Episode 183 – Monthly Business To-Dos

Custom Apparel Startups

Episode 183 – Monthly Business To-Dos

This Episode

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Mark Stephenson & Marc Vila

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customapparelstartups.com

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CAS Podcast

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ColDesi

You Will Learn

• Criteria for choosing your monthly tasks.
• How a monthly to-do list might save lost sales.

Resources & Links

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

Episode 183 – Monthly Business To-Dos

Show Notes

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is keeping up with all of the ‘tasks’ that can bog you down. These things may seem redundant or not as important as your daily duties, but avoiding them will absolutely cause trouble.

Review pricing

• Is everything still available?
• Has pricing gone up?
• SHOULD pricing have gone up?
• Is there an opportunity for a SALE or Discount?

Marketing check-in

• Promotions for next month or the NEXT month?
• Does your phone number work?
• Does your contact form work?
• New/replace products?
• Planning for events
• Website updates and changes
• Check your voice mail message
• Social media review (links in profiles, contact info, posts)

Financial Review

• Look back at the prior month
• Revenues Profits Expenses
• Lessons and changes
• Invoices and bills
• Taxes
• Fees/Dues

Sales Review

• How many new customers
• Lost customers
• Best sale of the month / worst sale of the month
• Most profitable orders

Legal Stuff

• Tax filings
• Certificates
• Licenses
• Order legal language
• HOA?

Clean Up!

• Make sure your work area is clean and safe
• Check your computer – are all the files in the right place?
• Gut check – how do YOU think you’re doing? How are you feeling about the business?

The purpose of a monthly check-in is not always because you didn’t properly adjust prices or didn’t pay bills. It’s so much more than that. It is creating a consistent habit of checking very important things often. It is also about making sure you didn’t forget details. Lastly, as you do this you will recognize patterns or oddities, which will help you catch something before it’s a problem (or catch something while there is opportunity!)

Transcript

Mark Stephenson:
Hey everyone, and welcome to episode 183, believe it or not, of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. This is Mark Stephenson.

Marc Vila:
And this is Marc Vila. And today, we’re here to talk about monthly business to-dos, so to-do lists every month.

Mark Stephenson:
Man, I run into this all the time and it’s something that we should have been doing for the past, I don’t know, decade for ColDesi and Colman and Company, just having this kind of checklist approach. And we’ve only recently adopted doing things like this. And so far, and I’m doing that in my side hustle business, and I know a bunch of business people that are just starting to get into this. And it’s just a matter of figuring out what you need to make sure of every month because when you don’t, terrible or hilarious things happen.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I would agree. Terrible or hilarious, or maybe worse, missed opportunities, the kind of thing where you want to kick yourself, be like, “Oh, if I would have just, then I could have” and it could be money-making opportunities or money-saving opportunities or just headache avoidance opportunities.

Mark Stephenson:
So these bullet points are going to be in the show notes. You are welcome to grab them if you’re on your desktop or later on, but let’s jump into it because this first one, we just did recently, started doing recently and I was shocked in the review pricing.

Marc Vila:
Oh, okay.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay.

Marc Vila:
So yeah, that’s a good point. So yeah, this is essentially, what we’re saying here is: just take a look at all of your pricing, your retail pricing, essentially, of everything that you sell on a regular basis and make any determinations, is the price wrong? Right?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And not just that, but is the price wrong for your business? And is the price incorrectly displayed? Right? So two different things. When we go through this past month, we went through our pricing for our Digital Heat FX product line and I think we identified 34 different places in the ColDesi, Colman and Company and Digital Heat FX universe where the price for one or more of the Digital Heat FX machines was displayed. So now, we know, because we were having those issues. We’d forget to add a special to one page that was on another, or there’d be some small change in the package or something like that and we’d forget. So now, we’ve literally got a spreadsheet that has each individual page. So when there’s a price change, our review pricing list starts with, “Okay, go through each one of these pages, make sure the price matches what we have decided the price should be or the price change needs to be.”

