What happens when both you and your wife lose your jobs and also find out that you are expecting your first child? Naturally, you start a business and work both hard and fast to grow your new company.
That’s how today’s guest Jonathan Tynes with Kick Print, started out with his shop. Since then, he and his wife Danielle have continually evolved their entrepreneurial journey.
On today’s Success Stories podcast, we’ll learn all about starting and evolving your business, to processes, to time management, all the while working with your wife as your business partner.
It is going to be a fantastic show and one that you won’t want to miss.
What happens when both you and your wife lose your jobs and also find out that you are expecting your first child? Naturally, you start a business and work both hard and fast to grow your new company.
That’s how today’s guest Jonathan Tynes with Kick Print, started out with his shop. Since then, he and his wife Danielle have continually evolved their entrepreneurial journey.
On today’s Success Stories podcast, we’ll learn all about starting and evolving your business, to processes, to time management, all the while working with your wife as your business partner.
It is going to be a fantastic show and one that you won’t want to miss.
Marshall Atkinson
What happens when both you and your wife lose your jobs and also find out that you were expecting your first child. Naturally, you start a business and work both hard and fast to grow your new company. That's how today's guest, Jonathan times with kick print, started out with his shop. Since then he and his wife Danielle, have continually evolved their entrepreneurial journey. On today's Success Stories podcast, learn all about starting and evolving your business, to processes to time management, all the while working with your wife as your business partner. It's going to be a fantastic show, and one that you won't want to miss. So Jonathan, welcome to the Success Stories podcast.
Jonathan Tynes
All right. Thanks for having me. And thanks for the awesome intro.
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, and we've known each other for quite a while. And it's so fun to do a project together like this. I can't wait to dig in.
Jonathan Tynes
Me either. I'm excited. And you've been awesome guide to a lot of things in my career. And it's been a lot of fun. Just watching you grow, and let's grow together. So let's do this. I'm ready when you are.
Marshall Atkinson
Alright. Well, here's question one. So let's begin the episode today by discussing your entrepreneurial journey, talk about the evolution of kick print, and then also how that feeds into your new business. snow monster, which, of course, is not doing anything with apparel decoration,
Jonathan Tynes
it's totally different. The entrepreneurial journey of how basically and how these feet together is kind of interesting. You know, kick print is custom apparel on T shirts, which is you know, where this podcast is focused on. That's where we got started. And then snow monster is like a New Orleans style snowball stand and sounds like two totally different worlds. And it sort of is, but understanding like our entrepreneurial journey and how that tied together and how really, once we understood like the fundamentals of running a business, it kind of helped grow both of these and how they cross pollinate, which is really interesting. So long story short, we started our business in our garage and was running everything manual presses. And for quite some time for probably about a year, I was only selling things, what I could do, which was very limited with a manual press. And then I started desiring to grow more and more and have more revenue. So we've sold bigger and bigger jobs. And that actually broke us down, we had issues where like I sold a 2500 piece job on a manual press in my garage, like the guy that was helping me print at the time, I think he'd like hurt his wrist and his forearm as muscle was boosted. Now he heard it had to go, I guess get surgery or something. It's been about seven or eight years now. But I ended up having to do it. And while I was printing these 2500 shirts, I got an order for 2000 shirts at the same time. And another order for 1000 shirts, that was six color front six color back six color both sleeves. Yeah, phenomenal amount of work. So at that point, I had two choices, one, outsource the work. Number two, turn down the work and turning down the work, I just couldn't fathom turning down 1000s of dollars. And so that's when I discovered, you know, bringing on people to help you out. Doesn't mean that you lose control of everything. And that was probably my first encounter of contract and subcontracting print job out. It went flawlessly for the most part didn't have any issues with that. So that's where, you know, we kind of realized like, in order to grow, it's okay to use other people, not just your employees use other shops. But the other thing that was really big in that is during that time when I started struggling like now that I could broker and outsource we had this huge capacity. And so how do you fill that capacity in that demand? You have to have what's called sales velocity, which is somebody interested in your product, and then buying and then moving them through that pipeline faster. And what we realized is that basically sending people to a catalog or sending people saying, hey, what do you want, we have to get people to figure out what they want, and then sell them what they need. And I call this the chocolate covered carrot. Everybody wants to eat chocolate, but they need to eat carrots. So we give them the chocolate covered carrot. And so we do that by asking questions, getting them to understand what they want, and then helping them make a decision faster. The