we really like customers like that because we're gonna get you know one to three or four orders from them a month, yeah, typically. And they're gonna be medium in size and medium to large in size, okay? And they're gonna be good margin for us. But when a customer is looking for, you know, like what kind of a printer should I talk to? Um, I think small businesses that are just starting out or are a million dollars or under, we can be a fantastic solution for them because typically when you're the only person running this running your business, it's like hard to plan ahead. And so like you can order business cards online, you can get 100 of them for 12 bucks, you can get 250 of them for me for 35 bucks, but I'll have them ready today or tomorrow.

SPEAKER_10 24:22

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_32 24:23

You know, you don't have to wait for them and stuff like that. So that's kind of like the trade-off is that you know, if you're in a hurry, if you're struggling to plan ahead and things like that, for a still a decently competitive rate, I can get you really good quality product really, really quickly. Um, and but you know, those same people may be better suited with an online vendor like VistaPrint or something like that because the cost is so much lower, but they're gonna be willing to wait and possibly pay some shipping alongside with that. So there's trade-offs, you know, but we could be a really good solution for quick turn quality at a decent price.

SPEAKER_08 24:58

So I like the speed thing that you brought up because I mean, personal uh anecdotes. I often drop the ball on doing stuff ahead of time. So, like uh I did my I tried to do a quarterly event, like in-person event every every quarter. And we did one in January at a mastermind at uh Club Paddock in American Fork, and I printed off copies of a working draft for a book that I was giving to everybody. Um, but I forgot to do that ahead of time. So I like did uh you know same day print at Staples and they couldn't do the whole thing. So I did the other half at like Office Max. And it was just like uh, you know, I needed I needed a resource that could be quick, um, but I was hitting the limit on what they could do same day. So it was just uh a bad fit, but but now I know I can reach out to Andrew. So yeah, I yeah, the time thing that's I think really important, especially to smaller businesses.

SPEAKER_32 25:56

Um I'm curious about that like samples situation. Like those guys are a great solution for a lot of problems, but we saw problems like the one you just described all the time. People look up a local print shop on Google, they find us, they call us. Uh, we had a lawyer come in the other day. He needed a whole file worth of PDFs for a court case, and he just didn't have time to deal with it himself. So he just dropped off his flash drive and printed everything off and it was ready in 20 minutes. You know, that's you know, we do all kinds of weird stuff like that all the time, and you're not gonna be able to get service out of Staples or Kinkos or anything like that. And it's gonna be a lot higher quality. So you can we're gonna solve some problems for you and make you look good at the same time.

SPEAKER_08 26:40

I'm curious, uh, a couple thoughts. So I ordered um I wrote a book. It's called How the Hell Are You Doing This, by the way. At the end of this, uh let me get your address so I can ship it to you. I did. I wrote that book.

SPEAKER_32 26:52

Oh, I've been seeing it all over my social medias and I didn't know you wrote that. That's me cool.

SPEAKER_08 26:57

I'll send you a copy.

SPEAKER_32 26:58

Now I gotta get one for sure.

SPEAKER_08 27:00

I I typically give a copy to everybody that comes into the studio films the episode, but since we're doing this remote, let me mail you a copy. Or we can meet GitLunch or something like that. But yeah, I'd love to hook you up. Um I'm I'm just thinking off the top of my head. So I I ordered 500 books um for the first run. Those uh I I so I self-published, um, wrote the book with uh an author, a ghostwriter, and an editor. We worked with the company was actually referred to me by uh Russell Brunson as a Chinese print shop. They print 500 copies and ship them to me for like 300 bucks. Or sorry, 3,000 bucks. 3,000 bucks. Um very high quality, I felt like, you know, nice soft touch hardcover book type thing. Um I'm curious as as companies like that, you know, you get China trying to compete and all these things. How do you how do you guys stay at the front of the market? How do you um how do you how do you compete with you know Chinese companies that are having maybe like government subsidies, you know, make it really affordable to print?

SPEAKER_35 28:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 28:05

I would imagine time is the biggest, you know, factor that that benefits you is like you don't have to wait, like I had to wait, you know, three weeks for slow boat shipping, and it was you know a couple weeks to get the stuff printed. And and then if you need a change or an editor, like because actually we found um after my first 500 copies were delivered, we found an editorial error in them. And it was like, well, even if we wanted to go back and fix it now, it's gonna take you know over a month to get the revised copies in.

SPEAKER_32 28:36

Yeah. Yeah, that's a that's a super good question. I I think that there are markets that suffer from that competition, and I don't think that mine is one of them personally. Um like your situation, and I have another customer, we're gonna be printing their books starting later this week. I'm really excited about it. Um, I don't know if I'm allowed to say, but there'll be some social media around it. I'll tag you in it. Um, but they were printing in Vietnam, and we were able to compete with Vietnam for on the landed price. So, like you said, shipping, tariff, etc.

SPEAKER_33 29:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 29:08

You know, all that all that goes into that. They went from a 16, 12 to 16 week lead time down to two weeks. And we were able to compete with the price coming out of there on uh six to eight hundred books. Um and so it's uh we don't really struggle with that too much. One of the places I have struggled with that across my career is in packaging. Uh China is, I mean, it's about a few years removed from competing with China directly, but uh China is a very affordable, cost-effective, and honestly, shockingly, super high quality provider of packaging coming out of Asia. The children that they employ there are very positive. So uh yeah, but uh forgets I'm 11-year-old running a 40-inch press out there. But no, they they do a really good job and it's really cost effective. And I lost multiple clients over my career to Asia. Usually, if those clients come back, it is specifically related to turn times and corrections. And you know, they don't want to wait 48 to 72 hours to get a response on a file correction and things like that. So it's you know, businesses in at least in the state of Utah, especially like nutraceutical and supplement companies, they move way too fast for that to be a decent solution for them.

SPEAKER_53 30:32

For sure.

SPEAKER_32 30:33

But they everybody tries it. And for some people it works great. For some people it does work so great.

SPEAKER_08 30:38

I know both. I'm curious. Um, what do what do you typically see as like the net benefit to somebody who does business with you? Uh, because I I'm I looked at your website just before the the call, you know, and I see kind of the range of products and services that you provide. Uh, do you collect video testimonials or anything from clients to help you like show the ROI that your business you know returns back to them?

SPEAKER_32 31:05

No, that type of marketing is something I'm severely lacking. Uh that that is a time management issue on my end. I do request Google reviews. If you look at our Google reviews, there's a decent amount of them. And they're I think we got like a 4.9 or 4.7. In fact, it's funny enough, I asked my dad to do a review for us, and he I think he's the only four-star review we got. I think he did it just yeah. I think he's like, it needs to be authentic. And I'm like, five stars is authentic. Come on. I'm your son. Don't I get five stars? Yeah. So yeah, but uh so we four stars is the product of your parenting. Yeah, exactly. Um, but yeah, we don't we don't do a whole lot of that. We are trying to like post a lot more about projects that we got running through the shop and try to like get people familiar with like what our work looks like as we produce it. But no, we we absolutely need to do more of that. And uh we have a you know, it's just me and my wife running this place, and we run out of time on just about everything every single day. Um but when it comes to like the if you want to talk about the ROI of working with us, I think in a very saturated market like print, like we have, we can whatever I'm gonna say, somebody else could probably commit to that exact same thing. Quick turn times, competitive pricing. We're gonna take great care of you and everything, you know, the all of the great things that people say. The thing that I lean back on is that what we do really well here, because we're a small and new shop, is we're still trying to discover those clients that are gonna really raise us to the next level of a facility. And so our onboarding process is finding out in a deeper level what you guys actually need as a customer. What is gonna bring success to your project? So we we have a pretty good sized publisher that we just brought on a month and a month and a half ago, and we did a lot of adjusting to meet their needs and to make it a profitable project for us. Um, we have been working with uh really popular thing right now is uh snail mail projects where people write stories and artwork and they put them in a letter and they mail it off. Um that's a that's a growing and healthy market that we are very interested in being a part of. And as we onboard, we've onboarded uh two of those clients so far. Again, we've had to go through a decent amount of adjustments in our processes specifically for those clients. And for better or worse, still remains to be seen. I would say that's definitely what set us a car. If you sit down with me and tell me about this thing that you put the last four years or two years of your life into, spent tens of thousands of dollars launching, and now you're having a reasonable amount of success and you need our assistance to help it keep going and growing. We care about that. We care about that because if we do a good job for you, then we get to grow with you. And I think that's the one thing that can really set us apart is we're not just saying that. We need your business, we want your business, and we want to care about your business more than you've ever been cared for before. And if we're not doing that, you know, tell us we will fix it because we think if what we're doing, we think we're providing that. So if you're not being provided that, we need to know so we can adjust and provide that for you.

SPEAKER_08 34:33

Do you offer um sorry, I'm writing down the quotes and I'm loving it. Do you offer anything like um an everydoor direct mail service? So like if somebody wants to come and they want to get their postcards printed or mailers printed, like I actually really like the concept you brought up just barely about the snail mail projects. That's something that I'm I want to get back to. Like it's a form of marketing that's making a comeback. Um but do you do you offer like a service if somebody wants to do that where you'll drop it off at the post office, like they send you the print, or I'm just curious. I've used an everydoor direct mail service before for postcards, and like they let me select the zip codes, they print the amount for all the homes in the zip codes, they take it to the post office and do that drop-off system. But is that something that you offer?

SPEAKER_32 35:24

Yeah, absolutely. I just say that our technology is a little lacking here. Um in the sense that like we do every day, we do it's called EDDM, um, everydoor direct mailer. We print several jobs like that every single week. Um, but we're being provided the list or we're being provided the volume, and the artwork's coming to us with the proper postage and everything already on it. So that's the that's the difference, is that like if you got into like got print or something, or Uprinting or something like that, they're gonna have a lot higher level of technology for you to take advantage of than we do. Because we're still small and growing into what we're gonna be and the services that we're gonna provide. And we do add technology and solutions all the time, um, but we're still getting to a place where it's a little bit more customer uh experience friendly. So, but we we love those projects. I I tell people here all the time EDDM is my favorite thing in the world. You print thousands of them, it only takes a few minutes, and you can make a decent margin on it, you know, so you can provide a good quick-turn service of good quality, your customer's happy, we're happy, goes through the shop really smooth. Those are fantastic projects, and we really enjoy them.

SPEAKER_08 36:36

Awesome.

SPEAKER_32 36:36

So, yes, the short answer is yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_08 36:39

With that, I'm curious, you know, as just a room for for growth, and I mean, take it or leave it. Um, do you ever partner with people to provide like the copywriting service or the design, the help for those print projects? Or do you just take when they you know have something already designed, they send you the PDF or the file?

