expand my business

6!!!!!

Woohoo!!!

That we are now outsourcing our screen printing. We found a local guy with all the equipment needing the work, so it’s beneficial on both our parts. We met with him again last night to work out on the details. Starting monday i don’t have to fill orders anymore.

:)

But I don’t think I’ll mark this as complete until we hire our first employee. It’s just been dave and i so far. We have some contract freelancers working with us, but nothing full time. Now that we’ve launched our first e-commerce store we are looking to:

1) Outsource the printing of the clothing. I oringinally did it myself, but the orders are coming in faster than expected so it’s becoming hard to keep on top of them. We found someone locally who has the time & equipment to print them for us. He will also do the shipping.

2) Hire someone to do customer service. I’ve never been a phone person or even a service type person. I prefer to be the geek behind the scenes that just makes everything look pretty. Someone else can handle the people aspect of it. This will be our first employee.

3.) Take out a small loan. We’ve made it this far paying cash for everything. No loans, no help, nothing. We are currently a profitable business and getting a loan would give us a boost to add to our company in ways that will make it more profitable. Also, it would help the initial funding of our employee until the company is generating enough to fully cover their salary, which we could probably pull off within a couple of months.

Yay!!!

I guess we’ve been constantly expanding for a year and a half now. But this week we will be making one of our largest advances so far.

We our launching our first (of many) e-commerce stores.

I’ve been working like a mad woman all month getting the site & shopping cart designed & programmed, clothing made, products uploaded, etc, etc, etc.

Since it is still only Dave and I running the show, it’s been a little overwhelming. I do all the designing/programming/etc while he handles more the business/salesy side of things. He’s doing merchandising and handling issues with the merchant account, financial things, etc.

Hopefully this starts to generate some $ soon so I can hire some help!!! That will be necessary for me to keep my sanity.

I’ll post a link to the store once it is live. :)

http://www.score.org/

They offer free counseling and great workshops to help make sure you get everything set up right. My business partner meet with them every couple months to make sure we are still on track. They answer all our questions on everything from accounting and legal issues to insurance and banking. It’s also a great networking tool. At the workshops we’ve met a lot of great people with companies in similar stages as us. I highly recommend looking into this.

For about a year and a half now. It’s doing well and full supporting me and my business partner now. I want to help it to continue growing and expanding to the point where I no longer work for my business, my business works for me :)