24 Ways to Increase Your Luck in the Screen Printing Business
The concept of “good luck” is often derided, but with a few tweaks to the way you run your shop, you may find yourself the recipient of it.
Published
2 years agoon
LET’S GET THIS out of the way: Much of your success in business has been due to luck. Yes, it’s a little unpalatable, but it’s true. And the more successful you’ve been, the luckier you’ve been. Wait! Don’t toss this month’s issue of Screen Printing aside. This success-luck thing required some preconditions – you’re also skilled at what you do, and likely very hardworking.
Chris Wachowiak of Ronin Branding gets it: “Luck is capitalizing on learned understanding creating knowledge … lots of work, effort, learning, and preparation help create the opportunity to recognize and seize the moments others see as luck. The truth is, you were just prepared to act or receive.”
The Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman summed up this secret to professional success in his favorite formula:
Success = talent + luck
Great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck
The work of Kahneman, who is best known for his studies into cognitive biases, backs up much other research that suggests we humans drastically undervalue the influence of luck in many situations, and overvalue it in others. It has to do with something psychologists refer to as the “locus of control,” or how much you think you control the events happening around you. Most people have an internal locus when it comes to good things – they take credit for their success – but an external locus when things go wrong.
This is not just a robust ego at work. It’s also about the “availability heuristic”: the bias whereby we attach more significance to things that are easier to call to mind. It’s not hard to recall the countless times when you put in the effort to succeed: slogging through 14-hour days during the holiday season, preparing reams of documents for loan interviews, the drama of managing an unruly staff. By contrast, it’s genuinely difficult to perceive the ways you may have been fortunate: opening or expanding a business at a time of historically low interest rates, benefiting from a global shift in taste toward customization/the humanization trend in animals, riding the back of 12 years of unbroken economic growth … In truth, we control much less than we like to believe.
There are reasons most business owners don’t want to talk about the role of luck in their success. It’s not just that it takes some of the shine off their accomplishments, but also because in the purest, blindest sense, luck is random and thus boring. If it’s out of your control, why bother?
To be sure, there is a certain type of luck – dumb luck, winning-the-lottery luck – that is not worth much thought. But the other kinds – the luck you provoke, the fortunes and misfortunes you prepare for, the luck that can be tapped through an understanding of probability, that luck that comes from hard work or your serendipitous networking – when fostered, can give your business a huge boost.
It’s this disconnect between skill and luck that is sometimes the hardest to understand. Counterintuitively, the more competitive and skilled the players in a marketplace or other segment in life, the more luck you need.
Consider the 50 companies featured in three of the most popular business bestsellers of the past 40 years: In Search of Excellence, Good to Great, and the unfortunately named Built To Last. Of the 50, 16 failed within five years after the books were published, and 23 became mediocre as they underperformed the S&P 500. It wasn’t because their managers or workers stopped trying or innovating. It was because things even out. If you get an extreme result in one period, the next result will probably drift toward the average. Statisticians call it “regression to mean.” Normal people might just say their luck ran out.
All this is not to imply that you are helpless before fate, or that you should bet the coming month’s payroll on the roulette table when you’re in Vegas for the next tradeshow. There is still much in life you do control – and luck, while it can’t be tamed, can be influenced.
In the following pages, we provide some ideas shared by your fellow screen printers, experts in this field, and from our own reading on how to improve your odds in the face of such uncertainty.
Be on the
Lookout for Luck
It starts with observation. “You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do,” psychology writer Maria Konnikova writes in The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned To Pay Attention, Master Myself, And Win. “If we want to be successful, we need to train our powers of observation, to cultivate that attitude of mind of being constantly on the lookout for the unexpected and make a habit of examining every clue that chance presents.”
Most people are simply not open to what’s around them – something that is becoming harder to cultivate in our age of constant distraction and never-ending connectivity.
Keep an Open Mind
… and Relax a Little
Part of the challenge is that good-luck events often reveal themselves in ambiguous, trivial ways, which can make them hard to detect. As the saying goes, “Actual great opportunities do not have ‘Great Opportunities’ in the subject line.” Thus, luck tends to favor the curious.
“This is one of the most counterintuitive ideas,” says Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, and author of The Luck Factor. “We are traditionally taught to be really focused, to be really driven, to try really hard at tasks. But in the real world, you’ve got opportunities all around you. If you’re driven in one direction, you’re not going to spot the others. Unlucky people go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result, miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.”