SPEAKER_32 37:00

Yeah, we're pretty traditional in a sense that we expect the artwork to be delivered print ready. Um, pretty common, I don't know when this happened in the history of print, at least around here. There's a thing called prepress. And in digital print, prepress is super simple because the technology takes care of it. Um and in higher forms of printing like offset and lithography, it's it's a lot more intense. There's a lot more to entail, but it's become kind of a service department instead of a profit center. Um so we offer things like we'll help pick fix people's bleeds um so they don't end up with white borders on our postcards, or we can um delete a background and something, you know, we'll take care of some small basic design services for you, but it's really, really limited. We do expect our customers to deliver us print ready files that are good to go. Now, that being said, you know, these days it's more and more I see that your printhouse is expected to be able to accommodate some sort of design at some level. And so I self-trained myself to do some very basic design. Um, anything you get from me can be much better from a professional designer 100%. But I don't know if that answers your question fully.

SPEAKER_08 38:15

Absolutely. Well, anything that we can help uh, you know, showcase your packaging um and and the value that you provide to the customer.

SPEAKER_32 38:23

So I'm curious too much of customer experience. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, Parker. No, go for it. That just goes back to that customer experience. Like you just launched your business and you need to do a mailer to get it out to everybody in a specific neighborhood because you mow lots, right? So you send me a PNG file off of Canva, right? I'm gonna help flip that into a print ready PDF for you, no charge, just to help out, because I want you to have success as much as I want to have success.

SPEAKER_08 38:52

Awesome. With um kind of this this line of of thinking here and the value that you offer, if you were to go back, you know, five years to where you were and and knowing what you know now, what would you do or change to kind of shortcut a little bit of the growth or the pain points that you've already had? Like what would make a difference for you if you could go back five years?

SPEAKER_32 39:16

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think about it all the time, actually. Um, I would start a lot smaller. Um that to me, for so manufacturing is super overhead heavy. You gotta have a facility, you gotta have the right amount of power, you gotta get a lease on your equipment or get a loan for your equipment if you're gonna purchase. Um so I would definitely start a lot smaller. I would have started with smaller equipment and less services. Um, that would have really, really helped the pain of getting launched. I went very big for a digital shop. Um, probably total over the life of the loans and the leases, total spend is gonna be well north of a million dollars in five years. Um and so it's very expensive. But you could get started in this industry for probably I don't know, maybe two thousand to three thousand dollars a month, and you could do it in an in an office space that only costs you twelve to fifteen hundred bucks a month, you know. But the the flip side of that is that to have any kind of growth at all, you need to hire talent um and uh and and talent costs. You know, you're gonna be several thousand dollars. So I just think that the I think that if you if I was going back, I would have started smaller with what I could handle myself that actually generated a profit. So I didn't have to wait so long to pay myself.

SPEAKER_48 40:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 40:46

Um that's I think if you're going into a manufacturing program, that's something to be considered is that the actual cost of doing as much as you wish you can do is way beyond. And you can't even utilize it all. Yeah. Like I I have I have like 19 pieces of equipment out there. We use probably three to five a day.

SPEAKER_33 41:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_32 41:06

So we're not utilizing all that equipment every single day. Um, and so that's like why habit.

SPEAKER_08 41:13

Yeah. Can I talk on the uh the start smaller idea here? I um I run a uh coaching business called Mission Ready Foundations. We teach entrepreneurs essentially military-inspired leadership systems adapted for business to help them scale and grow. And, you know, the last couple of weeks, it's a structured 12-week program. We work with um customers. I mean, they go through the coursework, the modules, they learn the lesson. We have a weekly call to go over, answer questions, and uh help get them on track with what the objective is for that week. And the last two weeks, we did um organic content and messaging and paid advertising. And one of the things that has been a recurring concept as I'm teaching the program is the starting smaller idea. Not because I think you should limit your beliefs or your dreams or what you're trying to achieve, but just because when you try to get big and complex, it adds headache and it delays you learning everything, right? One of the cool things about a paid ad structure, for example, if you run a start smaller mentality with that, is that you don't have to overwhelm yourself with 9,000 creatives in one quarter or uh, you know, huge budgets and spend. You can start collecting data off of, you know, maybe two or three dollars a day in ad spend. And that data is what allows you to make more informed decisions as you go. And starting small keeps it all in a manageable, like a position where you can actually learn from it and grow as a result. So I think I totally agree.

SPEAKER_32 42:59

I ran social media as on Meta, and the amount of data that you can collect and sort and review can can become extremely overwhelming very, very quickly.

SPEAKER_08 43:09

Oh yeah. I mean your your dashboard when you first sign into it, right? You have 10, I was gonna say 10, but that's a way a gross under exaggeration. It's it's literally, you get like a hundred KPIs thrown at you immediately. And you gotta like parse through the dashboard and what you're doing. And the reality is it's it's overwhelming for people, then they don't start, right? But that's that's like the antithesis of starting small, right? So I I focused it down like in the in the program that I teach. You know, we focus on uh click through rate. When you first start seeing, you know, are people actually engaging with your content? Is it is it actually uh getting their attention enough for them to take an action? Then we look at like your cost per mill. So like what's the uh what's the cost to get your your ad in front of a thousand eyeballs? And that is a good indicator of how stature. Or competitive your audience and market are. And then we look at like your return on ad spend. But we don't look at the return on ad spend until you've got two weeks of data already. So we were fine.

SPEAKER_32 44:11

And I think it's six months, like depending on what your product is.

SPEAKER_08 44:14

It really does, right? I mean, the the longer you go, um, the more refined that information is going to be. But uh you can start looking at you know what ads are gonna be winners. I mean, after about two weeks of data is what I recommend as a baseline to start with. But but the way you find that is you look at the click-through rate. Like if you're getting, you know, 10% of people who see your ad clicking on it, that's probably a pretty good creative. It's probably got a good hook, story, and offer, right? But if you're getting 1%, you know that that ad's not performing. I mean, it's just we look at you know the progression, but the only way you can do that in a manageable and palatable way is if you start small.

SPEAKER_32 44:55

Yeah, I agree. Totally agree.

SPEAKER_08 44:57

I also think it's more important. Like I mentioned, you know, we last week I was teaching the uh organic marketing, organic content piece. I have a pretty robust system now when it comes to producing organic content. Like we post on, you know, a dozen plus accounts every day, multiple times a day. So we have we have a lot of content that goes out very consistently. That's overwhelming for most people. And to be honest, the only reason I have it built that way now is that I have a full team that run that for me. So it's not overwhelming for me. So my recommendation to people starting small is hey, go post, you know, three times a week. Maybe you get on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and you do one story per day. And it doesn't even have to be anything fancy or staged when you do your story, just show what you're doing. Um, but you break it down into a much more manageable system, and that like starting small manageability, that allows you to be consistent. It's not overwhelming where you get stressed out and you stop doing it, and then you think you've got to start over or start from scratch again. It's how do we make it manageable? How do we make it simple? Simplicity is your friend, especially when you start a business.

SPEAKER_32 46:11

Yeah, no, I I completely agree. And it's like you need to you need to feed your family, but you gotta start small, right? So it's like I guess figuring out that balance is a super personal thing, but there is a lot to deal with when you open a business. I I was shocked at simple things like paying my quarterly sales tax. You know, it's like just a thing.

SPEAKER_05 46:32

Oh, the bane of my existence.

SPEAKER_32 46:34

Oh my gosh, the government sometimes I feel like is making it hard.

SPEAKER_05 46:38

Oh gosh, it's the 13th.

SPEAKER_08 46:40

I gotta put a check in the mail.

SPEAKER_32 46:41

Yeah, yeah, I'm getting ready to do mine. I got I gotta do it for four business entities today. But um, yeah, so we uh it just it's totally up to you like what small looks like and what you're capable of handling. But I definitely think that starting with way less than you think you can is probably a smart start. Because there's gonna be way more than you think there is, for sure.

SPEAKER_41 47:02

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_32 47:03

So starting small. So starting small and hiring proper talent is definitely like the two things that I would do totally different. Now, my my original guy that I hired here, he's he's my shop manager now, but he had uh almost no skill in digital print at all. He he's been a feeder at a giant impressed shop, but he had a he had some grit and a willingness to learn that I really enjoyed. And I still consider him an extremely valuable hire, but I maybe would have hired in a different order. Because my second hire, well, my second good hire was a kid who came from a digital print shop and worked at several, and he elevated the success of the shop overnight by two, two or three hundred percent.

SPEAKER_51 47:46

Wow.

SPEAKER_32 47:47

And so, like, if we'd have had if we'd have had that in the beginning, we probably actually could have made some money last year. So, but we spent so much time struggling, learning how to do everything. Like, because I thought that we could do it with just me and this one other guy, uh it it was a lot of pain and suffering. And I actually can run every single piece of equipment in the shop, which is cool, but a talent that I don't really need to have.

SPEAKER_08 48:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 48:14

You know, we need to have a talent of managing the business.

SPEAKER_08 48:17

So I want to ask about um about hiring in the team a little bit. A big part of my coaching is I do leadership, I do team development, right? Those are the the pillars, perhaps. Um, one of the common conversations that I end up having with people is hiring a players versus developing your talent or developing the talent on your team. And you mentioned, you know, you had one guy willingness to learn, and then you had the other guy who was like already experienced and seasoned. I'm curious, what's your thoughts on hiring an A player versus finding somebody who's motivated, a hard worker, and developing them?

SPEAKER_32 48:57

Yeah, tough question. It's a tough question because like definitely hiring talent, it's gonna cost you more, but it's gonna make you a lot more a hundred percent. Um but you know, the big question is if you're starting small and you're a good leader and a good teacher, which are not that's those are not my strengths, um uh I learned that very quickly is that you know, I've been led by much better leaders than I am. Um if you have that ability, then I think that starting with someone who is less expensive but has lots of drive and grit could be could be a good solution. I think it depends also on the complexity of your facility and what you're trying to do. You know, in print, everything you screw up costs money. Um there's no there's no like reverse button or delete or control Z or any of that. You know, you just you ruin a book, you lost three dollars, you know. If you we had a job that we accidentally overprinted and we printed more than the cost of the whole job, you know, and so like there's just like accidents like that can be super, super costly in this world. So I I guess that it I don't know that I have a good answer for you, but I know that hiring uh someone who did not have the skills and the talent taught me a lot about leadership and methods and building a program that somebody could follow. Yeah, and building that program with having them help me build that program made them really bought into the process. And that's extremely valuable in my opinion. But hiring the talent, if you can afford to do that first, and they could you can replicate that, now you have a scalable business.

SPEAKER_46 50:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 50:38

Because that person can teach those things a lot faster than somebody else can learn them. So um, so I guess I'd I'd call it a 70-30. Hiring talent is probably the better way to go. But there is good opportunity in hiring, lack of experience.