reason how these kind of tied together is we know with kick print, if you're in the custom apparel industry, there's like 1000 different garments you can sell if you open up promotional products That's a whole different can of worms with like 100,000 different options. So you have to curate things offer people the ability to say, hey, we can print on 20, we can print 100,000 different things. But these are the curated ones for your industry. And people typically don't like to make a bad decision, they want to make a good decision. And so oftentimes, they'll make the decision off of your suggestion. Every once in awhile, you'll get somebody that wants to do the research themselves and find a unique product. But most of the time, they don't how this ties in with snow monster is we started out with 50 flavors, it's actually grown since then. 50 flavors is a lot for here in Missouri, it is almost nothing compared to what you get in New Orleans, like there's like two or 300 flavors. And people don't have decision paralysis because it's normal. Here. It actually paralyze people, we had people coming to the menu, not knowing what to buy, and some of them just leaving because it was too intimidating. Realizing that we took the same concept with kick print, where we would bundle products. And even though we can sell 1000 different shirts, we've doubt it down to about 25 shirts, we call our top 25. And that's what we sell 80% of the time. So we did the same thing with snow monster we basically let we drew people in here's what's interesting is, hey, we have 50 flavors, we have unlimited concoctions that was like our marketing for snow monster. But how we got people to make the decision is had suggested concoctions and then Deal of the Week. And we found that most of our sales were from the suggestions. And so we just wrote a little script out and gave it to our cashier. Like you wouldn't think of giving a script to a cashier. But we did and said ask these questions and then make suggestions. And the questions were well, I don't know what to get. I'm overwhelmed. So what do you like? Do you like take flavors, fruit flavors, or sour flavors? Oh, I like fruit flavors. Great. Do you like pineapple? Or do you like orange be like watermelon. I like watermelon great. I suggest the watermelon and maybe pineapple with cream and ice cream. And they would make the suggestions of the toppings that would build value and make the price of the snowball go up. And that's when we saw a massive increase in sales. So bundling things together. Also, I've always heard don't sell products sell offers. And in short terms for those you wonder what that means a product was just like, hey, here's t shirt, hey, you're just snowball. And offer is here is something grouped together that's special. And it's at a limited time. And that's really what an offer is. So we basically did that. We've done that with kick print many times, hey, we got a t shirt with a free banner and stickers, our free graphic design, and it's 10% off. And it's it's Friday, that would be an offer was snowballs, we did the same thing like basically group these flavors and toppings together. And it ends Monday and I'll never come back ever again. When we basically told people, this is never going to come back. Or if it does, it's going to be a long time from now. People would just rush in order it whether they like it or not. And it was this FOMO effect. That was kind of interesting. That's been the way that I think the biggest thing the entrepreneurial journey is like you know, we've ran kick print for eight years and we just randomly started snow monster it actually came about because we had some people heat press and force that needed more hours. So we thought oh for snow cone, Stan, they'll run that half the time they'll run the you know, heat press some T shirts half the time. And that is not what happened. Like we ended up with 15 employees a whole separate building. Three, we have two units, commissaries, we got three buildings now, it's no monster. And I mean, it's only been open for six months. So it's ridiculous. But all that really changed in that was we took the processes that we learned in kick prints, which is as far as sales, making it easier for people to make the decisions but given the option to customize, and that's really what you have to understand is just because someone can order anything you need to kind of have that's why you know, McDonald's and all these places they have combo deals. You can get lots of things ala carte went to a barbecue restaurant recently and everything was ala carte, and nothing was bundled together and I got so confused. I ended up overspending. I accidentally ordered a bunch of stuff I didn't need had way too much food I left very frustrated. And then I didn't go back for like two years. And then when I went back they had added just a handful of things on the menu. And I literally ordered Oh, I'll take a number three. So making that most people don't think of that in terms of screen printing building packages, and then suggesting when people go hey, I want some T shirts. Well, what industry are you and go your lawn care guy will see a lot of people doing some Gildan shirts, we might want to upgrade to this shirt if you like it like this some signs some postcards and door hangers to hang on the doors of the neighbors and then some magnet signs for your truck. That's a package deal. Do you want to send the package deal, or you want to just kind of just start from scratch, and a lot of times people go, yeah, give me the see the package, you know, and that's really all you're doing. So you're just bundling products, making people's decision process easier. And that's how we've kind of used the same model for both businesses, that's really helped and both sides.