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It can be a challenge, especially if in your business, you work with flyers or brochures or anything that could be printed or posted online that is maybe a non-dynamic document, that can always be a challenge for you. So you want to have a list to make sure. Do you have multiple price sheets?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Do you work with schools and maybe you have a price sheet for each individual school? So you’ve got maybe half a dozen price sheets. Well, you just found out that the cost of one of the T-shirts that you sell has gone up. Now, maybe you have stock so it was okay while the month was going on, you were still profitable, but you know that come September or October, you’re going to have to re-up at the new higher price. Have you prepared and updated all of those? Do you have a list? So you can go ahead and get those out to your vendors or your customers, I should say.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, because what you want to avoid is getting a nice order from a school or a good customer and then realizing you’re losing a buck in order because you forgot to update the price list.

Marc Vila:
Right. And I think the opposite is true too, which we don’t think about it as much necessarily, but is there opportunity for a price to go down? Because, and I’m sitting on one of those opportunities now. Right?

Mark Stephenson:
Okay.

Marc Vila:
Actually, so Mark knows, I got a new chair recently and one of the things I noticed, I got an alert on my email and it said an item you’re looking at the price went down. And the price of this chair that I looked at six months ago went down 40%. So I started shopping chairs. Apparently, just in this day and age, there’s probably an abundance of chairs. I’m assuming a work from home 2020-

Mark Stephenson:
The famous office chair glut of 2022.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That everyone wanted a new chair to work from home in. And then the factories in China started making an infinite number of chairs. And then eventually, they ran out. So now, the price of chairs dropped. Well, if you’re an Amazon seller and you’re selling chairs like this and you haven’t checked pricing, you could still be running a chair that’s 30%, 40% higher than everybody else and potentially losing customers you didn’t even know you were losing.

Mark Stephenson:
But I think we should adapt that for our customers if you were selling custom chairs, customized chairs. All right. So I think review pricing is a great idea and it should be done at least every month. I mean, really, even if you think your prices haven’t changed, it’s probably not, that’s probably not true. Something has changed, you should take a look at the prices.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And I think a good way to do it is especially on standard products that you sell often, there’s probably not a lot of them.

Mark Stephenson:
Right.

Marc Vila:
So you go through, you take a look at invoices, you compare some data. You check if you got any emails or notifications or letters from your vendors, just double check those. Okay, yes. I remember getting something about this going up. Did I make any proper adjustments? Also, what I like about it, and one last thing, is it’s an opportunity for you to get that letter or notification or you go to shop online and you realize the price went up, that you don’t have to burn everything down and fight that right that moment because you’re going to buy supplies and make something custom and deliver it to a customer. That’s your plans for today. You don’t want to interrupt that with having to adjust pricing on all of your products and do it haphazardly in the middle of a busy day. So you know that on the second of next month, you’re scheduled to review that and “Hey, okay, everything’s fine for now. I’ll make through. And then I’m scheduled to look at this in a couple weeks.”

Mark Stephenson:
I think the second is a good idea because this is actually September 2nd that we’re recording this.

Marc Vila:
There we go. That’s why I said it actually, if why you picked up on that.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. That’s why you picked that number. So I agree with all that. And then the next thing to do, and it’s what we just talked about here when we’re looking at our websites to make sure that all the pricing is right, is that’s really part of a marketing check-in. You really need to take a look at your marketing universe, what you’re selling, how much it is, et cetera, at least once a month to make sure that you’re staying on track with your customers and your own business.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. The marketing check-in is something we’ve actually discussed many times on the podcast. We’ve talked about doing annual ones and regular ones and marketing planning and stuff like that. But a marketing check-in, I think to summarize it is, in my opinion at least, is everything that’s outwardly facing to your customers should have a degree of check-in or check-up once a month.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to read every paragraph of every social media post and every flyer you have, but you should have a running thought process of are these things still relevant? Is there anything that has changed recently? And if you have a monthly check-in scheduled, if you notice that again, example, you get an email, “These items are on sale. They’re discontinued, coming soon.” You don’t have to tackle it then, but you know that you sell that hat. So potentially, what you do is you add it to your list, your marketing check-in, and then you put on there “I’m probably going to want to take that hat off of my website because it’s discontinued.”