SPEAKER_08 50:53

I also wanted to ask about uh you made a comment about changing the order of hiring. Now, yeah, before we dive into that, are you familiar with a concept called the Rainmaker Triad? Uh similarly, the business triumvirate is a similar way to phrase that.

SPEAKER_32 51:09

So the only triumvirate I know is uh in Roman history.

SPEAKER_08 51:12

There we go. We uh I'll I'll posit this thought. And it's along the lines of you do what you do best, you outsource the rest. Um of my my favorite coaches, Mandy Keene, she teaches a concept called the Rainmaker Triad. And in short, she looks at, you know, all uber successful businesses have three key players in them. They have a rainmaker, that's somebody who's the charismatic leader, they start the conversations, they drive revenue, they get sales, that kind of thing. Then they have an engineer, and the engineer is the person that refines the system and the back end and makes it a scalable operation. Then they they have the third person is like the creator. Um, and they're you know, the artist. They make the product or the service beautiful and well packaged and deliverable in a palatable way or a good way to the customer. And so she looks at you know all of these hyper successful organizations and businesses, not just privately owned, but publicly owned, and they all have you know at least those three positions. And they're all that's where the biggest, highest level of talent is. So typically speaking, I recommend that people hire for their weakness. So, for example, like I'm very much a rainmaker. I have conversations, I get on the podcast, I talk to people, I network, I, you know, drive revenue for the business essentially by doing these things. But I'm really bad when it comes to, like, for example, my social media. I mentioned I have a whole a team that does my social media for me now. They're the creators. I'm not the creator, they're the creators. So I also have to hire an engineer, and the engineer is somebody who can go in and systematize the back end of the business, the automation aspect, moving people from, you know, like lead to the next step in the pipeline, right? All of those kind of automations and stuff. I'm not great with that. I just would I would do it manually if it was just me and I would, you know, use a Google Sheet or something like that. That's not necessarily the most efficient way to do it, but it's just how I would do it because I'm I'm more focused on having the conversation and driving the revenue. So I hire engineers and creators first to, you know, cover down on my weaknesses that way and develop a more well-rounded system. You said you would order or change the order of hiring differently. What does that look like to you? And if you look at your strengths, you know, would you recommend hiring to cover your weaknesses? Or are you recommending hiring to amplify the strengths that your business already has?

SPEAKER_32 53:59

No, no, I I the the whole process that you just described is exactly what I would go back and do differently. Um I tend to be a uh DIY kind of guy. And um I I definitely thought that I could handle a lot more, you know, sales of customer service as well as a piece of some of the manufacturing. And that was just completely totally wrong. Um like you, although you are a way better speaker than I am, definitely. Um, but I I'm a good sales guy. I I can meet with customers and talk to them about their project and show that I care about them and help them find decent consultative solutions to meet their needs. And that's something that I've excelled at and done really well with. Um but uh I that got curbed when I thought that I could do more hands-on things here and handle more pieces on my own. Um when I really would have been, like you said, hiring, you know, talent or engineers that know how to do this a lot, the operations a lot better than I do. Have experience in the operations that I didn't have, I could have launched with far more success than we did.

SPEAKER_08 55:07

I like the um the concepts that you're bringing up here. You mentioned you're very good at the sales. And I I have this recurring thought that I like to share. And it's that, you know, entrepreneurs, typically speaking, are always the best salesperson in their organization. It's just because at the end of the day, you're the most invested in it. No one else is ever going to have that same level of investment. Right. Um, so I I like to typically err on the side of staying in the sales longer than necessary and then hiring people to do everything else.

SPEAKER_32 55:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 55:40

And I would agree. Once the system gets built and you have people in place that are actually running the rest of the show and you can start outsourcing some of the sales, then you can actually maybe step more into that traditional, you know, ownership, maybe CEO type perspective and just focus on the direction and the growth of the company. Um but it's it's hard to replace the entrepreneur as the salesperson because you're gonna be the best of the sales. You're the most passionate about what you do. You know, it's your livelihood directly connected to it. And and when you have conversations, then it just makes them more authentic and real and you connect with people better.

SPEAKER_25 56:15

Yeah. So I totally agree.

SPEAKER_08 56:19

Let me ask about um strategy moving forward. So we kind of just talked about, you know, what would you do differently if you were to go back in time five years? Now let's look forward for the next five years, if you're okay with that, and say, you know, what's what's the goal for winter print and how are you getting there?

SPEAKER_32 56:39

Yeah, great question. And that and that question has actually changed over time. Um, you know, as as I was trying to determine what I was trying to build build here. Um the the the goal for I think it's gonna take five years in total in business to recuperate the mistakes that have been made uh in the launching of a business. So the goal for five years is to get to uh a stable and consistent level of revenue and margins that we're not fighting the panic attack of running a startup business. We're trying to get past the start of things. And what does that look like in five years? For me, I'm a numbers guy. I think that looks like um I think that looks like somewhere between three and five million dollars in revenue, uh running somewhere between 20 and 35 percent of uh you know net margins. Um and you know, uh a staff for at least one staff for every part of the shop that operates on a consistent basis. Um and so and then also, and then at that point, you know, hopefully by that point I've been able to implement a decent sales process and put some sales staff in place as well. That's I've heard people ask this question before, and there are way better answers than what I have for you. Really, my whole dream is to just run a stable business. I'm not looking to make a hundred million dollars. Some people that's really important to them, and that's okay. You should chase your $100 million dream. My goal is that this is my retirement plan. Yeah, it only needs to make X amount for me to have comfortable retirement at you know, at a decent retirement age, somewhere between 60 and 70 years old. I'm not I used to dream bigger, bigger dollars and things like that. But after being in the trenches for a long time, I have more of what I would call a realistic dream, which is that if my company can do somewhere between seven and ten million dollars over the next 15 years, uh maybe, maybe even as high as 12 or 13 million dollars in a decent net net margin, yeah, then I should be able to unload that to somebody for a decent retirement, you know, and have it and and uh and walk away knowing that I built something successful and meaningful. There's the other part of it too, it's the intangible is that like as I talk with my wife about what we want this company to look like, we see as it's a great opportunity. We s we see ourselves as stewards of this business opportunity. And to be a good steward, we have to care about the people that work here and the people that we work with. And we think that both of us have had employers, you know, that I would I want to say used and abused, but that might be a little bit dramatic, but overused, not properly appreciated or anything like that. We're hoping that we can have still a big enough with small enough company that our staff can know that they're cared for, that a place of work can feel like a safe place for them to be, to earn a living, and to become the best version of themselves as they grow in their lives. You know, that's really that's really part important part of the vision is that we can have the stability here to provide that to the select few people that do work here.

SPEAKER_08 59:51

I love what you just said about becoming the best version of themselves. Yeah, absolutely. I I'm a big believer in um the journey to self-actualization. Not that I can ever attain it as a destination, but in falling in love with the process of self-improvement and self-development.

SPEAKER_35 1:00:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:00:10

I think that that is the most important thing that I can offer someone as an employer is if even if you're only with me for a short period of time, if I can help you constantly improve while you're with me, make you um, you know, more marketable, or develop your capacity or capabilities, I feel like I have an obligation to help you do that. And in doing that, I become a better version of myself. The business becomes better, right? Like I agree. The development of the team is the development of everything else. So I'm a I'm a big believer in that. Now you you shared a series of goals essentially over the next five years. I'm curious, you know, what action or plan is going to help you get to those goals or or what help do you need to achieve those goals?

SPEAKER_32 1:01:02

Yeah, super good question. So the evaluation here is that because we launched a lot bigger than we should have, and a series of unfortunate events that were included in that, uh, we are we're adjusting our size right now. So we're adjusting the we're looking to adjust the size of our shop. We're looking to adjust the size of our overhead. We are looking to essentially retry on the go uh to make ourselves more financially stable and healthy. And so, you know, that that includes two sides of it. Essentially, it's like some things you can reduce, something you can't. We can't reduce staff. We need everybody we got, and finding a replacement for what these guys provide to us is would be very difficult, not impossible, but very difficult. Plus, I value them. They they've been through a lot with me, and I don't want to let that go. Um, and then we're gonna reduce the size of our facility to what we actually need because we're only using about a third of what we bought, you know, so we don't need that. And then with that revamp, oh, and then also adding additional services at the same time. We've been taking a strong look at the market, what's missing in the area, and we're looking to add some pieces of equipment and talent that will fill those gaps in the market in the area that we think will really set us apart as a provider.

SPEAKER_08 1:02:25

Sorry, I've taken notes. I really like the idea. So I told you I got elected to city council this past year. Um and one of the things that was very surprising to me was the necessity of maybe right-sizing the operation and ensuring that things were being done in an efficient manner. Now, I I mean, it sounds like you recognize that that's necessary for the goal that you have. Um and at the same time, I really like your optimism when it comes to adding and expanding services and developing the capability that you can provide clients at the same time. I mean, it just shows that you're aware that there are ways to improve the organizational and operational efficiency without sacrificing the quality to the customer or the client. I think that that's that's the mindset that a well-rounded entrepreneur stays in because you recognize there's always a room to improve.

SPEAKER_32 1:03:28

Yeah. Yeah, we have to improve or we'll die.

SPEAKER_08 1:03:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 1:03:33

We'll have to adjust or we'll die.

SPEAKER_08 1:03:35

Uh yeah, David Goggins. Okay, I was trying to think of the quote.

SPEAKER_32 1:03:40

Um Greg, you want to feel like a piece of garbage on the daily podcast.

SPEAKER_08 1:03:44

Just listen to David Goggins. Uh, but but he said in um, I think it was his first book, um Can't Hurt Me. That's the first one. Uh he says, you're either getting better or you're getting worse. And in business, that's either that you're getting better or you're going, you're dying. You're your your business is dying. So I I really like that that mentality there. Well, Andrew, let me ask, you know, you've provided a ton of value to me and the audience today. Is there anything that I can do for you or provide value to you and your audience?

SPEAKER_32 1:04:15

Yeah, absolutely. I think the most important thing for us right now is that we we're searching to increase our our customer base and our value. We're we're currently on the search for those uh I don't want to, I feel like it might be offensive, but I'm gonna say those meaningful customers, but my understanding is that most startup companies have a few key clients that really elevate them. And we have a couple of those, but we're still looking to find the next one. So the way that we can best be helped is to share that we exist, share that you had a good experience in this conversation, share that you know you recognize that there's competence here and that there's an eagerness to provide a quality service and a quality product. Um, and then let those people come see it for themselves. Uh, so revenue generation and customer expansion is definitely the most important thing that we can possibly do right now. Absolutely. So if anybody hearing this is looking for a new printer or a new shop or a new relationship or maybe a new opportunity for collaboration, uh, we're not turning down anything right now. We would love to talk to anybody and see what's going on and give it a try. Maybe you got something weird you want to try. Let's try it, let's get weird. I'm all out.