Marshall Atkinson
And this reminds me of a quote from Seth Godin, which is, don't try to find customers for your product, find products for your customers, that's
Jonathan Tynes
good. That's very good.
Marshall Atkinson
And that way, that's how you build success is by engineering things that you know, people are gonna like, and I really liked that idea. And I like what you're doing. And I think you're very smart about it. And really, what's amazing to me is how you've learned through your entrepreneur journey about how business should work and employees and products and all that, and you're taking that and moving it into a completely different area with a snow cone idea. And in realizing that a lot of that is all the same. That's the sweet spot, I think it's just finding out what you're good at, and then hiring people to do the work for you. And letting them you know, giving them some guardrails and processes procedures, and then get out of their way,
Jonathan Tynes
I think is very important, because to understand the fundamentals of business, and understanding, like, hey, that you could copy this process with lots of businesses, because there's a lot of anxiety floating around with entrepreneurs right now of what if they go out of business? Or what if inflation pushes them out? The fact is, is now we actually did snow monsters and experiment. And we were totally fine with losing 100% of our investment, we went into it, not really thinking to turn it into a business, it was literally a side venture. And one reason why we did it was like I kind of realized, like, time has taken away, I've sat on snow monster for five years, me and Danielle did believe it or not. And there's a lot of things recently that we were thinking about doing. And then we didn't do and then someone else did. And I realized like, it's now or never like we need to just do it. If it succeeds, we'll deal with the success if it flops, then we learn something, we had some fun. So we set some ground rules before we launch that snow monster could not take away from the primary business, which is kicked pregnant, and it could not invade our lives and take away from our children. So that means that we can't be the ones always running it, we have to balance both businesses and build processes for those. The reason why I say that is because a lot business owners right now are nervous. Like if they just have a slow day or slow week or slow month. I mean, they're literally having a hard time sleeping medication because of massive anxiety. When you want you realize like, hey, get the fundamentals down. And if your screenprint business or your snow cone business, whatever business you have, doesn't work out or gets impacted by the economy, you could take those fundamentals and pretty much carbon, copy it. And since doing the second business, I don't recommend doing a second business for everyone because it can if you allow it consume and destroy the primary business, but the thing that it's taught me is like I could literally go into pretty much any industry and carbon copy and within six months have a successful business because basically we ground tested a lot is there probably some industries, obviously that this is some of these fundamentals won't work. But if you're selling a product to consumers without a lot of red tape, then this would work. So I could literally if this doesn't work, I could turn around sell Cajun food, hey, you know I can turn on sell food item or whatever. And I think another thing too is you have to mark it being totally different not as improvement or less. The thing that we did was snow monster as we market it as if it was something that was never done before. Reality is there's like four snow cone stand. So we decided not to call it snow cones. We it is and it's snow balls. snowballs and snow cones are like tacos and street tacos. They're very similar. So having to market that massively different is what piqued everyone's curiosity. It got us on the news. We went extremely viral here locally. And it it actually crushed us to the point of not being able to really handle the volume, like we had two hour and 10 minute wait times for smoke. I wouldn't wait for a prime rate for two hours. But people were you know, so. But yeah, I mean, I think once you get this set of rules, and you get kind of a playbook, you can take this, you don't have to have as much anxiety, you're willing to take more risk in your business. Because if it fails, oftentimes it's not the end of the world if something fails. And that's what people have to understand. You have to understand if your business fails, you are not done, you're not going to be homeless, you know, you are going to be able to pick up and move on and grow from that. And that's what you people's got to understand. Like, take the risk, do it now because you're gonna one day not be able to do that. So that's really kind of what I'd say the biggest thing I've taken from that.