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, or you’re going to take advantage of any kind of discounted prices from that vendor and have a closeout sale.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Mark Stephenson:
So buy them all and have a sale for the coming month.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Mark Stephenson:
Because that’s the other thing to look at, is to figure out, are you going to engage in any promotions next month? What are the sales going to be? That’s now on ColDesi’s list and why we put together that list of the 34 pages for Digital Heat FX is we need to find out not just what changes we have to make, but we talk to our vendors to see if there’s a financing special that they’ve got, or maybe one of our vendors has given us more supplies that we can give away with our units, or maybe we’ve negotiated some kind of a deal with the freight company so we can offer free freight on more things. You really need to take a look for a minute at least, and see if there’s anything that you want to change for the season or for the month coming up.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s great. And sometimes, what’s so hard about this is guys, you’re telling me obvious stuff. Right? I mean, somebody said, “This is obvious stuff. What am I getting out of this?” I’m telling you that Mark and I both know this because we both work, have worked over our entire careers independently with small business owners to help them out. How many times have you gone to somebody’s website and filled out a form and they don’t even get it?

Mark Stephenson:
70% of the time.

Marc Vila:
Right, or I’m just saying-

Mark Stephenson:
But wait, I’m not making up that number. It’s literally 70% of the time.

Marc Vila:
And I had somebody that I was talking to recently and I said, I think it’s super cool that you do this. “Oh, no. Oh, actually, we don’t do that anymore.” “Oh, okay.” He’s like, “Yeah, I haven’t done it for a year, at least. Not since, I don’t think we’ve done that since 2019.” By the way, if you’re listening to this in the future, it’s 2022.

Mark Stephenson:
Right. Actually, even if you’re not. If you’re listening to this in the past, it’s also 2022.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. If you’re listening to this in the past, 2020 is a weird time.

Mark Stephenson:
Just skip it.

Marc Vila:
But anyway, I’m not even sure where I was going, Mark.

Mark Stephenson:
No, neither am I, but I will say that-

Marc Vila:
No, I do know.

Mark Stephenson:
Okay.

Marc Vila:
So this person said, “I haven’t even sold that in a couple years. I don’t even do that in a couple years.” And I said, “You know it’s right on the front of your website. It’s on the homepage. It’s in the main banner.” And they’re like, “Oh, you know what? I just really don’t go to the homepage often. I go to other pages and I share these posts and blogs and stuff, so I’m all over the website every day, but I’m not really on the homepage hardly ever. I didn’t even think about.”

Mark Stephenson:
Right. And that’s that, I mean, really. And like I said, I think I mentioned, we just put together this list of the 34 pages where Digital Heat FX pricing lives, officially. We would always go through all of the websites, but we really never had this page, this page, this page and this page. And we’ve been selling Digital Heat FX for eight years, something like that. I mean, it’s been a long time, but there are other things in just checking your website for updates and changes and checking for what promotions that you want to run next month, if the pricing needs to be changed. I also want you to really just quickly make sure that the phone number on your website is correct and that it works, that your contact form works, like Marc Vila mentioned, and that any links that you’ve got to social media because one thing I also found is people will develop their websites from a template and it will have 57 social media links at the bottom to services that no one actually ever goes to.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. There’s still a vine link down there.

Mark Stephenson:
Blog spot, no one knows what that is.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
And if I go and click on those, it takes me to spam pages or it takes me somewhere I don’t need to go. So you should go through all those social media links and review those too.

Marc Vila:
I can’t tell you how often, that what an interesting part about this I guess is so often, we go to larger company websites in general, right? We’re going to Lowe’s website and Walmart’s website and Target and CVS and Walgreens and we go to all these websites that have massive teams of people that monitor and do things with the website. I mean, the teams are so big. I may have mentioned this before in the podcast, a friend of mine, his job for a large company website was he would get a report from somebody, and then he would make sure the ticket was entered in correctly and all the links were right in there, and it was spelled right and it made sense. And then he would make sure that it was in the queue properly. So he was a bit of that office space. So it’s like “So you deliver it directly to the engineers?” “No, I don’t deliver it.” So that’s what he did.

Mark Stephenson:
Now, I want to hire that guy. It sounds very useful.

Marc Vila:
And by the way, I think it was a six-figure job, and he was amongst the team. Now, the reason I bring that up is because you go to Target all the time and you’re never going to see on the top of Target’s website “On the 4th of July sale” still showing up in August.