SPEAKER_08 1:05:27

I love it. So well, thank you so much, Andrew. Uh tell people, real quick, for the the show in the show notes, where can they find you? Where can they follow you? How do they connect with you and your business?

SPEAKER_32 1:05:39

Okay, awesome. The uh so we have a website. It's just okay. All over social media. My daughter runs it, my daughter and my wife. They do an awesome job from never being social media managers. So um our Instagram is at winter underscore print underscore. Our Facebook is just winter print. Um, and then you can Google us, you can call me, my phone number. My personal phone number is the phone number on Google. Please give me a call. Our email is customerservice at winterprint utah.com. That also goes directly to me. Um, so I would love to talk to you and I'd love to help out with your next project or your next idea.

SPEAKER_08 1:06:15

Awesome. Thank you so much, Andrew. I appreciate your time today.

SPEAKER_32 1:06:18

Yeah, thank you, Parker.

SPEAKER_08 1:06:20

Um, was weighing entrepreneurship against the opportunity cost? That's not something that I often think about because I view, and and maybe this is you know hindsight's 2020. I view entrepreneurship as it was the greatest opportunity for me. And if I didn't invest in that, what I would have missed out on.

SPEAKER_32 1:06:40

So that's kind of where the grit and the acceptance of I can make my own path came from. When it comes to like thinking this was the true plan for me, I think I naively bought into the glory of it. I wanted to be the big dog who made all the right decisions.

SPEAKER_16 1:06:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 1:06:56

And that everybody looks too for those answers. Uh, don't find that that would be my recommendation. Like you need to take a much more uh realistic look at what it means to be an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_08 1:07:08

I have often said that harnessing your ADHD is a superpower, and I'm here today with an entrepreneur, Andrew Barnes, who has done just that. Andrew, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

SPEAKER_32 1:07:22

Yeah, absolutely. Uh my name is Andrew Barnes. I'm from Pleasant Grove, Utah. Um, I'm 39 years old. I've been an entrepreneur uh officially for about five years now. Um, and um my profession is uh commercial printing, which is basically the most boring subject of the world unless you are involved in it.

SPEAKER_08 1:07:46

I don't know if it's the most boring subject in the world. I mean, you got to think about it. Everybody uses marketing materials, prints, books. I mean I'm assuming you're in all that.

SPEAKER_32 1:07:57

Yeah, when you dive, it'd be super fun. I mean, just uh getting to the ins and outs of uh what it takes to take a flat sheet of paper and turn it into a good piece of marketing material or a publication.

SPEAKER_08 1:08:07

So can I ask? I actually end up I print a lot, and so this is a great connection for us to make. Uh where are you located? Or where do you do your print out of?

SPEAKER_32 1:08:15

Yeah, business office is uh and warehouse located in Spanish Fork um in uh Spanish Fork, Utah, just a little south of where I'm from.

SPEAKER_08 1:08:24

So I gotta we'll have to talk, you know, outside of the podcast too, but uh I write books and print books. Um obviously marketing materials, mailers, like uh ran for city council this last year, and then we did everydoor direct mail, and then we had door hangers and all that kind of stuff. So I'm like, ah, this is a good connection I need to have. Yeah, totally. So can I ask, how did you get into entrepreneurship? You know, I uh before the the podcast, we sent you an email, we kind of go through your questions, but how did you get into commercial print and owning that business?

SPEAKER_32 1:08:59

Yeah, okay, good question. I, you know, sometimes you just fall into things like before um I was in print, I was uh working at a lumber company local to Utah, and uh I wanted to grow into the sales department there. And then uh my father-in-law owns a printing company, and he needed a customer service representative over there and um asked me if I'd be interested in taking that position. And I was like, sure, you know, I the prerequisite was like I'd like to have a path to into sales. And uh and he said, absolutely, we can get you trained up on everything in a couple of years, we can get you moving in that sales direction. So that's kind of how I ended up in print. Um for ending up as an entrepreneur, it like it's been kind of just like a lifelong passion. Um I think other ADHD people probably have the same thing. I have a real issue with authority on occasion. Um, I uh I struggle to follow other people's visions if I don't understand the purpose of it. Uh, and so there's a real like deep leading to do what I want to do um in my own way. Um and so, I mean, I was very, very young, probably 13, 14 years old when I kind of realized that uh all the things I thought I wanted to be, you know, firefighter, policeman, army guy, all that were kind of not as interesting as I thought they would be. Um, but entrepreneurship has always been super interesting to me. Um I and so, yeah, and so when I was, but I never really knew what I wanted to do. I never knew, like I had no like big dream or invention or idea of what I would actually do as an entrepreneur. And so, you know, the deeper and deeper I got into the world of print, and as I I learned the ins and outs of the industry, uh it became kind of just the obvious selection. Um, what really got me pushed into it was um my my former employer, which is a great, great guy, but I would call him a bit of a mentor, just really supported me in my sales career. Um, but I approached him with wanting to add additional services as a brokerage uh that we didn't offer in-house to build those markets within our own company. And um, and and it was declined, no offense taken or given on it. Um, but I was like, okay, well, I want to do it anyway, so I'm gonna quit and I'm gonna start a print brokerage. And uh and I picked up a partner and went that direction. Um, and that was five years ago. And then uh about early to mid uh 2024, um I was kind of evaluating the lifespan of a brokerage, uh, of a print broker, because really anybody can Google up the same people that I'm using, they may not get as quite as good of a price, but they can try it direct from the same people that I'm buying it from. So that's a bit of a conundrum as a print broker. Um, I think it used to be different, you know, 30 years ago, but it's not like that anymore. But um so I decided that there was a lifespan to my brokerage, and I needed to either, you know, get a job or start a new business or go a new growth direction, or I could open a facility. And so late 2024, we ended up making that decision, going and purchasing all the equipment, finding a facility, moving that direction. So so outside, so like actually having like a full set of staff, a full set of you know, costs and warehouse and all that. I'm only in about a year and a half deep on that uh as an entrepreneur. So that answer your question.

SPEAKER_08 1:12:30

Yeah, absolutely. I'm I'm curious because you know, entrepreneurship isn't for everybody, right? Um, and I I am vehemently against the prevailing guru maybe conversations that say things like everyone needs to start a business, everyone needs to be an entrepreneur, that's how you make your money. Um, because there's a lot of risk involved. And some people can't tolerate that. And it also requires you to learn a lot. For example, like you had a really strong background in sales, it sounds like. Yeah. You then have to learn the management piece, you have to learn the uh KPI tracking, the marketing outside of direct sales. I mean, like there's just a lot more that goes into it. And you mentioned, you know, getting the equipment and the warehouse. And so I I think it takes a very special individual to become an entrepreneur and stick with it. So I'm curious if there was anything in your past, maybe um like childhood, young adulthood, that let you know or reassured you like this was the right path for you to take, and this was something that you could actually do.

SPEAKER_32 1:13:36

Um, well, there's kind of two sides, there's a two-sided answer to that question. I definitely like I was a latchkey child, and so like everything that I wanted or needed outside of, you know, my my parents definitely provided. Like I had clothes for school that weren't decent, like there there was no like neglect there or anything, but definitely like anything extra that I wanted to do or to have was a hundred percent on me to figure out from a very young age. So that's kind of where the grit and the acceptance of I can make my own path came from. Yeah. But um, but when it comes to like thinking this was the true plan for me, I think I naively bought into the glory of it. I wanted to be the big dog and made all the right decisions, yeah. And that everybody looked to for those answers. Uh, don't buy into that would be my recommendation. Like, you need to take a much more um realistic look at what it means to be an entrepreneur uh than that. Because it was way harder than I thought. Like way harder. Even just a simple brokerage was incredibly difficult. And this has been a hundred times harder than that.

SPEAKER_08 1:14:46

Sure. And I mean, that was with years of knowledge in the industry already, too. So yeah. I mean, I'll be vulnerable and I just to share my own story for the listeners too. I um I worked for free essentially when I started my business for almost three years. And it just took that long for me to figure everything out and reinvest back into the company and get to a point where it was sustainable that I could actually start to take money and receive a paycheck from it like that. And I think a lot of people, you know, they see the end results of entrepreneurship, uh, maybe a little bit more of the time freedom, um, some of the higher income levels. And like you said, they buy into this perspective of glory that isn't necessarily realistic, especially not in the short term. It genuinely takes time and you have to invest in yourself and learn a lot of skills and competencies to get to a point where the business can grow. You can hire the team, you can build the systems and actually achieve the higher scale there.

SPEAKER_32 1:15:48

Yeah, and I think that uh I think like measuring the level of difficulty is definitely like not comparing yourself to other people's situations because the few entrepreneurs that I knew when I was starting out had had, you know, according to their stories, I'm sure there are things they either forgot or don't want to remember about how hard it was, but fairly smooth launches into it and uh into doing decently well uh for themselves. Now they're not, you know, 100 millionaires or anything like that, but they did well for themselves. And I kind of thought that's how it would go for me. Um, and that is just a hundred percent not the case. It has been completely my story is completely different from theirs, uh not comparable. Um, and so when you're gauging that, I would also gauge like where you're at in your life. You know, like for me, I had four kids. I had already made a really decent income as a sales rep. I was fairly successful as a sales rep. And we had built a lifestyle around that. So when you're like weighing the difficulty of starting a business, you gotta weigh how much it costs to even reasonably maintain your current lifestyle. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you're out driving sweet cars and stuff all the time going on vacations. It means like, how much is your mortgage? And how many months can you pay your mortgage before you pay yourself, you know, and like asking yourself those kind of questions. Those are things that were underestimated on my part, 100%.

SPEAKER_08 1:17:07

I like the I mean you shared two concepts there that I think are really important. The first, measuring success against yourself and not against others. Uh, I think that that's a critical skill for someone who wants to get into business ownership or entrepreneurship to develop and master on their own. Because if you're compared to somebody else, I mean, comparison is the thief of joy, right? Uh, if you're constantly looking at those maybe hundred millionaires, like you said, or the people that are always driving uh luxury cars around, it's easier to get down on yourself or put yourself in a mental position where you feel less than or that you haven't accomplished what you need to accomplish. The reality is as long as you're in a process of continuous improvement where you're a better version of yourself than you were yesterday, or you're accomplishing what you need to accomplish today that you didn't get done yesterday, and you're you're, again, success measured against your yourself, you'll constantly improve. You'll constantly get better, and the business will grow as a result of that, because as your capacity increases, so does your business's capacity. The second one that I really like that you just brought up was weighing entrepreneurship against the opportunity cost. That's not something that I often think about because I view, and and maybe this is, you know, hindsight's 2020, I view entrepreneurship as it was the greatest opportunity for me. And if I didn't invest in that, what I would have missed out on. But there's a very real factor that you highlighted, and that was, you know, you already had a certain lifestyle and you had to maintain that. You had the mortgage, you have maybe the family, you have the expenses already in place. There's an opportunity cost associated with getting into entrepreneurship and starting a business. And maybe you're missing out on, you know, a six-figure salary and benefits that you might already have. And you have to determine as an individual whether or not that's worth it for you, for your position. Can you maintain the same level or or quality of life that you need or want? Right. And those are things that need to be assessed.