Hit the Books
Entrepreneurially lucky people who regularly question the norm and seek continuous improvements in their business end up being luckier because they want to learn, says Anthony Tjan, author of Heart, Smarts, Guts, And Luck. “They read new things, try new experiences, and are open-minded to a variety of relationships because they are curious. All of these things increase the probability for circumstantial luck … You will simply see more – and therefore increase your chances of finding luck – if you adopt the mindset ‘there is always more to see and more to learn.’”
Don’t Be Too
Quick to Judge
To be lucky, you want to change your relationship with ideas, says Stanford engineering school professor Tina Seelig.
“Most people look at new ideas that come their way and they judge them: ‘That‘s a great idea’ or ‘That‘s a terrible idea.’ But it‘s actually much more nuanced. Ideas are neither good nor bad. And in fact, the seeds of terrible ideas are often something truly remarkable,” she says in her widely viewed TED talk on luck. “You look around at the companies, the ventures that are really innovative, the ones that we now take for granted that have changed our lives, well, you know what? They all started out as crazy ideas, ideas that when pitched to other people, most people said, ‘That’s crazy, it will never work.’’’
Squeeze Those Lemons
According to Wiseman, lucky people are certain the future will be bright. That expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it helps them persist in the face of failure and positively shapes their interactions with other people. When things go awry, they ‘‘turn bad luck into good’’ by seeing how they can squeeze some benefit from the misfortune. Asked how they’d react to being shot in the arm, according to Wiseman, they typically reply, “Well, I’d be relieved I wasn’t shot in the head. Maybe I can sell my story to the media.” Psychologists refer to this ability to imagine what might have happened, rather than what actually did happen, as “counter-factual.” In doing this, such people feel better about themselves and their lives. This, in turn, helps keep their expectations about the future high, and increases the likelihood of them continuing to live a “lucky life.”
Ian Graham of Feels So Good found good luck through a horrible situation: COVID. “We got lucky and survived COVID with minimum disruptions. We took advantage of the fundraiser business model that was so prevalent during that time, and it ended up helping catapult us into the world of ecommerce. This has been a huge opportunity for us to grow and take on new challenges. I see this as a huge stroke of luck, and we were rewarded for taking a chance and trying something new.”
Think of Yourself
as the “Almost-Victor”
When bad luck strikes, Konnikova recommends thinking of yourself as an “almost-victor” – someone who thought correctly and did everything possible in terms of the things you could control but was foiled by fate’s cruel hand. “No matter: You will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time,” she writes in The Big Bluff. “People share things with you: If you’ve lost your job, your social network thinks of you when new jobs come up; if you’re recently divorced or separated or bereaved, and someone single who may be a good match pops up, you’re top of mind. This attitude is what I think of as a luck amplifier.”
“In 2010, I was let go at a job I had for nearly 18 years,” Marshall Atkinson of Atkinson Consulting says. “At the time, it was devastating. However, I started writing, networking, and reaching out to people I only admired from a distance. I started a blog and consulting. As it turns out, that dramatic event was what set me free.”
Just Don’t
Play the Victim
In contrast, seeing yourself as a victim will serve more as a luck dampener, says Konnikova: “Because you’re wallowing in your misfortune, you fail to see the things you could be doing to overcome it. Potential opportunities pass you by; people get tired of hearing you complain, so your social network of support and opportunities also dwindles; you don’t even attempt certain activities because you think, ‘I’ll lose anyway, why try?’; your mental health suffers; and the spiral continues,” she says. To be sure, perspective-shifting tricks like counterfactuals won’t solve all your issues in one fell swoop, but they can provide breathing space. Some days, a little room to maneuver is all you need.
View Life as
a Flow of Luck Events
“It helps to view life as a river in which lucky events – good and bad – will flow your way. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is,” writes Morten T. Hansen, co-author of Great by Choice, in a blog on the Harvard Business Review website. “When you start having this ‘luck flow’ mindset, you can start managing those events to your advantage, but only then.” This view recalls the Stoic approach to life that has been popularized in recent years: It’s not the events that happen in life, but our reaction to them that matters.
“I once managed to order 200 bright yellow shirts twice for the same order,” Chessie Rosier-Parker of Squeegee and Ink says. “Then figured I could tie dye the spare 200 shirts and sell them at festivals I was trading at. It just so happened that tie dye was huge last year so we did really well with them. I would have never tried to do them unless I was trying to figure out a way to make them profitable and not go to waste.”