Mark Stephenson:
Right. True.

Marc Vila:
Because they have a whole team of people who does this. But when you end up on small business websites and small business, I mean, meaning you don’t have a dedicated team of people who just look at the website all the time.

Mark Stephenson:
Right.

Marc Vila:
Small to medium-sized businesses, all the time, there’s stuff mentioning “We’re closed for New Year’s Eve” and it’s March. I mean, I just see this stuff always.

Mark Stephenson:
And I’m actually adding right now to our little bullet points. Check your phone message.

Marc Vila:
Oh, yeah. Voicemail message, email auto-replies. I got an email auto-reply from a business not too long ago when I opened up a support ticket, that was a three-month old thing about how an update to their software was coming in January. And I was like, “It’s like April.” So I replied back and I said, “If the software update didn’t come out yet…” And that was like, there was already three updates since then.

Mark Stephenson:
I would’ve just been “How’d that go?”

Marc Vila:
Yeah, how’d that go? So point being, I know this is all obvious, but you’re going to miss it if you don’t pay attention to it. So you should pay attention to everything we’re saying here, and you should write some of this down and put it on a calendar event and do it. Otherwise, the obvious things are what get past you.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. And don’t forget, just the last bullet on this marketing check-in is to actually go through your social media profiles as well. If you have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, Instagram, if you’ve got TikTok, if you’ve got LinkedIn, even if you don’t use them regularly, you should go through once a month, just see if you’ve been spammed. Make sure all the information is correct, make sure you’ve got a picture, that the headline’s still appropriate. Even make any little changes that you want to. Tell them you’re now offering X, Y, Z, or there’s a promotion coming this month.

Marc Vila:
And some people will, or not some people, I mean, whatever you want to call it. Some people will put up a social post with the intention of not leaving it up forever, maybe it’s like, oh, all new or a product is on sale or I want to announce a temporary huge price break because of X, Y, Z. And then you post that on there, it’d be like “I just want to have this up for a week for anybody who might see it, but I don’t want to show it forever because I don’t want anybody know in the future I ever sold it for that price.”

And then you forget and it’s up there and you only post twice a month, so it’s only six things down, and December comes and somebody says, “Hey, I saw you had that T-shirt on sale for this price. I’d love to get that price.” Well, now the price has gone up twice and you sold it on a clearance sale for some other thing and you can’t offer that. So it’s another thing, it’s a great thing to go to your social media and do a little mini scroll. If somebody came here, what would they see in five seconds of scrolling?

Mark Stephenson:
That’s great. That’s a great tip.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And make sure that you’re still happy with that. And if you’re not, fix it.

Mark Stephenson:
So the next one is one that’s also very close to my heart because I’ve actually been doing this for years, and that’s doing a financial review. And I’d suggest you do it for your business and how that relates to your personal finances as well, especially if it’s just you or you’ve just got one employee, is to take a look back at the prior month and look at your revenues, your profits and your expenses. And by look at it, I mean, look at it, figure out how much it is if you can’t pull it easily. Is there anything unusual about it? Did you get a particular high bill you don’t recognize?

Did you check your credit card statement and see if one of your people subscribed to you to something, or if there’s something that you’re subscribed to that you no longer need? Maybe it’s a software, maybe you got overcharged for supplies or printing or something like that, doesn’t match your PO. Really just digging down and looking at this picture of “This is how much I made, this is how much I spent. Here’s my profits” with all the details in between is really vital to your ongoing business health.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And it’s one of those things that a really good habit of this is going to help you catch stuff before it’s too late or before it’s frustrating or annoying, and all different little types of things can happen in that financial review. You can realize that in your Square or Stripe app, you didn’t have it default to collect tax. And then you weren’t collecting your little 6%, 7%, 8% tax that you needed to, and you’ve lost out on that money now because the government still wants it. Also, in that financial thing, as we wrote down fees and dues and monthly fees and things like that, an interesting thing about this is you may be a member of the Chamber of Commerce and there’s an annual fee, and you like being a member, assuming. Then did you get an email about to pay that? Did you put that email aside because you’re going to pay it later because you’re about to walk out the door? And how do you know to check up on that stuff if you don’t have the scheduled review? And then next thing you know-

Mark Stephenson:
Or maybe you noticed that it was auto debited and you never go and you don’t want to be a member anymore but you just spent $300, $600 on an annual membership again.

