To realize your business’ fullest potential, you need to explore all the options to meet your client’s wide range of needs. Different clients have different needs and unfortunately, a lot of t-shirt printing businesses are set up to only cater to the middle of the bell curve. This really is too bad because only 20% of your clients account for 80% of your profits. Now I need you to stop and think about that for a second. Only 20% of your clients produce the vast majority of the revenue your business will ever make. That should stop you in your tracks.
Once you realize that, you should rethink your business so as to cater to higher valued clients. I’m not saying that you should throw out or completely ignore lower value clients. What I am saying is that you should set up your infrastructure in such a way that you would provide more value to your best paying clients. Why? You want them to come back again and again. You want to establish a relationship where you would get these higher margin clients coming back to your business indefinitely.
Their loyalty means a lot more to you than your lower margin clients. I know this sounds rough, I know this almost sounds insensitive and impersonal, but it’s just all about business. You want to know which side of your bread is buttered on, otherwise you are going to play the t-shirt printing game to lose. Sadly, in any given town or city in the United States, most of the t-shirt printing outfits out there are barely one step away from closure. That’s right, they’re barely beating bankruptcy because they are completely blind to this value driven analysis.
To make sure that your business lives up to its fullest potential, as far as profit margins and actual profits are concerned, you need to pay attention to the specific interests of the 20% of your customers that put the most dollars in your pocket. Otherwise, you’re simply just going to be running around in circles and wishing and hoping for great things to happen. Throughout it all, you are wondering where did all your time, effort and energy go. You don’t want to be in that position. If you’re already in that position, you don’t want to remain stuck.
The best thing that you could do is to buy small heat transfer machine that is scalable enough to entertain all the specific design needs of your top valued clients. Having a heat machine can give you a tremendous advantage when it comes to versatility, cost effectiveness and practicality.
Versatility is crucial because high valued clients’ needs tend to change over time. If you look at your books, chances are you’ve snagged the business of a small local organization that has a lot of commemorative events that’s why it seems that they have an unending appetite for commemorative t-shirts. Using this small population of clients, you can then branch out to other clients that share their needs.
For example, if you have gained the business of a little league outfit that needs t-shirts every single month, guess what? There are many little league organizations spread out through your city, as well as your region. If you play your cards right, your t-shirt or graphic printing business can be a specialized business. You can afford to say goodbye to one shot personal low profit margin jobs. Instead, you can put all your attention to identifying and recruiting higher valued clients.
The great thing about t-shirts is that they are worn out easily. What I mean by that is once organizations order a batch of t-shirts for one event, they will then need another batch of t-shirts for another event. It never ends. Your job is to look for those types of organizations.
You also have to have the right equipment. While a typical heat transfer machine can do a decent job with vinyl, you would do better if you use a heat machine that works with a wide variety of materials and designs. That’s the only way you can produce consistent, high quality work that meets the needs of your higher value clients.
Again, the bottom line here is higher valued clients tend to order a lot and they tend to keep coming back. If you handle their accounts professionally, and you offer tremendous after sales service, you can bet that these businesses will come back to you again and again. Don’t lose that opportunity. Focus on volume, focus on delivering a high level of professionalism. You can’t get to that point if you don’t have the right equipment.
This is why it’s really crucial that you buy the right heat machine. At the very least, these machines must be scalable, flexible, and powerful enough to cover that vast swath of your potential high valued clients’ needs, not just now, but long into the future. That’s how you play the game to win. Otherwise, your t-shirt or graphic printing business share the fate of most other struggling small businesses. Life is too short to do that. If you’re going to swing that bat, make sure you swing for the fences.