Keep a Luck Diary
… or Spreadsheet
To build these positive skills, Wiseman recommends keeping a “luck diary.’’ At the end of each day, spend a couple moments writing down the lucky things that happened. “We ask them not to write down the unlucky stuff. After doing that for a month, it’s difficult not to be thinking about the good things that are happening.”
If you want to take it to the next level, do something professional poker players do: Create a spreadsheet. Each time something happens, jot it down in a “situation trigger” column. In the next column, write a description of your thoughts, emotional reactions, and how you subsequently behaved. In the next column, give your best assessment of what was the underlying flaw, and finally, write a “logic statement” you can use to inject some rationality the next time you’re faced with a turn in luck.
Feel Lucky Through
Some Simple Subtraction
Don’t want to keep a diary? The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests this exercise in simple subtraction, which is a bit like the pivotal scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Think about the positives in your life – your family, your business, your community, your health. Then start thinking about all the small events that had to take place for you to get to this point: What if your father hadn’t taken that summer job and met your mother, what if your great-grandfather hadn’t opted to try his luck in America, what if penicillin hadn’t been invented … and so it goes. What this does, according to the paper, is deepen your appreciation for what is happening in your life at this moment. It allows you to count your blessings.
“I just happened to be sitting in the office of a local offset printer getting some quotes on an upcoming job,” Robert Francis of ScreenPrintPlus says. “He got a phone call while I was sitting there. He covered the receiver and asked if I did screen printing on posters. I said of course. It turns out the phone call was from a huge grocery store chain in the Chicagoland area that had just closed its in-house offset/screen printing shop. We ended up having that account for 16 years. It was always either our biggest or second biggest account each year. I guess there’s something to ‘being in the right place at the right time.’”
Be Prepared to Act
One of the most often-cited quotes about luck comes from Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” The actual statement was a little different: “Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.” It’s not enough just to spot a good-luck event; you need to be prepared to alter your plans to act on it.
When faced with a luck opportunity, Hansen recommends doing what a lot of the best corporate leaders do: Apply the “zoom out, then zoom in” principle. When confronted with a luck event, small or large, take a moment to zoom out (“What are we really trying to accomplish here?”), then zoom in (get the details right). Similarly, prudent leaders prepare for that unexpected event that comes out of no- where. (Had you honestly heard of Wuhan before 2019?) Prepare for bad-luck events by incorporating safety margins (take an earlier flight to that tradeshow; add two extra days to your next deadline), acquire options (line up that backup supplier), and invest in a strong network of people who will help when things go bad.
“The decision to add UV-cure capability led directly to using takeoff, which precipitated organizing everything around printing our most popular format 2-up,” Kyle Baker of Baker Prints says. “While dead obvious for productivity in retrospect, I didn’t arrive at that conclusion without the indirect impetus – and it was a revolutionary change in our history. It was one of many experiences that has taught me to look for opportunity to improve everywhere, be it a little tweak here or a leap forward there.”
Take Risks – Fortune
Favors the Brave
“You gotta be in it to win it” is a better example of great advertising than applied math, but it is accurate: Even winning the lottery – the ultimate example of dumb luck – requires you to go out and buy a ticket, or at least open your phone. Taking action releases energy, and luck typically requires a catalyst and at least a small risk. As the salesperson’s creed goes, every time you don’t ask, the answer is no.
Good luck also has a multiplier effect. Opportunities lead to opportunities. Recounting a publishing deal that started with a hello to a stranger and ended with a book that sold a million copies, Seelig says, “Now, you might say, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky.’ Of course I was lucky, but that luck resulted from a series of small risks I took, starting with saying hello. And anyone can do this, no matter where you are in your life, no matter where you are in the world – you can do this by taking little risks that get you out of your comfort zone. You start building a sail to capture luck.”
Let’s not forget that not doing something is also a choice. “There’s a false sense of security in passivity. You think that you can’t get into too much trouble – but really, every passive decision leads to a slow but steady loss … Hanging back only seems like an easy solution. In truth, it can be the seed of far bigger problems,” writes Konnikova.
“In my experience, luck first started with a risk,” Nate Hansen, Hansen Screen Printing, says. “We would print a few things for a potential big customer so they can see the quality really turned things around in our shop. We were able to take advantage of the situation by customer retention and keeping communication open.”