Marshall Atkinson
So Jonathan to make any business work, you need processes to do the heavy lifting. And we've kind of talked about that a little bit. But over time you create and build processes that allow you to accelerate your business growth. Can you talk about a few other processes that you think have made a significant impact on what you were doing?
Jonathan Tynes
Yeah, absolutely. I think that a process for everything, I do think you can get a little bit too much into it. Like you can dissect it down to where, you know, it's too detailed. But you need an overall SOP standard operating procedure, or process, plus a script, I read something the other day, I can't remember the guys name. His name was Alex does like this gym stuff, you probably know who I'm talking about. He's a, he's phenomenal new entrepreneur that just are following on Twitter. He said the other day, if you want your business to grow, and grow at scale, get your whole company to stick to the script. And I didn't quite understand really what that meant. And then I realized, like, oh, that means everybody needs to do it the same way. Therefore, if it changes, or it's breaking down, it's not the person, it's the process. And so it kicked print, I have been obsessing for the last like year and a half to build this business as if I was going to sell it. Not that I intend to sell it. But as if I could be like, what is the permissions? What is SOP? So we built out a monday.com board. That is literally a process for everything, like literally anyone could walk in here, and know exactly what temperature to press something at like everything is even down to calling out mesh counts. Even if we are outsourcing it, we sort of know what those are based off of what we've done. And so there's an SOP for everything. The biggest thing is internal operations, and the sales process, figuring out where the customer is in the buyers journey, and then what steps need to be taken, I think the biggest one that's been the most effective for us, is basically we have Imagine your customer, you have a prospect, you have a lead, you have someone who's qualified lead, meaning that just because they're interested in business with you, doesn't mean they need to be your customer. So you get on the phone with them qualify them, then they're qualified and you're proven and quoting each of the steps that you're in need to have a when they are a lead. How do you make them a qualified lead when they're a qualified lead? How do you then go to proofing and quoting, when you're proofing and quoting, how do you get them to where they've given you sizes, and they're waiting on an invoice? Once they pay the invoice, and you mark them as one and it's sent to production? Blah, blah, blah? What do you do next? So we built out post order workflow, for example. And there's a team for every stage kick right now. So when it's a prospect, there's a team that does outbound prospecting, there's a team that qualifies leads, there's a team that now builds presentations, and it's literally written down. And you don't have to overcomplicate you don't need all these different software's to do it, just you know, if you want to simplify it down, build a folder and drive and add a document and just make it three or four pages, and just say a summary at the top and then break down the steps. And that's really all you need. You don't really need a lot people get hung up in the details of like, oh, what software and this and this and this, you just need a process and you need if you can't hand a guide to someone and say, Hey, in 90 days, I need you to make sales. Well, you don't need to learn what is in the ingredients of plastisol ink in order to sell a t shirt. You know, that's the thing is we get so deep in the process. People want an image on their shirt. How do you get them in the sales process into that? So basically what we've done, this was very uncomfortable for me, I'm very good at shooting from the hip. Like I don't have a script for this podcast, I looked over the questions knew the answers and got hopped on with you. But then I realized that that's not how my team operates. And so we started obsessing over scripts, and how to format those bold and underline and stuff like that, so that people could read them while they're talking to someone on the phone. And that's been a very hard process. But we have scripted out a lot of things. Most things is scripted. But then we became very robotic, like everything was the same. And so we had to figure out how to inject personality. And so once we realize, for example, one of our scripts says, Hey Marshall, and then insert something about Marshall that you know, well in our CRMs we have notes. Hey, I noticed that Marshall is a Florida State fan despite the fact that I'm an LSU fan. So let's poke fun and --
Marshall Atkinson
Hey, oh, so sorry about that game. You must have been crying.