Marc Vila:
Yep.

Mark Stephenson:
So I think that’s really important. And of course taxes, super important. You might want to get on the phone if you’re at this level with your accountant or your CPA, just talk over taxes. Did you pay your payroll taxes? Do you owe social security? I mean, do you owe all of those federal taxes that come along with owning your own business? Is there any licenses that you skipped? I know we’re going to get into that later, but it really is part of the financial review to see if you’re paying all your bills. It’s one of them.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Paying the bills, money is coming in. Also, overdue invoices is something that lingers so often. And side note on that, I mean, especially when you’re selling a tangible good, I wouldn’t put any money into anything unless you’ve got some money upfront, especially on a tangible good. That’s a complete side note but okay, you have a potential client and they wanted you to mess with something on the logo. And you said, “You know what? This is probably going to take me 15 minutes and I’ll do a good faith” type of thing. And you throw 15. I mean, I’m not going to tell you don’t do that. I think I do that.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
But “Oh, yeah. I’ll pay you tomorrow. Just get started. I’m in a rush.”

Mark Stephenson:
Right.

Marc Vila:
Don’t order those shirts because I’m telling you, the person who’s in a rush, who can’t pay you today to get order those shirts, is not going to pay you tomorrow.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes, because-

Marc Vila:
100% chance of that.

Mark Stephenson:
Right, because unless you’re selling $20,000 worth of stuff.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
They’ve got a credit card that has $200 on it that they could give you right now.

Marc Vila:
Immediately. “I’m driving.” “Okay, pull over a quick sec. Where are you? Are you on the Autobahn going 100 miles per hour with no place to pull over?” Like, “Oh, you’re stuck in traffic? Yeah, pull into that gas station parking lot real quick.” I mean, don’t let excuses on, don’t let people bog you with excuses because they’re going to try to manipulate you, those people who would do that. And next thing you know, you’ve got 100 shirts that you’ve made and somebody who’s still going to pay you tomorrow.

Mark Stephenson:
And the other reason why you want to look at this is because it’s super hard to collect on an old invoice. So for example, if you send out an invoice to a customer that maybe they put a deposit, they just owe the rest and they didn’t pay within the 15 days or 30 days. And you check and look, you send them a bill, you just send them a reminder email and they didn’t pay again. If you don’t see that until the next month, now, you’ve got something two months old. The person doesn’t even want to pay for it anymore. They may not remember the details of the order. It’s just there’s no motivation. You’ve really got to tighten that up. Part of your financial review, make sure no one owes you any money.

Marc Vila:
Yep.

Mark Stephenson:
And actively collect the money.

Marc Vila:
And it’s much easier to collect two weeks later than it is two months later.

Mark Stephenson:
Yes. Agreed.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Well, good. So I think a financial review is important. There’s a million other things we could talk about in there. I personally recommend you use software, something like FreshBooks or QuickBooks or something like that, something that will easily track it. Most of the online stuff now, I think FreshBooks is something silly, like $7 a month for the starter package. And it does all this smart stuff. Not that I’m advertising them specifically, but I’ve used them and you can auto-set stuff to clients. So just your quick reviews are very easy.

So I’m going to recommend getting off those Excel spreadsheets and getting onto some software that will be a little smarter, and include some email reminders, have colors of things that are paid and not paid automatically and stuff like that. And maybe it even syncs with your credit card software, it’ll make your financial reviews much easier. And if you’re really bad at financial reviews, it’s easy to give an accountant or somebody who is good at that stuff permission into one of those pieces of software to be a viewer or something like that so you can have somebody review that stuff for you and let you know if there’s a problem.