SPEAKER_32 1:19:11

Yeah, definitely. I mean, the conversation with my wife, who is 100% involved in all the decision making, uh, which I highly recommend, by the way, um, was just like how much are we willing to lose? And when we when we looked at it and we looked at the risks that we were taking and the opportunity to build a dream for me, it was 100% for me. Um you know, our is that a risk we're willing we're taking in our determination together was yes. But I think until you're fully in that and staring that possibility in the face, you it may be hard to judge, you know, if you're willing to go that far or not.

SPEAKER_08 1:19:50

That's a really powerful thought. How much are you willing to lose? I um you know, it it was funny for me because when I started, I really didn't have anything to lose. And so at that point, it was like I could lose everything. It didn't matter. I could go all in on it. Um what a I mean, that's a powerful position to be in. At the time you feel worthless, but I I realized in hindsight, I was a student. I had just left the active duty army. Um, I was going to Utah Valley University and living on student loans and the GI bill, essentially.

SPEAKER_38 1:20:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:20:26

So I didn't have a lot of money coming in, enough to pay my bills, essentially. But I was living in my grandmother's basement. I uh didn't have a lot of expenses. I mean, just my car payments, phone bill type stuff. Um, so it was like if I if I lost that what I'm still living in grandma's basement.

SPEAKER_32 1:20:46

Yeah, it's not far to fall, right?

SPEAKER_08 1:20:48

Yeah, so it made it easier for me to go in, I think.

SPEAKER_32 1:20:52

I think young people, like if you want to start a business, like the best time to do it is when you're young. If you want to get a taste of what that's like, your situation I would say would be a perfect one. But yeah, you know, I I see stuff on social media, I don't know how true it is. They say like the average entrepreneur starts when he's like 40 something, and they make their first million when they're 50 something. Like those are the average numbers or whatever, somewhere in that range.

SPEAKER_14 1:21:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 1:21:17

And um, you know, I think it's because it's really hard to take that that leap, you know, until you feel like safe or established, but I think that that's the the biggest why of all. Because once you're safe and established, that means you have way more to risk, yeah, way more to lose in the in the in your path.

SPEAKER_08 1:21:37

I think, you know, from my perspective, the two benefits to being a little bit older, perhaps. Now I'm just playing the devil's advocate a little bit, is that one, you have something to invest, and that maybe can help you start. For example, like I I had to bootstrap everything. I just that's I didn't have anything, so I didn't have anything to lose, but I didn't have anything to gain um or to invest. The second was I was a non-traditional age student because I'd already been in the army for five years. I was a little bit older, a little bit more mature. It was the willingness to invest in learning or developing my my self-competency. And that's a hard sell, I think, for younger people. But when you're older and you can look back, you have that wisdom to understand the investment in your own education, not just like formal education, but I mean the willingness to learn and develop and and appreciate, you know, skill and and competency. I think that that grows as you age. You understand what that's actually worth a little bit more. Uh so it's easier to invest in that. I'm thinking you're you're spot on though. You know, if you start young, the hardest part when you start young is that you still want to do all the young person things. You want to go out with your friends on the weekends, you want to blow off, you know, school or work to go snowboarding. But the reality is like the people who just commit on the personal growth when they're young and they compound for 10 years doing that. Oh my goodness, that's where the the huge victories in entrepreneurship come from, in my opinion. I mean, it Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 1:23:15

You can learn a lot, a lot faster.

SPEAKER_33 1:23:18

But it's there's trade-offs.

SPEAKER_32 1:23:20

It's like I said, like you're you're there is no right age to do anything. I just I think you you know, when you decide it's right for you and you have done a proper assessment and evaluation, you know, and then you take the leap one way or the other, it's you know, that's a very personal decision. So you don't want to tell somebody they should start when they're young and then maybe not mature enough, you know. Maybe they got some need to have some experiences, some hardship to learn what it's like to deal with hardship uh ahead of time.

SPEAKER_08 1:23:55

I'm curious. You um you kind of told us a little bit about you know the the print aspect of it uh or or your print business, but can we dive into that a little bit too? I'm I'm interested, you know, what does commercial print actually entail? Who do you serve? Like what does the business actually look like for somebody?

SPEAKER_25 1:24:18

Yeah, that's a great question.

SPEAKER_32 1:24:20

So like I have a commercial print shop and I only handle I only handle a certain portion of the market, you know, because there's a lot of different kinds of printers out there. Um uh like my former employer, they're they're a large printer. I I don't I don't know their numbers, but I guess they're thirty north of thirty million dollars a year in revenue. Wow, you know, so they they have like a really broad reach on their service, and most of their stuff, uh at least when I left, what I understand, is like big offset printing, which is like huge presses, um, and uh, you know, kind of what you see in in movies and things like that. Um, and that's that's a piece of the market that can do like long-run products and packaging and things like that. Um, and then there's a there's like a web print part of the market, which is you know, continuous run, which is for really high volumes on really low spec quality product. Um, and then and that's a very loose overview. There's actually some high quality digital web that you can get that's awesome. But um there's uh and then there's like flexible printing, which there's digital flexible printing, and then there's long run, roll-to-roll paper stocks and label stocks. Um, and so what we handle is we handle we're we're commercial, but we're a digital printer. So we have we have presses here that run at a reasonable rate, um, and they're good for small to medium size runs of pretty much anything that you need to do. Um, it it runs on uh the way our cost program works is that we have you know a couple different size sheets that we can run, but it's a really narrow window of size sheets that you can run. And then we're charged based on click charges, which that means that every side of the sheet that prints, we call an impression. Every impression has an associated charge with it depending on how many colors are printed on it. And so we have a baseline static price that you can run on, which is makes us great for like short to medium runs. Once you start crossing that medium threshold, then it starts to become too expensive to use us. So we have to either broker that or recommend another printer.

SPEAKER_08 1:26:29

Out of curiosity, because most of my audience is going to be smaller businesses, entrepreneurs. Uh, we have uh you know a good chunk of people that are operating in maybe like the $250,000 to a million dollar range right now. Um what does a a small to medium size run mean? Is that like if I were printing books, is that 500 books?

SPEAKER_32 1:26:49

Yeah, so for books, that's a great question. I would say sell 1,000 books, maybe 2,000, depending on the page count.

SPEAKER_38 1:26:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_32 1:26:56

Um if you're doing postcards, you know, 50,000 or less. Um we're really struggling to compete north of 40 or 50,000. Um we can compete, but the margin's really low. Um but depending on that.

SPEAKER_08 1:27:10

I mean you say 40 to 50,000, that sounds like a ton to me. I guess I'm just not you know knowledgeable.

SPEAKER_32 1:27:16

Postcards are just so cheap and simple. Like we we we call them just uh like flat stack sheets, and so we just you print postcards, you can do large loops of cutting, and you can bulk box those relatively quickly. You can do a very large number of those, but then you know, uh when you take like a trifold brochure, we're gonna struggle to be competitive over like 10,000, 12,000 units. Um, if you're doing if you're doing uh a book that has 300 pages in it and uh it's full color uh throughout, which is not very common, but if it was full color throughout, you know, we're gonna struggle to be competitive north of five hundred to a thousand bucks on it. But if you do A magazine that has like 96 pages and it's a black and white or something, you know, we can we can be competitive up to 2,000, maybe even up to 5,000, depending on the size and the page count. So those are kind of what we would call like small to medium runs. But to be honest, like our average ticket size is under $200.

SPEAKER_23 1:28:18

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_32 1:28:19

So when you're talking small to medium size runs, like we gotta we gotta turn a lot of work. We gotta turn a lot of work to make any money. So we don't really count jobs, we count dollars, you know. It's like, yeah, we ran 30 jobs this week, but the total value of that was 1200 bucks, you know. So there's things that so when you're looking at small to medium, I mean a 250,000 to million dollar size business, whatever they're buying, we're probably able to service.

SPEAKER_57 1:28:45

I'm curious.

SPEAKER_32 1:28:47

But we service companies, huge companies. Like we've service $500 million companies because all they need is a thousand postcards once or twice a month, you know, or 500 magazines to spend out to their subscriber base or something like that. So you know, we can we can service any size company depending on the needs.

SPEAKER_08 1:29:05

Who do you uh primarily see as people that benefit from uh your service? I I mean to me, I I think of everything in the in the term of the business. So it it to me, it's like the small to medium-sized businesses, the the entrepreneurs, like if if they need marketing materials, like you need a print shop, obviously. Uh who's your your target client typically?

SPEAKER_32 1:29:30

Yeah, great question. So we're always looking for uh repeat work. I I think this is another two-sided question. What are we looking for and what is the customer looking for? So when we're looking for customers, we're sort of we're looking for companies that have regular needs.

SPEAKER_33 1:29:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 1:29:47

So uh I'll give you an example. One of ours is uh is uh uh you buy a warranty, an extended warranty company. So those guys are sending out you know brochures and marketing materials across the country regularly. So we really like customers like that because we're gonna get you know one to three or four orders from them a month, yeah, typically. And they're gonna be medium in size and medium to large in size, and and they're gonna be good margin for us. But when a customer is looking for, you know, like what kind of a printer should I talk to? Um, I think small businesses that are just starting out or are a million dollars or under, we can be a fantastic solution for them because typically when you're the only person running this running your business, it's like hard to plan ahead. And so like you can order business cards online, you can get 100 of them for 12 bucks, you can get 250 of them for me for 35 bucks, but I'll have them ready today or tomorrow.

SPEAKER_10 1:30:43

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_32 1:30:43

You know, you don't have to wait for them and stuff like that. So that's kind of like the trade-off is that you know, if you're in a hurry, if you're struggling to plan ahead and things like that, for a still a decently competitive rate, I can get you a really good quality product really, really quickly. Um, and but you know, those same people may be better suited with an online vendor like VistaPrint or something like that because the cost is so much lower, but they're gonna be willing to wait and possibly pay some shipping alongside with that. So there's trade-offs, you know, but we could be a really good solution for quick turn quality at a decent price.