Jonathan Tynes
Thankfully, I didn't watch it. But I did see a lot of Mad southern people. So A lot of happy Florida people. So I figure it was a good, it was a good deal. But that's just a note like that you do. It's very good to keep good notes about your customers have a good CRM, if you need help setting that up, you know, shoot me an email, I'll give you my info and I can help you figure out how to set some some of this stuff up. It's not really all that hard. The main thing is, is every step the customers that a lot of times I think, people we get hung up in the product, like the t shirt, where's the t shirt at in the production process? Well, that's post sale. So you got to break it down to sales and production, and then have steps for each one. I think that's the main thing is where's your customer at in the buying process that sales? Where's the t shirt at? Or where's the product at in the manufacturing process? That's production. And I think we get so hung up in where the shirt is, we didn't even give a crap where the customer is. So that's just what the SOPs, we built out steps. When did they call like, let me give you an example, an overview of our post order workflow. As soon as they place an order, they are sent a handwritten customized postcard. The fun thing is, it's all done through AI. None of it is actually handwritten. The pictures are customized to them. The front and the back of the postcard is handwritten. And it's shipped. I mean, instantly, as soon as they placed the order, that trigger fires off. And my virtual assistant just looks over it makes sure it's correct. So we don't want to send someone, hey, thanks for ordering T shirts, and they didn't order they ordered custom pop sockets or something like that. So that fires off, then after the order has landed, we then send them a How did you like your order what we have done differently, if anything, and then we get feedback at that point. And then it fires off another request two weeks later, asking them for a review on Google and Facebook, if they've already reviewed, we have that in our CRM, we don't ask them for that, then we ask them two weeks later, for referrals, we ask them for three, and we offer them gift cards for every person they refer. Therefore, we turn in one customer into two customers, that post order workflow has done it has put 10s of 1000s of dollars in our business just doing that. That's just a small example of what an SOP is.
Marshall Atkinson
I love it. I love it. And, you know, it's been said that there are three aspects to every sale, right? It's the current, you know, whatever the thing is, right? There's the referral. And then there is the expanded sale, which is the what's next. Right? They just ordered whatever, coming up for them a month or six months or whatever, if there's another sales opportunity. So what is that?
Jonathan Tynes
Oh, that reminds me on the on the post order workflow, there is one step that ties into that Marshall, we actually offer them an immediate $50 off a reorder the same day they order. And we say it expires in a week and with someone just spent money, the best time to get them to buy is now because they in the buying mindset. As soon as they close that gate, that gate doesn't close for a little while. So if you want to sell people upsell, do it immediately after they buy, not right before they pay their invoice. The reason why is because one, you're going to derail the t shirt project or derail the main job with koozies and shirts. But if you're going to like bump your let's say you want to bump your T shirt or orders with pins, koozies stickers, a lot of times we go, Hey, thank you so much for placing your order we're giving you $50 off, and then we actually explain go win. Now you're probably wondering Marshall, why we're giving you $50 off an order when you just placed an order, say well, we want to help you grow your business. So we make it all about them not about how great we are. And say we know you're a smart person, we know you like to take advantage of good opportunities, we're gonna give you this opportunity to grow your business, but we're not gonna leave you empty handed, we're gonna give you 50 bucks off, or it's 10% off up to 50 bucks. But here's the real kicker is when you give people discounts. I see a lot of people giving 10% 20% People don't know what the value of that is. They don't even know what it cost. Like I've seen a deal the other day it's like 20% off patios. I'm like, Well, what is the patio cost, like 40 grand or 10 grand or five grand, but if it's at $500 off your patio, that's an intrinsic value. So what we did was is we show a $50 bill, and we send them a $50 bill in the email, and then we explain what is in the $50 bill seeing that $50 bill. It's like oh, man, give me 50 bucks. Just like Kohl's cash. I got the idea from Kohl's cash. The Kohl's will send my wife freakin Kohl's cash and then we end up going to Kohl's to spend $10 And I'm offering her $100 to stay at home and not go to Kohl's but that concept works it gets people showing up and spending money so that's yeah.