Mark Stephenson:
So that brings us to doing your sales review, which I like that it’s separate from your financial review. I mean, you should be looking at what your numbers were last month versus this month, last year, make sure you’re either growing in revenues or profits or you’re at a comfortable level and you’re happy with your current performance. And the way that sales review should break down is you should know how many customers you’ve got, how many new ones came into your business. And this will give you the early signs, like at ColDesi, we very closely track how many people made inquiries about our equipment. So we track that on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis so we can see our new potential customer trends over time. So you should be doing the same kind of thing. Even if it’s one or two a month or five a month, you should know.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. I think another cool thing about the sales stuff is it’s an opportunity to get excited about stuff that happened. Just looking at that money that came in again and being like, oh man, I remember that lady just called me up out of the blue because I went to a lunch party of some sorts, an event, and I said, “Hey, I do custom mugs.” And then I got a phone call the next day, that was so cool. That reminds me. I should probably do more stuff like that.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
I think that’s very cool.

Mark Stephenson:
Actually, what they’re probably thinking about themselves is “I remember when I listened to the podcast, the CAS Podcast, about networking and how to approach people, and I did that. Then a lady called and ordered custom mugs.” Okay, so that’s the good news, is how many new customers you got and think about how you got them. And like Marc said, whether or not you want to do more of that. Also, take a look at any customers that you may have lost.

Marc Vila:
That’s good.

Mark Stephenson:
And I’m going to break that down into two categories. Those are deals that you had expected and quoted on that did not close. So I feel like that’s a little personal review. If you’d expected to get two orders from a local high school and they did not come in, then you should know why, because it may be a lost customer. You may have lost that business or there may be something you can do to close that order now.

Marc Vila:
I think that that’s a really good part of the monthly review, especially as you are, if you’re a business that’s still of the size where you can individually review orders like that to find out why you lost deals. You can’t win them all, and that’s okay. And you should be happy to only win the deals that are the best for your business. But if you lost a deal because of pricing and you realize that that low price is just something that you reasonably won’t work with, then that’s okay. And you then look at that profile of customer and you realize maybe that’s not the right type of customer. If you lost a deal because you didn’t follow up because you forgot to follow up via email, and makes a case for having a CRM or a reminder system to remind you to follow up.

Mark Stephenson:
I mean, honestly, feel free to beat yourself up a little bit about that.

Marc Vila:
If you didn’t follow up, yeah. That’s the worst.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. If you didn’t follow up and there’s a deal out there that you didn’t get because you forgot, then you should reexamine your whole life.

Marc Vila:
What you should do is you should say how possibly can other businesses remember to follow up? How do you remember everything? And then you don’t remember everything. You have software or tools that help you remember, like a CRM, and we have episodes about CRM, but a customer relation management software. And that is something that you can email a customer a quote and then set yourself a reminder in that software to remind you in 48 hours to ask if they have any questions or whatever it might be.

Mark Stephenson:
Absolutely. I love that.

Marc Vila:
Yep. That’s a great part of the sales review, is understanding that any loss deals in general, why you lost them. And then if you’re okay with the loss or not. Like I mentioned, if the price was too low, well then I’m not going to sell for that price. That’s okay. I forgot to follow up with the customer. Shame on me.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, there you go. So I think also, to take a more global look and figure out when we’ve talked about this before for a year, an annual recap is just take a quick look and write down what your best sale of the month was and your worst sale. So your best sale might be measured in a couple of different ways, could be the one that you made the most amount of money on in profit, could be the one that was the most profitable, which means maybe you sold five shirts and you made as much money as you would normally sell 10 or 20 shirts.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
Right? Or it could just be you enjoyed the heck out of it.

Marc Vila:
It was fun.

Mark Stephenson:
It was a multimedia thing that you were really excited about doing. You had to do it, so that’s the best sale of the month.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s something that you would hang up on the wall to show of future customers. Another best sale of the month could be you’ve got a really small order, but for a customer with huge potential.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, I like that.

Marc Vila:
Like I only did five shirts, but it’s for the national such and such society, which I know has 10,000 members and 20 chapters, and I’m in now. How am I going to advertise to that group so I can get deeper into that group later? So that’s another potential best sale of the month. Those are really opportunities for growth.

Mark Stephenson:
I love that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And the worst also could be just terrible customers.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. It could be a terrible… it could be an unprofitable job, somebody you hated talking to on the phone.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the best things you could do as a business owner is not do business with jerks. You have that opportunity.

