The Dying Trade Printing $2M a Year

0:00I sell cowboy hats and custom hats. >> Sweet. >> Uh we do around two million in revenue right now. Awesome. I'd like to be at five. Okay. >> Um what's stopping me is so everything is mostly through social media. We've got about 780,000 organic followers. >> Cool. >> Um we are doing some paid ads, getting a 12 to 18 rows on the ads. >> Great. >> And the issue is is I've got this big red shiny button on my desk and at any moment I can just slam it and just double the content. Like you say, I can double the paid ads. Sure,

0:29>> but I can't make the hats. >> And supply conraint, >> but it takes years to take somebody and make them into a master hat maker. >> And the issue is is as much as we could say it's a recruiting problem. Sure. Hatmaking is not like an inherent skill. So it's you it's you could bring in a person that does artistry, you could bring in a person that does anything like that and all of a sudden if they don't have the vision for it, they can't shape a hat. And so you need the hatmaking combined with the customer service in order to be able to talk to the clients. So, at this point,

0:58>> are they So, what's the price of the hat >> right now? Anywhere from 800 to 1,200. >> Okay, got it. So, there's a super high-end kind of like artisal >> for sure. >> You know, hats, they're all custom, etc. >> And we do like end to end like full virtual. So, every single person normally when they buy a hat goes into a hat store. And the issue is is that hat stores are all locally based and it's a dying trade. And so what I did is I harnessed the power of social media and then we do all the video calls and everything with people that they love on social media but it's made just for them.

1:33>> Yeah. >> So it's totally recruiting issue. >> Totally. >> Um and I mean fundamentally if you're like I have unlimited demand for this stuff virtually, right? You can just slam the button and just get double the sales but you can't deliver on it. Um it's a also kind of like the sales thing different in terms of delivery but it's going to be a recruiting and recruiting and training issue. Um the fact that I the thing that I think is underutilized right now is the fact that it's a dying trade.

1:58>> That to me is where the really exciting alpha is because if you tell me okay there's all these people who are dying on the vine who can barely make ends meet and then I'm over here printing money with the exact same skill set they have. I'll bet you there you go. Uh, I'll bet you you probably pay them better if they're making thousand dollar hats. >> But I'm in Kentucky. >> Yeah. >> No one wants to be in Kentucky besides us. >> No one wants to be in Kentucky for what you pay them now.

2:26>> That's true. >> So compensation is you can be overcompensated or you can be undercompensated. So if you are supply constrained >> and you are making money hand over >> fist, >> you are underpricing your your your talent. Okay. >> So, it's like how much more would I need to pay somebody in order to get them to be one willing to move to Kentucky and two be willing to go through the training for it? If I can get them to do that, do I still have a good margin? If so, great. And it's like, okay, well, if I paid them 30% more, uh, we'd be good to go. Okay. Well, what does 30% look like in terms of if we change nothing about price? What does 30% look like if we pass through the price to the customer? Does it change anything about our acquisition?

3:08>> If so, then jack the price, jack the talent, and then you're good to go. How would you jack the talent? Like just I mean because I don't feel like recruiters can find hatmakers. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. >> I think they can totally find hatmaker. >> You think so? >> I mean I would just Google hatmaker and then I would call all the business owners. I'm just mean like this is how I would do it. I just like they're business owners >> and so if they have the opportunity to because the thing is they're probably not making anything. >> Yeah. >> And so many of them are artists.

3:32>> They don't have business sense. And so if they can make the money they want to make and do the thing they want to do, that's a dream life. It's a pretty good offer. But then they have to work for me and then the ego thing gets in the way. >> Yeah. But not for all of them. >> Okay. >> Like you need what? Three more, five more, 10 more. >> I would say like two to three more to get to five to seven. >> Yeah, I know. >> So >> I know. >> So I'll I'll I'll make a point uh because I think this is this is important. So you guys met my team today.

4:02>> Does it now make sense that they don't make $100,000 a year? >> Yes. like the people that you talk to make between, you know, 200, well two, no, probably higher than that, said probably 300ish on the low end all the way to 750 plus, right? The people that you spoke with. And so if I said, hey, no one wants to come to Vegas who already has like a huge amount of, you know, marketing knowledge because anyone who's really good at marketing can make more. Well, there's plenty of marketers who can make a million dollars a year in revenue and take home 200, you know, 250 with all the headache. It's like, well, I could pay you double that and you can just deal with high level business owners all day. And for some people, it's like, that's a pretty good deal.

4:39>> Okay. >> And so, I could I would I would this would be horrible if I was just trying to be like, how do I pay kind of as little as I can and then be like surprised that no one wants to come here, but you have the margin and you have the pricing power, so use it. >> So, one last question. >> Yeah. >> Can I hit the big red button and then that way? >> No. Supply first. >> And supply first. Get the people first. >> Well, you have margin, right? like 40 to 45%. >> You got margin. >> Okay.

5:05>> So, I'm just wondering if I hit the big red button, then I have more money and then I can afford. >> Well, how much capacity do you have right now? Are you fully like >> are you fully tapped out? >> Right now, currently when someone buys a hat from us, the soonest they'll be getting their hat is like October and November. So, >> so you just be pushing out delivery when you get >> I could push out delivery technically. >> Yeah. >> The industry does delivery at 6 months to a year for a custom hat. We're still technically two months under. I know it's crazy. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hate I hate using latency, but I do think that there's no difference between six and eight months.

5:33It's just forever. >> Okay. >> I'm just Yeah. >> Well, it is. And that's like at about the three to four month like you get you have to essentially just slowly grab everyone off the ledge. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, I think I mean if you want to slam your red button just so you can just jam some cash in. I that that doesn't really bug me. Pushing from six to eight is going to change absolutely nothing about the conversion process. >> Okay. Recruiting problem. Next. >> Rock and roll. If you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free.

6:33free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstrain the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.