Marshall Atkinson
That's good. And are you a pay 100% of the invoice upfront guy?
Jonathan Tynes
Yes. If we can't be done, I actually only have Have one net 30 customer. And it's because unless someone signals to us that they will never do business with us, or if they have to pay up front, then everybody's paid up front, we've taken $32,000 That's, you know, upfront from a customer that paid 100% up front. If a customer requests the net 30 We always rebuttal with 5050 Do we try to negotiate our way out of that? To cut down cashflow issues? I have one customer, I know him personally. And basically, we worked with them, we did like seven jobs for them big contracting company, same thing every three or four months. So it's easy recurring money, and they had a shift in the billing department. And he's like, hey, you know, we can't be prepaying and putting stuff on credit cards. It has to be so they asked for net 30 rebuttal with a net seven. And I said I need a net seven. I thought they would get mad at that. They complied. So as a given that seven and it starts when you cut the purchase order, not when you receive the goods? Deal. Deal? Yeah. So there's been times where we got paid the check for even order the shirts, you know, so that's the only customer I do that with that we honestly just assume the sale and free we don't explain it. I mean, people are buying stuff on Amazon, they're not net 30 Amazon, so they're really just move forward with the sales process as if they know they have to prepay. And then when they ask the question, almost sound shock like, Oh, you were expecting to pay after you got the goods? Oh, okay. Sorry, I didn't think to you know, I didn't know that would be a concern. Yeah, we require 100% payment upfront, and just shut up and leave it at that you don't have to explain and what we do this because of this and this and that makes you sound untrustworthy, just say it and then be done. And that's it.
Marshall Atkinson
Like what you hear so far, be sure to subscribe so you can get the latest from Success Stories. And now here's Devin Freet. With the S&S Spotlight.
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Marshall Atkinson
So many business owners that I speak with Jonathan do not have a good grasp on their time management, they're usually caught doing the wrong tasks or not prioritizing their time like they should, and especially the owners to get caught into doing all these things you know, you shouldn't be doing. So I know that you have specific ideas on this. So can you elaborate on how you not only prioritize your time, but manage the chaos of being a business owner?