SPEAKER_08 1:31:18

So I like the speed thing that you brought up because I mean, personal uh anecdotes. I often drop the ball on doing stuff ahead of time. So, like uh I did my I tried to do a quarterly event, like in-person event every every quarter. And we did one in January at a mastermind at uh Club Paddock in American Fork, and I printed off copies of a working draft for a book that I was giving to everybody. Um, but I forgot to do that ahead of time. So I like did uh you know, same day print at Staples, and they couldn't do the whole thing. So I did the other half at like Office Max, and it was just like uh, you know, I needed I needed a resource that could be quick, um, but I was hitting the limit on what they could do same day. So it was just uh a bad fit. But but now I know I can reach out to Andrew. So yeah, I yeah, the time thing that's I think really important, especially to smaller businesses.

SPEAKER_32 1:32:17

Um I'm curious about that like sample situation. Like those guys are a great solution for a lot of problems, but we solve problems like the one you just described all the time. People look up a local print shop on Google, they find us, they call us. Uh, we had a lawyer come in the other day. He needed a whole file worth of PDFs for a court case, and he just didn't have time to deal with it himself. So he just dropped off his flash drive and printed everything off, and it was ready in 20 minutes. You know, that's a you know, we do all kinds of weird stuff like that all the time, and you're not gonna be able to get service out of Staples or Kinkos or anything like that. And it's gonna be a lot higher quality. So you're gonna we're gonna solve some problems for you and make you look good at the same time.

SPEAKER_08 1:33:01

I'm curious, uh, a couple thoughts. So I ordered um I wrote a book. It's called How the Hell Are You Doing This, by the way, at the end of this. Uh let me get your address so I can ship it to you. I did. I wrote that book. Oh, I've been seeing it all over my social medias and I didn't know you wrote that.

SPEAKER_32 1:33:16

That's me.

SPEAKER_08 1:33:17

I'll send you a copy.

SPEAKER_32 1:33:18

Now I gotta get one for sure.

SPEAKER_08 1:33:20

I I typically give a copy to everybody that comes into the studio films the episode, but since we're doing this remote, let me mail you a copy. Or we can meet, get lunch or something like that. But yeah, I'd love to hook you up. Um I'm I'm just thinking off the top of my head. So I I ordered 500 books um for the first run. Those uh I I so I self-published, um, wrote the book with uh an author, a ghostwriter, and an editor. We worked with the company was actually referred to me by uh Russell Brunson as a Chinese print shop. They print 500 copies and ship them to me for like 300 bucks. Or sorry, 3,000 bucks. 3,000 bucks. Um very high quality, I felt like, you know, nice soft touch hardcover book type thing. Um I'm curious as as companies like that, you know, you get China trying to compete and all these things. How do you how do you guys stay at the front of the market? How do you um how do you how do you compete with you know Chinese companies that are having maybe like government subsidies, you know, make it really affordable to print?

SPEAKER_35 1:34:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:34:26

I would imagine time is the biggest, you know, factor that that benefits you is like you don't have to wait, like I had to wait, you know, three weeks for slow boat shipping, and it was you know a couple weeks to get the stuff printed. And and then if you need a change or an editor, like because actually we found um after my first 500 copies were delivered, we found an editorial error in them. And it was like, well, even if we wanted to go back and fix it now, it's gonna take you know over a month to get the revised copies in.

SPEAKER_32 1:34:56

Yeah. Yeah, that's a that's a super good question. I I think that there are markets that suffer from that competition, and I don't think that mine is one of them personally. Um like your situation, and I have another customer, we're gonna be printing their books starting later this week. I'm really excited about it. Um, I don't know if I'm allowed to say it, but there'll be some social media around it. I'll tag you in it. Um, but they were printing in Vietnam, and we were able to compete with Vietnam for on the landed price. So, like you said, shipping, tariff, etc. Yeah. You know, all that all that goes into that. They went from a 16, 12 to 16 week lead time down to two weeks. And we were able to compete with the price coming out of there on uh six to eight hundred books. Um and so it's uh we don't really struggle with that too much. One of the places I have struggled with that across my career is in packaging. Uh China is, I mean, it's about a few years removed from competing with China directly, but uh China is a very affordable, cost-effective, and honestly, shockingly, super high quality provider of packaging coming out of Asia. The children that they employ there are very forgetting some 11-year-old running a 40-inch press out there. But no, they they do a really good job and it's really cost effective. And I lost multiple clients over my career to Asia. Usually, if those clients come back, it is specifically related to turn times and corrections. And you know, they don't want to wait 40 to 72 hours to get a response on a file correction and things like that. So it's you know, businesses in at least in the state of Utah, especially like nutraceutical and supplement companies, they move way too fast for that to be a decent solution for them.

SPEAKER_53 1:36:52

For sure.

SPEAKER_32 1:36:53

But they everybody tries it. And for some people it works great. For some people it does work so great.

SPEAKER_08 1:36:58

I know both. I'm curious, um, what do what do you typically see as like the net benefit to somebody who does business with you? Uh, because I I'm I looked at your website just before the the call, you know, and I see kind of the range of products and services that you provide. Uh, do you collect video testimonials or anything from clients to help you like show the ROI that your business you know returns back to them?

SPEAKER_32 1:37:25

No, that type of marketing is something I'm severely lacking. Uh that that is a time management issue on my end. I do request Google reviews. If you look at our Google reviews, there's a decent amount of them. And they're I think we got like a 4.9 or 4.7. In fact, it's funny enough, I asked my dad to do a review for us. And he, I think he's the only four-star review we got. I think he did it just like it needs to be authentic. And I'm like, five stars is authentic. Come on. I'm your son. Don't I get five stars? Yeah. So yeah, but uh so we four stars is the product of your parenting. Yeah, exactly. Um, but yeah, we don't we don't do a whole lot of that. We are trying to like post a lot more about projects that we got running through the shop and try to like get people familiar with like what our work looks like as we produce it. But no, we we absolutely need to do more of that. And uh we have a you know, it's just me and my wife running this place, and we run out of time on just about everything every single day. Um but when it comes to like the if you want to talk about the ROI of working with us, I think in a very saturated market like print, like we have, we can whatever I'm gonna say, somebody else could probably commit to that exact same thing. Quick turn times, competitive pricing. We're gonna take great care of you and everything, you know, the all of the great things that people say. The thing that I lean back on is that what we do really well here, because we're a small and new shop, is we're still trying to discover those clients that are gonna really raise us to the next level of a facility. And so our onboarding process is finding out in a deeper level what you guys actually need as a customer, what is gonna bring success to your project. So we we have a pretty good sized publisher that we just brought on a month and a month and a half ago, and we did a lot of adjusting to meet their needs and to make it a profitable project for us. Um, we have been working with uh really popular thing right now is uh snail mail projects where people write stories and artwork and they put them in a letter and they mail it off. Um that's a that's a growing and healthy market that we are very interested in being a part of. And as we onboard, we've onboarded uh two of those clients so far. Again, we've had to go through a decent amount of adjustments in our processes specifically for those clients. And for better or worse, still remains to be seen. I would say that's definitely what sets us apart. If you sit down with me and tell me about this thing that you put the last four years or two years of your life into, spent tens of thousands of dollars launching, and now you're having a reasonable amount of success and you need our assistance to help you keep going and growing. We care about that. We care about that because if we do a good job for you, then we get to grow with you. And I think that's the one thing that can really set us apart is we're not just saying that. We need your business, we want your business, and we want to care about your business more than you've ever been cared for before. And if we're not doing that, you know, tell us we will fix it because we think if what we're doing, we think we're providing that. So if you're not being provided that, we need to know so we can adjust and provide that for you.

SPEAKER_08 1:40:53

Do you offer um sorry, I'm writing down the quotes and I'm loving it. Do you offer anything like um an everydoor direct mail service? So, like if somebody wants to come and they want to get their postcards printed or mailers printed, like I actually really like the concept you brought up just barely about the snail mail projects. That's something that I'm I want to get back to. Like it's a form of marketing that's making a comeback. Um but do you do you offer like a service if somebody wants to do that where you'll drop it off at the post office, like they send you the print, or I'm just curious. I've used an everydoor direct mail service before for postcards, and like they let me select the zip codes, they print the amount for all the homes in the zip codes, they take it to the post office and do that drop-off system. But is that something that you offer?

SPEAKER_32 1:41:44

Yeah, absolutely. I just say that our technology is a little lacking here. Um in the sense that like we do every day, we do it's called E D DM, um, everydoor direct mailer. We print several jobs like that every single week. Um, but we're being provided the list or we're being provided the volume, and the artwork's coming to us with the proper postage and everything already on it. So that's the that's the difference, is that like if you got into like got print or something, or Uprinting or something like that, they're gonna have a lot higher level of technology for you to take advantage of than we do. Because we're still small and growing into what we're gonna be and the services that we're gonna provide. And we do add technology and solutions all the time, um, but we're still getting to a place where it's a little bit more customer uh experience friendly. So, but we we love those projects. I I tell people here all the time EDDM is my favorite thing in the world. You print thousands of them, it only takes a few minutes, and you can make a decent margin on it, you know, so you can provide a good quick-turn service of good quality, your customer's happy, we're happy, goes through the shop really smooth. Those are fantastic projects, and we really enjoy them.

SPEAKER_08 1:42:56

Awesome.

SPEAKER_32 1:42:57

So, yes, the end the short answer is yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_08 1:43:00

With that, I'm curious, you know, as just a room for for growth, and I mean, take it or leave it. Um, do you ever partner with people to provide like the copywriting service or the design, the help for those print projects? Or do you just take when they you know have something already designed, they send you the PDF or the file?

SPEAKER_32 1:43:20

Yeah, we're pretty traditional in a sense that we expect the artwork to be delivered print ready. Um, pretty common. I don't know when this happened in the history of print, at least around here. There's a thing called prepress. And it digital print, pre-press is super simple because the technology takes care of it. Um and in higher forms of printing like offset and lithography, it's uh it's a lot more intense. There's a lot more entailed, but it's become kind of a service department instead of a profit center. Um so we offer things like we'll help fix people's bleeds um so they don't end up with white borders on their postcards, or we can um delete a background and something, you know, we'll take care of some small basic design services for you, but it's really, really limited. We do expect our customers to deliver us print ready files that are good to go. Now, that being said, you know, these days it's more and more I see that your printhouse is expected to be able to accommodate some sort of design at some level. And so I have self-trained myself to do some very basic design. Um, anything you get from me can be much better from a professional designer 100%. But I don't know if that answers your question fully.

SPEAKER_08 1:44:36

Absolutely. Well, anything that we can help uh, you know, showcase your packaging um and and the value that you provide to the customer. So I'm curious too.