Be a Dentist
Michael Mauboussin writes in The Success Equation that the closest you can come to making your own luck is to work in a field where the variation in skills remains wide – which, by and large, means new industries or segments rather than established ones. Keep in mind though that wherever luck is powerful, short-term outcomes will be poor indicators of whether you’re on the right track. At the same time, some fields such as startups, product launches, academia, and creative efforts like jewelry design are by their nature riskier. Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that $1 million earned as a dentist is not the same as $1 million earned as a rockstar because success as an artist depends much more on chance. If you imagine a game of “career roulette,” you end up a starving artist 99 times for every time you end up a rockstar. If you want to minimize the chance of bad luck, he says, be a dentist. There are no “starving dentists.”
Or Be Contrarian
Given the skewed payoffs in such a world, it is possible to achieve outsized success by being contrarian. When the economist John Kay examined the forecasting record of his peers in the 1990s, he noted that Patrick Minford, an idiosyncratic forecaster, would often produce the best forecast one year and the worst one the next. If the consensus is wrong, being an outlier gives you a high chance both of dramatic success and spectacular failure.
Provoke Luck
The core strategy of anyone looking to enhance their luck is to expose yourself to as much randomness and “good uncertainty” as you can. Break your daily routines, take a different route to work, go to a party with the goal of only talking to people wearing red, attend conferences no one else in your field is attending, read books and blogs no one else is reading. “Although it may seem strange, under certain circumstances, this type of behavior will actually increase the amount of chance opportunities in people’s lives,” Wiseman says.
It’s like living in an orchard, he continues. Keep going back to the same trees, and soon you’ll harvest no apples. “It’s easy for people to exhaust the opportunities in their life. Keep on talking to the same people in the same way. Keep taking the same route to and from work. Keep going to the same places on vacation. But new or even random experiences introduce the potential for new opportunities.”
“Although I agree that random situations seem to arise, which could be considered luck, I think a person creates them by putting themselves out of their ordinary comfort zone and then converts them to ‘fortune’ by using skills which they have worked on through the years,” Andy MacDougall of MacDougall Screen Printing says.
Create Your
Own Chaos Monkey
Software engineers at Netflix created Chaos Monkey, a system that randomly disables Netflix servers. The idea was to push the company’s engineers to think more broadly and build more resilient systems. Like Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works program, which freed some designers to pursue ideas that were sometimes at odds with what the main company was working on, Chaos Monkey showed a recognition that although the conventional approach to design – gradual evolution – will eventually yield results, throwing a wrench in the works can help leapfrog you into the future. Add some randomness to your systems and see what happens.
Build a Lucky Network
Studies show the people who can help you the most in business often aren’t those closest to you. Rather, they are the secondary contacts, the friend of a friend, the associate of a key client, or some other person you know only tangentially. The reason is twofold: A secondary contact has nothing much invested in recommending you to someone else (the old saying about not letting business and friends mix) and because this person is not from your inner circle, they expose you to a wider network based on interests or connections you don’t have. Your hairdresser’s son, for example, may be the person to build your website.
Tjan says the best way to practice what he calls “serendipitous networking” is to be open and authentically interested in people. “A Lucky Network is not something that can be premeditated. It is not a targeted list of must-have relationships, but rather it is a set of relationships built out of curiosity and friendship that somehow ends up encompassing people who turn out to be pivotal. In our research, 86 percent of the luck-dominant credit a key part of their success to an ‘openness to new things and people,’” he writes in an HBR blog.
“In the very early years of King Screen, we received a phone call from our accountant asking if we would be interested in having lunch with another ‘screen print shop owner’ who had just sold his business for millions,” Scott Garnett of King Screen says. “Our accountant’s father just happened to be that owner’s accountant. What were the chances? Obviously, we said yes! We arrived to a lunch meeting a couple weeks later only to find out it was Jon Carroll of Boxercraft. Our lunch meeting ended up being more than four hours long, and it was one of the greatest business lessons of my career.
“Advice he gave me that day still has an impact on my decision-making to this day,” Garnett continues. “The main lesson I learned from it was to seek out mentorship. The decorated apparel industry is a really great community if you can connect with the right people who share your vision and goals. Some of the people I consider my closest friends I have never even met in person. They’re the industry people I’ve only met in text groups, DMs, and podcasts. There are tons of people out there that not only understand the struggles and triumphs you’re experiencing but better, they’re willing to help you through the hardships and applaud your wins.”