Jonathan Tynes
Yeah, this is a really big one very big one. Because a lot of business owners think they own a business, when in reality, the business owns them. And they don't realize that. So I build this around three reasons. Why do entrepreneurs start businesses to begin with number one, to hopefully make more money to to, because they're passionate about what they do. And number three, to get more time and more freedom? Well, if you're not making money, you hate what you do. And you're there all the time, you would be better to sell your business, liquidate your assets and go get a job, you actually would probably have a better quality of life, we get so hung up on working for ourselves that we don't realize our kids are growing up, our kids are young gonna be little one time. And once your kids grow up, it's it, they're grown. And so that's been a realization. To me, another thing is segmenting your time down, understanding the reality of time. Let me give an example. What I mean by that. I heard this the other day. This isn't original to me, I'd love to claim it. But I do think of it now, as something I think of constantly. My parents live in Mississippi on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana. I see them three or four times a year. And so my parents are in their 60s if they live another 10 years. I basically in my minds, you know, you think of it well, I have 10 years with my parents, I hope they live longer in 10 years. But in reality, I don't get to see them every day, in 10 years. I see them two or three times a year. So in reality, I've got 30 more visits with my parents. And when you think of that, and segment your time down, like hey, my son is seven years old. And then 11 years from now he's gonna be 18 And if he's like me in a free spirit, he's out of here. And I don't like that but that's reality. So I only have 11 Christmases only have 11 summers and when Once you break it down like that, you know, it really doesn't matter that that whiny customer needs 10 shirts and needs a six color front and eight color back. No, you need to prioritize set minimums based off your quality of life. And understand that time is the one thing you cannot get back. But money you can get, literally, we went from a t shirt business to a snow cone business. And to be honest with you, I could easily make snow monster as big or bigger than kick print, just by duplicating the business over and over and over. So I'm telling you this because the way that you prioritize your time, you are not going to prioritize your time, if you don't have an importance of time, if you're just farting around and don't care, or you don't want to be around your kid or you're not aware that your kids are growing up and your parents are dying and you don't have that mortality and your mindset, then you're not going to have urgency. So you need to first of all have urgency and realize that every breath you take is not life. That is one step closer to death. I know that sounds morbid. But once you realize that, then you're gonna have urgency, you're not going to just take crappy orders, you're not just going to spend your time dealing with whiny customers, you're going to take quality customers and build quality systems to compress and maximize time. So the first thing is, the number one factor that we have internally here is I have on our sales board, we have a little all my salespeople remote now. So we don't have anybody in the office anymore. Everybody works from home. So the salespeople do, it says this, "Who can give me the most money the fastest, and with the least amount of friction?" And that is our guiding factor. So if we got a 500 piece, shirt order, that's one color, and they've got the sizes, and we've got a team jersey, but they're the wind easiest, they're the most friction, and it's going to be less profit. So we let people know Hey, letting you know that we are a little backed up, it's going to be until tomorrow before I get back with you. If that's going to be an issue, please let me know I have some recommendations for you. And then we recommend them to our favorite competitor. But I mean, we're not going to talk them see the problem is is there's also in the squeaky wheel gets the grease problem is, is you're spending all of your day greasing squeaky wheels, and not fueling the engine of your car. And money is the thing that makes the world go around whether you like it or not. If you're not making money doing what you do, and you're not being profitable with it, then you could be better off right now working, you can work from home for 30 $40 An hour right now. So like it's like literally is time to work for someone else. If you really aren't making money, enjoy what you do and have free time. So if you don't have those three things you maybe should consider, do you really need to be an entrepreneur later in life, are you going to be like I own my own business, or you're gonna be like, I wish I spent more time with my kids when they were little, and talk to my parents more and vacation a little more, you're not going to care that you spent 80 hours in the shop. So who can give me the most money the fastest with the least friction. That's what we go after. And we do sometimes piss people off, because we put them on the back burner. But I caught my salespeople talking to somebody who wanted 10 shirts, you know, and wanted them yesterday. And then I had someone email me the other day. And it was just a while back. But they had 1000 employees had a $30 per employee budget. That's a big break in order. I was like, Why is this person, not the number one call that is made, and they're ready to rock and roll right now. And we're sitting here talking to Little League teams. And I was I hit the roof. And so sometimes you do have to jump in on your team because the squeaky wheel gets the grease sometimes, because people are afraid of those people that's mining, I'm sorry, but the customer is not always right. I mean, it has its place. It's not the case anymore. You have to prioritize your time or you're going to be spinning your wheels.