SPEAKER_32 1:44:45

Okay, customer experience. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, Parker. No, go for it. That just affected that customer experience. Like you you just launched your business and you need to do a mailer to get it out to everybody in a specific neighborhood because you mow lots, right? So you send me a PNG file off of Canva, right? I'm gonna help flip that into a print ready PDF for you, no charge, just to help out, because I want you to have success as much as I want to have success.

SPEAKER_08 1:45:13

Awesome. With um kind of this this line of of thinking here and the value that you offer, if you were to go back, you know, five years to where you were and and knowing what you know now, what would you do or change to kind of shortcut a little bit of the growth or the pain points that you've already had? Like what would make a difference for you if you could go back five years?

SPEAKER_32 1:45:36

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think about it all the time, actually. Um, I would start a lot smaller. Um, that to me, for so manufacturing is super overhead heavy. You gotta have a facility, you gotta have the right amount of power, you gotta get a lease on your equipment or get a loan for your equipment if you're gonna purchase. Um so I would definitely start a lot smaller. I would have started with smaller equipment and less services. Um, that would have really, really helped the pain of getting launched. I went very big for a digital shop. Um, probably total over the life of the loans and the leases, total spend is gonna be well north of a million dollars in five years. Um and so it's very expensive. But you could get started in this industry for probably I don't know, maybe two thousand to three thousand dollars a month, and you could do it in an in an office space that only costs you twelve or fifteen hundred bucks a month, you know. But the the flip side of that is that to have any kind of growth at all, you need to hire talent um and uh and and talent costs. You know, you're gonna be several thousand dollars. So I just think that the I think that if you if I was going back, I would have started smaller with what I could handle myself that actually generated a profit. So I didn't have to wait so long to pay myself.

SPEAKER_48 1:47:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 1:47:06

Um that's I think if you're going into a manufacturing program, that's something to be considered, is that the actual cost of doing as much as you wish you can do is way beyond, and you can't even utilize it all. Yeah. Like I I have I have like 19 pieces of equipment out there. We use probably three to five a day.

SPEAKER_33 1:47:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_32 1:47:26

So we're not utilizing all that equipment every single day. Um, and so that's like why have it.

SPEAKER_08 1:47:33

Yeah. Can I talk on the uh the start smaller idea here? I um I run a uh coaching business called Mission Ready Foundations. We teach entrepreneurs essentially military-inspired leadership systems adapted for business to help them scale and grow. And, you know, the last couple weeks, it's a structured 12-week program. We work with um customers. I mean, they go through the coursework, the modules, they learn the lesson. We have a weekly call to go over, answer questions, and uh help get them on track with what the objective is for that week. And the last two weeks, we did um organic content and messaging and paid advertising. And one of the things that has been a recurring concept as I'm teaching the program is the starting smaller idea. Not because I think you should limit your beliefs or your dreams or what you're trying to achieve, but just because when you try to get big and complex, it adds headache and it delays you learning everything, right? One of the cool things about a paid ad structure, for example, if you run a start smaller mentality with that, is that you don't have to overwhelm yourself with 9,000 creatives in one quarter or uh, you know, huge budgets and spend. You can start collecting data off of, you know, maybe two or three dollars a day in ad spend. And that data is what allows you to make more informed decisions as you go. And starting small keeps it all in a manageable, like a position where you can actually learn from it and grow as a result. So I think I totally agree.

SPEAKER_32 1:49:19

I ran social media as on Meta, the amount of data that you can collect and sort and review can can become extremely overwhelming very, very quickly.

SPEAKER_08 1:49:29

Oh yeah. I mean your your dashboard, when you first sign into it, right? You have 10, I was gonna say 10, but that's a way a gross under exaggeration. It's it's literally, you get like a hundred KPIs thrown at you immediately. And you gotta like parse through the dashboard and what you're doing. And the reality is it's it's overwhelming for people, then they don't start, right? But that's that's like the antithesis of starting small, right? So I I focus it down like in the in the program that I teach, you know, we focus on uh click. Through rate when you first start, seeing, you know, are people actually engaging with your content? Is it is it actually uh getting their attention enough for them to take an action? Then we look at like your cost per mill. So like what's the uh what's the cost to get your your ad in front of a thousand eyeballs? And that is a good indicator of how saturated or competitive your audience and market are. And then we look at like your return on ad spend, but we don't look at the return on ad spend until you've got you know two weeks of data already. So we were fine.

SPEAKER_32 1:50:31

And I think it takes months, like depending on what your product is.

SPEAKER_08 1:50:35

It really does, right? I mean, the the longer you go, um the more refined that information is gonna be. But uh you you can start looking at you know what ads are gonna be winners. I mean, after about two weeks of data is what I I recommend as a baseline to start with. But but the way you find that is you look at the click-through rate. Like if you're getting, you know, 10% of people who see your ad clicking on it, that's probably a pretty good creative. It's probably got a good hook, story, and offer, right? But if you're getting 1%, you know that that ad's not not performing. I mean, it's just we look at you know the progression, but the only way you can do that in a manageable and palatable way is if you start small.

SPEAKER_32 1:51:16

Yeah, I agree. Totally agree.

SPEAKER_08 1:51:17

I also think it's more important. Like I mentioned, you know, we last week I was teaching the uh organic marketing, organic content piece. I have a pretty robust system now when it comes to producing organic content. Like we post on, you know, a dozen plus accounts every day, multiple times a day. So we have we have a lot of content that goes out very consistently. That's overwhelming for most people. And to be honest, the only reason I have it built that way now is that I have a full team that run that for me. So it's not overwhelming for me. So my recommendation to people starting small is hey, go post, you know, three times a week. Maybe you get on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and you do one story per day. And it doesn't even have to be anything fancy or staged when you do your story, just show what you're doing. Um, but you break it down into a much more manageable system, and that like starting small manageability, that allows you to be consistent. It's not overwhelming where you get stressed out and you stop doing it, and then you think you got to start over or start from scratch again. It's how do we make it manageable? How do we make it simple? Simplicity is your friend, especially when you start a business.

SPEAKER_32 1:52:31

Yeah, no, I I completely agree. And it's like you need to you need to feed your family, but you gotta start small, right? So it's like I guess figuring out that balance is a super personal thing, but there is a lot to deal with when you open a business. I I was shocked at simple things like paying my quarterly sales tax. You know, it's like just the thing. Oh my gosh. The government sometimes I feel like it's making it harder. Oh gosh, it's the 13th.

SPEAKER_08 1:53:00

I gotta put a check in the mail.

SPEAKER_32 1:53:01

Yeah, yeah, I'm getting ready to do mine. I got I gotta do it for four business entities today. But um, yeah, so we uh it just it's totally up to you like what small looks like and what you're capable of handling. But I definitely think that starting with way less than you think you can is probably a smart start. Because there's gonna be way more than you think there is, for sure.

SPEAKER_41 1:53:23

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_32 1:53:23

So starting small. So starting small and hiring proper talent is definitely like the two things that I would do totally different. Now, my my original guy that I hired here, he's he's my shop manager now, but he had uh almost no skill in digital print at all. He he's been a feeder at a giant impressed shop, but he had a he had some grit and a willingness to learn that I really enjoyed. And I still consider him an extremely valuable hire, but I maybe would have hired in a different order. Because my second hire, well, my second good hire was a kid who came from a digital print shop and worked at several, and he elevated the success of the shop overnight by two, two, three hundred percent.

SPEAKER_51 1:54:07

Wow.

SPEAKER_32 1:54:07

And so, like, if we'd have had if we'd have had that in the beginning, we probably actually could have made some money last year. So, but we spent so much time struggling, learning how to do everything. Like, because I thought that we could do it with just me and this one other guy, uh it it was a lot of pain and suffering. And I actually can run every single piece of equipment in the shop, which is cool, but a talent that I don't really need to have.

SPEAKER_08 1:54:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 1:54:35

You know, we need to have a talent of managing the business.

SPEAKER_08 1:54:37

So I want to ask about um about hiring in the team a little bit. Part a big part of my coaching is I do leadership, I do team development, right? Those are the the pillars, perhaps. Um, one of the common conversations that I end up having with people is hiring a players versus developing your talent or developing the talent on your team. And you mentioned, you know, you had one guy willingness to learn, and then you had the other guy who was like already experienced the seasoned. I'm curious, what's your thoughts on hiring an A player versus finding somebody who's motivated, a hard worker, and developing them?

SPEAKER_32 1:55:17

Yeah, tough question. It's a tough question because like definitely hiring talent, it's gonna cost you more, but it's gonna make you a lot more a hundred percent. Um but you know, the big question is if you're starting small and you're a good leader and a good teacher, which are not, that's those are not my strengths. Um uh I learned that very quickly is that you know, I've been led by much better leaders than I am. Um if you have that ability, then I think that starting with someone who is less expensive but has lots of drive and grit uh could be could be a good solution. I think it depends also on the complexity of your facility and what you're trying to do. You know, in print, everything you screw up costs money. Um there's no there's no like reverse button or delete or control Z or any of that. You know, you just you ruin a book, you lost three dollars, you know. If you we had a job that we accidentally overprinted and we printed more than the cost of the whole job, you know, and so like there's just like accidents like that can be super, super costly in this world. So I I guess that it I don't know that I have a good answer for you, but I know that hiring uh someone who did not have the skills and the talent taught me a lot about leadership and methods and building a program that somebody could follow. And building that program with having them help me build that program made them really bought into the process. And that's extremely valuable in my opinion. But hiring the talent, if you can afford to do that first, and they could you can replicate that, now you have a scalable business.

SPEAKER_46 1:56:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 1:56:59

Because that person can teach those things a lot faster than somebody else can learn them. So um, so I guess I I call it a 70-30. Hiring talent is probably the better way to go. But there is good opportunity in hiring, lack of experience.

SPEAKER_08 1:57:13

I also wanted to ask about uh you made a comment about changing the order of hiring. Now, yeah, before we dive into that, are you familiar with a concept called the Rainmaker Triad? Uh similarly, the business triumvirate is a similar way to phrase that.

SPEAKER_32 1:57:30

So the only triumvirate I know is uh in Roman history.