Learning from Luck
In nearly all luck events, there are elements you did control, ways you reacted that could have been handled differently, things you can learn to do better next time. If you keep making the same mistakes, that’s not bad luck – it’s a failure to learn. Conversely, when things are going well, it’s a good idea to test whether your success is entirely the result of wise decision making or due in some part to good fortune. “One of the things about good luck if you’re not careful is that it can go to your head,” Konnikova says. “Because when you’re winning, it’s just too easy not to stop and analyze your process. Why bother if things are going well?” she says.
The most dangerous situations are when people believe they have attained a certain control over luck, she says, citing studies of investors. “The more people overestimate their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became: The participants grew increasingly less likely to switch to winning stocks, instead doubling down on losers or gravitating entirely toward bonds.”
Focus on the Process,
Reward the Effort
To some bosses, the only thing that matters when it comes to the contributions of their workers is the outcome, not how they got there. Economists refer to this as the “tournament” approach, based on the idea that the only thing that matters for a player in, say, the US Open, is that they’re holding up the trophy (and the winner’s check) at the end. Degree of effort, style, boldness, initiative … none of that is of consequence.
But in business, outcomes aren’t always in your control. So, it’s better to set targets and a system that rewards effort, innovation, and prudent risk-taking. Focus more on the process and not solely on the results. To do otherwise is to create an overly conservative environment where people don’t dare make a mistake. ‘‘Consider the psychic costs of coming up short in a philosophical system that disclaims the role of luck, timing, or competition, and admits no obstacles that cannot be conquered by the sheer application of will,” Steve Salerno writes in his book Sham.
Luck Is Not a Strategy
Luck and hope have a complicated relationship. You never want to rely on good fortune as a business strategy. Lady Luck is capricious at the best of times. That said, it’s actually good for your salespeople, especially the younger ones, to believe in luck – not dumb luck but the kind that comes from getting out there and provoking it. “The greater a salesperson’s belief that success is a combination of luck and effort and that good luck will come along sooner or later, the greater their sales activities, such as making phone calls, meeting prospects, qualifying prospects, and gathering intelligence about prospects and competitors. And ultimately the higher their performance,” writes marketing professor Joël Le Bon in a Harvard Business Review Online article. He says the salespeople he has studied attributed 60 percent of their sales to luck.
“People say I’m lucky, but the harder I work the luckier I get,” Ron Augelli of Talk Shirty to Me says. “There is a drive and a mindset you need to understand what luck is. If there isn’t an opportunity, create one! There are many books on motivation and how you view business and life. Find the right ones and connect, continue to learn, learn how to handle yourself when you’re wrong, and take responsibility.”
Listen to Your
Lucky Hunches
Gut is another tricky one. Intuition can help, but emotions aren’t always your friends when it comes to making decisions. Wiseman argues lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. They also take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities – for example, by meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts. “You don’t want to broadly say that whenever you get an intuitive feeling, it’s right and you should go with it. But you could be missing out on a massive fount of knowledge you’ve built up over the years. We are amazingly good at detecting patterns. That’s what our brains are set up to do,” Wiseman says.
See the World
Probabilistically
For gamblers, life is about probability. Yes, luck may rule their world, but they thrive when they can narrow the odds.
Such an approach means not expecting you’re due anything – “good karma, good health, money, love, or whatever else it is,” says Konnikova. Probability has no memory. Because a coin-toss comes up heads three times in a row has no bearing on the fourth toss. But it’s something most people struggle with. “It’s called the ‘description-experience gap.’ In study after study, people fail to internalize numeric rules, making decisions based on ‘what feels right’ rather than based on the data they are shown. We need to train ourselves to see the world in a probabilistic light.”
For all the benefits of taking a positive approach to things, you’re still better off being the favorite rather than the underdog. In the battle between Walmart and the plucky independent, the big box invariably wins. When people get into trouble taking life or career bets, it’s often because they didn’t understand the risks. Don’t try crossing the road blindfolded.
Run Experiments
What the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley figured out early was the rewards of luck are huge, money is often made from things you weren’t even looking for, and you don’t have to bet the house. Top VC firms will typically invest in 20 startups with the expectation only one or two will prosper. But you don’t need to have a billion dollars behind you to take such an approach – any modest and reversible experiment counts, says Tim Harford, the author of Freakonomics.