Mark Stephenson:
If you are in an owner ownership position, then you can definitely do that. And I encourage you to do that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I think that’s one of the best things.

Mark Stephenson:
Unfortunately, if you’re not in an owner position, like some podcasters I know, you’re just not allowed. You’re just not allowed.

Marc Vila:
No, it’s true though. And all of it, I think that the best part about if you’re in an owner position or is this best and worst sale of the month, you get to define all that based on your goals and dreams. And I think that that’s the kind of thing that gives me no chills type of stuff, is like gosh, you get to decide what the best sale of the month is. If you’re profit-driven, it’s that. If you’re happiness-driven, it’s that. Whatever it is, so I think that that’s super cool.

Mark Stephenson:
Cool. So we should probably revisit the legal stuff again.

Marc Vila:
Yes. Legal stuff, just being the last one on the list. I just define the stuff as the stuff that can get your business shut down, the stuff that can prevent you from doing business in the future, the stuff that can cause you to have to pay fines or being able to stop you from growing or doing something that you want. So tax filings, certificates, licenses. What else?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. So I think that you need to make sure that you have your local business license, I mean, the basics for setup because a lot of people will get started and they’ll get a little bit busy and it’ll just fall by the wayside. You probably need to pay sales tax every month, you need to-

Marc Vila:
Or every quarter, or you have to determine what your State and local rules are, right?

Mark Stephenson:
Yes. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
So you figure that out or have somebody figure it out for you and make it a part of either your monthly review or your quarterly review, however it has to be done. But if you don’t have somebody doing it for you, then you need to make sure that you’re reminding yourself somehow. And if you’re not paying attention to things on a regular basis, you’re going to get lost in it.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I’d also maybe, and I’m stretching here to say that you have to do this every month, but if you write up a quote or if you have an order that people fill out online, just make sure that all the language in it is legally appropriate and hasn’t changed. So if your quote says net 30, make sure that that’s what you mean. Make sure that you’re not violating any local ordinances or laws, especially if you are a… I’m going to say this and it’s going to make people angry. If you’re a traditional screen printer that uses traditional screen printing ink, you need to make sure that all of your legal stuff with, am I really allowed to do this in my city or county or location? Am I disposing of all this stuff properly? Because in the beginning, when I wasn’t using much, it was no big deal to put it in my garbage can, but now, I’m filling up two garbage cans a week out of the back of my house. Someone is going to notice. So whatever business you’re in, just make sure that you’ve got all your legal stuff tight.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, and that stuff can be a little tricky too. I mean, mentioning the chemical stuff. How do you know if your city or county or State has changed some environmental laws?

Mark Stephenson:
Right.

Marc Vila:
I’m not asking you necessarily, but it’s not an easy answer to say. How would I know? I’m not sure. So if you have an attorney that you work with or there’s a website you can go to, or if there’s a hotline that you can call for the State, you can ask questions like that. And again, maybe monthly is too much for something like that, but in regards to your legal stuff and your monthly check and maybe every quarter or every six months on that particular event, hopefully, you’re putting this stuff in a calendar you’re putting. Check for any changes in laws in regards to the type of business I do.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
And that-

Mark Stephenson:
Actually, I think maybe on a monthly basis, you just decide that you’re going to think hard about the legal stuff. You’re going to pay attention. You’re going to say-

Marc Vila:
And just analyze it a bit. Yeah.

Mark Stephenson:
Taxes, licenses, anything changed, I’m good. All my quote language, my order language is all good. I’ve got terms and conditions on my website. All that is still taken care of. We’re good.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Good. And I think that that covers everything. I mean, Mark put a note in here, no homeowners associations. Do you run a business from your home? If you do, be sure you’re not doing anything that’s in violation because it would suck to get a letter in the mail and just be like, what am I going to do?

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. “Hey, Marc Vila. I noticed when I was driving by your house, you had the garage open and there was commercial manufacturing equipment, which is what apparel decoration equipment is sometimes categorized and that’s against our HOA regulations. You have 72 hours to shut that down.”

Marc Vila:
Yeah, which is why I recommend in front of your house, you put a series of flames that shoot up and hide your garage. That’s a way you can open the garage and nobody can see in beyond the flame wall.