SPEAKER_08 1:57:33

There we go. We uh I'll I'll posit this thought. And it's along the lines of you do what you do best, you outsource the rest. Um one of my favorite coaches, Mandy Keene, she teaches a concept called the Rainmaker Triad. And in short, she looks at, you know, all uber successful businesses have three key players in them. They have a rainmaker, that's somebody who's the charismatic leader, they start the conversations, they drive revenue, they get sales, that kind of thing. Then they have an engineer, and the engineer is the person that refines the system and the back end and makes it a scalable operation. Then they they have the third person is like the creator. Um, and they're you know, the artist. They make the product or the service beautiful and well packaged and deliverable in a palatable way or a good way to the customer. And so she looks at you know all of these hyper successful organizations and businesses, not just privately owned, but publicly owned. And they all have you know at least those three positions. And they're all that's where the biggest, highest level of talent is. So typically speaking, I recommend that people hire for their weakness. So, for example, like I'm very much a rainmaker. I have conversations, I get on the podcast, I talk to people, I network, I, you know, drive revenue for the business essentially by doing these things. But I'm really bad when it comes to, like, for example, my social media. I mentioned I have a whole a team that does my social media for me now. They're the creators. I'm not the creator, they're the creators. So I also have to hire an engineer, and the engineer is somebody who can go in and systematize the back end of the business, the automation aspect, moving people from, you know, like lead to the next step in the pipeline, right? All of those kind of automations and stuff. I'm not great with that. I just would I would do it manually if it was just me and I would, you know, use a Google Sheet or something like that. That's not necessarily the most efficient way to do it, but it's just how I would do it because I'm I'm more focused on having the conversation and driving the revenue. So I hire engineers and creators first to, you know, cover down on my weaknesses that way and develop a more well-rounded system. You said you would order or change the order of hiring differently. What does that look like to you? And if you look at your strengths, you know, would you recommend hiring to cover your weaknesses? Or are you recommending hiring to amplify the strengths that your business already has?

SPEAKER_32 2:00:19

No, no, I I the the whole process that you just described is exactly what I would go back and do differently. Um I tend to be a uh DIY kind of guy. And um I I definitely thought that I could handle a lot more, you know, sales of customer service as well as a piece of some of the manufacturing. And that was just completely totally wrong. Um, my like you, although you are a way better speaker than I am, definitely. Um, but I I'm a good sales guy. I I can meet with customers and talk to them about their project and show that I care about it and help them find decent consultative solutions um to meet their needs. And that's something that I've excelled at and done really well with. Um, but uh I that got curved when I thought that I could do more hands-on things here and handle more pieces on my own. Um when I really would have been, like you said, hiring, you know, talent or engineers that know how to do this uh a lot the operations a lot better than I do, have experience in the operations that I didn't have, I could have launched with far more success than we did.

SPEAKER_08 2:01:27

I like the um the concepts that you're bringing up here. You mentioned you're very good at the sales. And I I have this recurring thought that I like to share. And it's that, you know, entrepreneurs, typically speaking, are always the best salesperson in their organization. And it's just because at the end of the day, you're the most invested in it. No one else is ever going to have that same level of investment. Right. Um, so I I like to typically err on the side of staying in the sales longer than necessary and then hiring people to do everything else.

SPEAKER_32 2:02:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 2:02:00

And I would agree. Once the system gets built and you have people in place that are actually running the rest of the show and you can start outsourcing some of the sales, then you can actually maybe step more into that traditional, you know, ownership, maybe CEO type perspective and just focus on the direction and the growth of the company. Um but it's it's hard to replace the entrepreneur as the salesperson because you're gonna be the best of the sales. You're the most passionate about what you do. You know, it's your livelihood directly connected to it. And and when you have conversations, then it just makes them more authentic and real and you connect with people better.

SPEAKER_25 2:02:36

Yeah. So I totally agree.

SPEAKER_08 2:02:39

Let me ask about um strategy moving forward. So we kind of just talked about, you know, what would you do differently if you were to go back in time five years? Now let's look forward for the next five years, if you're okay with that, and say, you know, what's what's the goal for winter print and how are you getting there?

SPEAKER_32 2:02:59

Yeah, great question. And that and that question has actually changed over time. Um, you know, as as I was trying to determine what I was trying to build, build here. Um the the the goal for I think it's gonna take five years in total in business to recuperate the mistakes that have been made uh in the launching of a business. So the goal for five years is to get to uh a stable and consistent level of revenue and margins that we're not fighting the panic attack of running a startup business. We're trying to get past the start of things. And what does that look like in five years? For me, I'm a numbers guy. I think that looks like um I think that looks like somewhere between three and five million dollars in revenue, uh running somewhere between 20 and 35 percent of uh you know net margins. Um and you know, uh a staff for at least one staff for every part of the shop that operates on a consistent basis. Um and so and then also, and then at that point, you know, hopefully by that point I've been able to implement a decent sales process and put some sales staff in place as well. That's I've heard people ask this question before, and there are way better answers than what I have for you. Really, my whole dream is to just run a stable business. I'm not looking to make a hundred million dollars. Some people that's really important to them, and that's okay. You should chase your hundred million dollar dream. My goal is that this is my retirement plan. Yeah, it only needs to make X amount for me to have comfortable retirement at you know, at a decent retirement age, somewhere between sixty and seven years old. I'm not I used to dream bigger, bigger dollars and things like that. But after being in the trenches for a long time, I have more of what I would call a realistic dream, which is that if my company can do somewhere between seven and ten million dollars over the next 15 years, uh maybe, maybe even as high as 12 to 13 million dollars at a decent net margin, yeah, then I should be able to unload that to somebody for a decent retirement, you know, and have it and and uh and walk away knowing that I built something successful and meaningful. Because the other part of it too is the intangible, is that like as I talk with my wife about what we want this company to look like, we see as it's a great opportunity. We s we see ourselves as stewards of this business opportunity. And to be a good steward, we have to care about the people that work here and the people that we work with. And we think that both of us have had employers, you know, that I would I want to say used and abused, but that might be a little bit dramatic, but overused, not properly appreciated, or anything like that. We're hoping that we can have still a big enough but small enough company that our staff can know that they're cared for, that a place of work can feel like a safe place for them to be, to earn a living, and to become the best version of themselves as they grow in their lives. You know, that's really that's really part of an important part of the vision is that we can have the stability here to provide that to the select few people that do work here.

SPEAKER_08 2:06:11

I love what you just said about becoming the best version of themselves. Yeah, absolutely. I I'm a big believer in um the journey to self-actualization, not that I can ever attain it as a destination, but in falling in love with the process of self-improvement and self-development.

SPEAKER_35 2:06:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 2:06:30

I think that that is the most important thing that I can offer someone as an employer is if even if you're only with me for a short period of time, if I can help you constantly improve while you're with me, make you um, you know, more marketable, or develop your capacity or capabilities, I feel like I have an obligation to help you do that. And in doing that, I become a better version of myself. The business becomes better, right? Like the development of the team is the development of everything else. So I'm a I'm a big believer in that. Now you you shared a series of goals essentially over the next five years. I'm curious, you know, what action or plan is going to help you get to those goals or or what help do you need to achieve those goals?

SPEAKER_32 2:07:22

Yeah, super good question. So the evaluation here is that because we launched a lot bigger than we should have, and a series of unfortunate events that were included in that, uh we are we're adjusting our size right now. So we're adjusting the we're looking to adjust the size of our shop. We're looking to adjust the size of our overhead. We are looking to essentially retry on the go uh to make ourselves more financially stable and healthy. And so, you know, that that includes two sides of it. Essentially, it's like some things you can reduce, something you can't. We can't reduce staff. We need everybody we got, and finding a replacement for what these guys provide to us would be very difficult, not impossible, but very difficult. Plus, I value them. They they've been through a lot with me, and I don't want to let that go. Um, and then we're gonna reduce the size of our facility to what we actually need because we're only using about a third of what we bought, you know, so we don't need that. And then with that revamp, oh, and then also adding additional services at the same time. We've been taking a strong look at the market, what's missing in the area, and we're looking to add some pieces of equipment and talent that will fill those gaps in the market in the area that we think will really set us apart as a provider.

SPEAKER_08 2:08:45

Sorry, I'm taking notes. I really like the idea. So I told you I got elected to city council this past year. Um and one of the things that was very surprising to me was the necessity of maybe right sizing the operation and ensuring that things were being done in an efficient manner. Now, I I mean, it sounds like you recognize that that's necessary for the goal that you have. Um and at the same time, I really like your optimism when it comes to adding and expanding services and developing the capability that you can provide clients at the same time. I mean, it just shows that you're aware that there are ways to improve the organizational and operational efficiency without sacrificing the quality to the customer or the client. I think that that's that's the mindset that a well-rounded entrepreneur stays in because you recognize there's always a room to improve.

SPEAKER_35 2:09:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 2:09:50

Yeah, we have to improve or we'll die.

SPEAKER_08 2:09:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_32 2:09:53

We'll have to adjust, or we'll die.

SPEAKER_08 2:09:55

Uh yeah, David Goggins. Okay, I was trying to think of a quote.

SPEAKER_32 2:10:00

Um, you want to feel like a piece of garbage on the daily watch.

SPEAKER_08 2:10:05

Just listen to David Goggins. Uh, but but he said in um, I think it was his first book, um Can't Hurt Me. That's the first one. Uh he says, you're either getting better or you're getting worse. And in business, that's either that you're getting better or you're going, you're dying. You're your your business is dying. So I I really like that that mentality there. Well, Andrew, let me ask, you know, you've provided a ton of value to me and the audience today. Is there anything that I can do for you or provide value to you and your audience?

SPEAKER_32 2:10:35

Yeah, absolutely. I think the most important thing for us right now is that we we're searching to increase our our customer base and our rent. We're we're currently on the search for those uh I don't want to, I feel like it might be offensive, but I'm gonna say those meaningful customers, but my understanding is that most startup companies have a few key clients that really elevate them. And we have a couple of those, but we're still looking to find the next one. So the way that we can best be helped is to share that we exist, share that you had a good experience in this conversation, share that you know you recognize that there's competence here and that there's an eagerness to provide a quality service and a quality product. Um, and then let those people come see it for themselves. Uh so revenue generation and customer expansion is definitely the most important thing that we can possibly do right now.

SPEAKER_55 2:11:29

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_32 2:11:30

So if anybody hearing this is looking for a new printer or a new shop or a new relationship or maybe a new opportunity for collaboration, uh, we're not turning down anything right now. We would love to talk to anybody and see what's going on and give it a try. Maybe you got something weird you want to try. Let's try it, let's get weird. I'm all out.

SPEAKER_08 2:11:48

I love it. So well, thank you so much, Andrew. Uh tell people, real quick, for the the show in the show notes, where can they find you? Where can they follow you? How do they connect with you in your business?

unknown 2:11:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_32 2:12:00

So we have a website. It's just okay. All over social media. My daughter runs it. My daughter and my wife, they do an awesome job from never being social media managers. So our Instagram is at winter underscore print underscore. Our Facebook is just winter print. And then you can Google us. You can call me. My phone number, my personal phone number is the phone number on Google. Please give me a call. Our email is customer service at winterprint utah.com. That also goes directly to me. So I would love to talk to you and I'd love to help out with your next project or your next ideation.

SPEAKER_08 2:12:35

Awesome. Thank you so much, Andrew. I appreciate your time today.

SPEAKER_32 2:12:38

Yeah, thank you, Parker.