Writing in the Financial Times, he says: “An experimental thinker views the uncertainties of the world as something to be resolved through tentative trial and error.” Try something modest, he says; “an experiment doesn’t need to be a double-blind, randomized controlled trial to yield useful information. If it works, do more of it. Many of the decisions we make are reversible. Only our stubbornness makes them
permanent.”
Close the Loop
Showing gratitude has a close relationship with luck, says Seelig. “You need to understand that everyone who helps you on your journey is playing a huge role in getting you to your goals. And if you don’t show appreciation, not only are you not closing the loop, but you’re missing an opportunity.”
“In 2018, we were given the opportunity to print shirts for a player on the Philadelphia Eagles,” says Alicia Borromeo of Logowear House. “That year, they made it to the post season, so he wanted to launch shirt designs for people to wear to the games leading up to the Super Bowl. The shirts sold throughout the post season, giving us a huge boost in the slow months of January and February. From a marketing standpoint, it was great to show off a big project like this. It kept us relevant and part of the community. But ultimately, ‘lucky’ moments like this are usually just one-offs, and not something that can lead to lasting growth. Retaining steady, reliable, and loyal customers is the only true way to grow. It’s important for us to foster the relationships we have and let long-term customers know they are appreciated.”
Luck, the Silent Business Partner
By Matt Pierrot
Owner, GetBOLD – Tshirt Printing and Embroidery
About 10 years into running my screen printing business, someone approached me with an offer out of the blue. At the time, I was 40 years old, I was burned out, and I was tired of being pulled in 10 different directions. The offer seemed like a golden ticket. I asked for the offer on paper and then took it to my accountant, Henry, to review. We dug into the proposal over lunch.
“Do you want my professional opinion as an accountant, or do you want the advice I would give to a friend?”
This was not the question I expected the conversation to lead with, so I chose “friend.”
“Look,” he said, “you have a great business here. It makes money. You have no idea how many businesses don’t make money. It’s growing and it’s viable and you’re still young. If you sell it, you will still need a job, so what will you do? Go work for someone? Not likely. Start a new one? Probably.”
“Now, let me give you a dose of reality on that idea. Entrepreneurs think that because they build one successful business, they can build another. Maybe they can, but a lot of the time they can’t. What is the difference the second time around? Two reasons, usually. The first is when you’re young and poor, you fix problems with sweat and hard work, and when you’re older and you have some money, you will try and fix those problems with money. The two offer very different results.
The second reason, and possibly the more important one, is luck. When you built this business, you had a lot of luck. Some of that luck you aren’t even aware of. You had the right idea at the right time, not just for the market, but for you, personally. And then you happened to find the right general manager, you happened to find the right location, you happened to find the right customers. Heck, the Canucks happened into a playoff run that I know dropped a lot of money in your lap at a time when you really needed it. Plus, you happened to start at a time when another large shop in town closed its doors due to fire. There are a lot of lucky moments that add up to you being able to build success.
Don’t treat this lightly. This success is rare. Sure, your hard work and brilliance can take credit for a lot of it, but lurking back there in the shadows is a heaping dose of luck. So, if you don’t like running this business as it is, then fix it. Don’t sell it. Find out what you don’t like and change it. Hire help. Get a business coach to sort out the burn out. If you’re bored, then add a new piece, like embroidery (which we did) and give yourself a new challenge. Do something to embrace your luck and hard work. Don’t throw it out and try and make it again. At best, you will build a whole new business to end up right where you are now. At worst, you will be older and broke.”
I admit those words were a bit of a punch to my ego, but I took his advice, turned down the offer, and made a lot of changes. Now, as I look back at 23 years of running this business, I think I am more willing to credit luck with being part of my success than I used to, and with that, I think one of my luckiest moments was when I hired Henry as my accountant.
Chris Burslem is Group Managing Editor at SmartWork Media.
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LET’S TALK About It: Part 3 discusses how four screen printers have employed people with disabilities, why you should consider doing the same, the resources that are available, and more. Watch the live webinar, held August 16, moderated by Adrienne Palmer, editor-in-chief, Screen Printing magazine, with panelists Ali Banholzer, Amber Massey, Ryan Moor, and Jed Seifert. The multi-part series is hosted exclusively by ROQ.US and U.N.I.T.E Together. Let’s Talk About It: Part 1 focused on Black, female screen printers and can be watched here; Part 2 focused on the LGBTQ+ community and can be watched here.
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