Mark Stephenson:
I like that.

Marc Vila:
I mean, that actually, then my HOA flame walls are approved. I just don’t know about yours, so check. But you are going to have neighbors like that, that are just ruiners. They’re the same type of people who are jerk customers probably, but-

Mark Stephenson:
Probably.

Marc Vila:
And in all seriousness, it is important to just understand and know those things and know where you’re sitting so you don’t have any surprises.

Mark Stephenson:
Yep.

Marc Vila:
There’s something we don’t have on the list that I think is just worth a brief thing. Cleanup.

Mark Stephenson:
Oh, interesting.

Marc Vila:
Go through your shop, your room. If you have a full business or a full warehouse or you just have a single room that you’re working out of, whatever it is, sweep, mop, pickup, scrape, paint stuff off the floor on empty buckets, whatever it might be. Just do a quick little monthly cleanup. Also, electronic cleanups are good, too. Empty that downloads folder, move all the invoices to the proper places, go into your accounting software. The cleanup is a part of the accounting stuff too. Just general cleanup is good, electronically, physically, and then mentally too. Probably not a bad idea to meditate on a little bit of your ideas and dump out the stuff in your head that’s driving you nuts and take in the new thoughts or energy that are going to make you strive to do something great next month.

Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I love it.

Marc Vila:
A gut check.

Mark Stephenson:
I’m writing things down.

Marc Vila:
Great. So all this stuff is going to be in the show notes on customapparelstartups.com. Mark’s typing some of the things I’ve added in right now. So if you’re listening to this and you want to see a list like this, go to the podcast website and you can find episode 183 and you’ll see all these notes and all the other episodes that we’ve got on approximately 180 plus other topics that you might find interesting for your business and a bunch of notes on those topics as well. So definitely buzz through if this is your first episode, you’ve listened through. Thank you. I think we’ve got a bunch of great stuff out there. And the really old stuff’s probably potato quality because it’s seven years old or something, but it’s still pretty good content.

Mark Stephenson:
It really is. We still refer to those early-

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I’ve thought about us going through some of those old episodes and doing redos.

Mark Stephenson:
Of course, it wasn’t video. We were just holding up pieces of paper in front of the camera with our notes. There was no audio. We used a flip chart, like when you’re doing a presentation.

Marc Vila:
All the math was abacus.

Mark Stephenson:
There you go.

Marc Vila:
So well, great. The purpose and the final note we put here, the purpose of the monthly check-up is not always just pricing or paying bills, but that gut check is important. And it’s really though, I think from a highest level, it’s creating consistent habit of checking all of the important things on a regular basis, making sure you don’t forget details, making sure you don’t misplace thoughts, ideas and things you wanted to do. And what happens is humans in general, people with the human brain, you will recognize patterns and oddities without actually saying you’re trying to look for them. It’s just something that we can do. So if you’re looking every month at all of these things, things will stand out as a good pattern, a bad pattern or an anomaly. And then you get to address that because you’re used to looking at this stuff, which is going to put you ahead of all the people who don’t do that and let it get away until it’s too late or it becomes a big mess.

Mark Stephenson:
I agree. And I have a final challenge for everyone.

Marc Vila:
Okay. I’m ready.

Mark Stephenson:
Is to go through at least 20 episodes of the CAS Podcast and look at the wall behind Marc Vila.

Marc Vila:
Okay.

Mark Stephenson:
And let us know if you notice any changes. That is your goal for noticing anomalies.

Marc Vila:
Have you noticed any changes?

Mark Stephenson:
I won’t say because I really just want people to listen to 20 episodes of the podcast and pay close attention.

Marc Vila:
Now, I’m very curious.

Mark Stephenson:
There may not have been. All right. Anyway, that was great, Marc. Thanks for this episode number 183. I thought it’s really useful. Hope you all got something out of it.

Marc Vila:
Absolutely. If you have any ideas for episodes or something you’d like us to cover that we haven’t or revisit, please reach out to us and let us know and we’ll turn it into something.

Mark Stephenson:
Sounds good. You guys have a great business.

The post Episode 183 – Monthly Business To-Dos appeared first on Custom Apparel Startups.