Marshall Atkinson
So this all comes down to really educating your staff on what should be a priority. Because we can always make another dollar but we can't make another minute. And absolutely what do we need to be working on right now? And I can tell you because you know me I talk to a gazillion people a week that a lot of people they tell me all the time, Jonathan, I just don't have time for this. I just don't have time for this. And I always correct them. I go no, you have the time. It's just not a priority for you. Right? Yeah. And you'd be shocked right now without only calls that I've had where the shop owner they don't have any sales and they're not doing well and things are all upside down. And I'll go Hey, tell me describe to me the sales actions and processes that you did yesterday. What did you do? How many calls did you make what did you do? Whatever, you know, whatever you did lay it out for me. And they'll go, well, we didn't really do anything, I was too busy burning screens. And I go, Well, you know why you have a sales problem is because you don't have any sales actions, you're not doing anything that's going to cause the sales process to move forward. Because you're just sitting there stuck in the mud, complaining that you don't have any sales.
Jonathan Tynes
In most times it's because they're honestly afraid of sales, I've did it myself, or done it myself, whatever is the correct way to say that. But I've done that before, where I would go to the shop or get in the grind. And I would be doing something that you know, an employee should be doing. And once I realized, like, Hey, this is how you need to value yourself. And you asked yourself this question. If you got sick right now. And you needed to hire someone to run your company, and they ran it exactly how you run it, how much would you have to pay them? You know, once I realized that I stopped doing things that I could hire employees for. And I started empowering employees, you don't need to be doing $12 An hour task. If you would have to hire someone replace you $250,000 A year you didn't do $150,000 A year task. And then you need to divide that up by an hourly timeframe and say, how much would you be paying yourself per hour and 40 hour week. And then if you're not making $200 an hour, then you don't need to deal with it. And so I've literally, we now have an EHR, which is an effective hourly rate is what we call it. And that's what it's called, not what we call it, but we then break it down. And I have my sales manager saying, hey, how does this impact our EHR? And at first, they're like, Well, what does that matter? as well? You know, are you willing to work past 430? Tonight to 530 to make up for wasting time on this 10 piece order? No. Okay, well, then, basically, we have X amount of time to make our money. And so you need to compress that with jobs. Now, if you don't have leads coming in, and you have to solve that I can help you, you know, need some help with that reach out to me, but you have to get acquisition first. But you know, you don't have a system for acquisition and a system for follow up and a system for postorder follow up, you're going to be chasing discounting your product frantically, one month, and the next month, claiming that you're slammed. And if you have that problem where you're like, we're gonna go out and then literally 30 days later, you're posting now hiring ads, that is a symptom that you don't have systems, that is a symptom of a bigger problem, that you do not have a systematic business, that you have a reactionary business, and you may very well not be in business long if you don't build systems. And that should be the bigger sign. And that's what really open to me everyone gets hung up on brokering or printing in house so that the sales process is the same. I would say this, if you print in house or you broker, you should always unless your contract printer, but if you're doing direct to sales, you should always act as if you, like sell it as if you were outsourcing and here's why. Because life happens if a bus runs through your shop or something explodes and burns your shop to the ground. You don't need to be out of business. You just simply outsource your stuff. You know, you have to think in terms of what happens in life. So I think the big thing going back to that is like with sales, a lot of people just don't want to make sales calls. They're afraid of hearing a customer's voice, you know, get past that.
Marshall Atkinson
You're afraid of the "no", Jonathan, that's the problem. Yeah, I hate to say somebody saying no. And to me, no, is a good thing. Because no, usually could mean No, and you have to waste your time with them ever again. But it could also mean not right now. Like you can't really sell hoodies in July. Right? Because it's like 9 million degrees. Right. So. So it's like one of these things where, you know, what would it take or kind of call you back? Or you're forgetting more information. And, you know, Nelson Mandela had a really great quote, which is, I never lose, I either learn or win. Right? And by getting that no, that helps you figure out what you need to do to get to the US, right? And that's in every sales Bible ever.
Jonathan Tynes
So yeah, absolutely. Just don't be afraid of that. No. And here's the thing, the more you do those intimidating sales calls, the more you're gonna be calloused over the No, you know, with me, my my wife just started doing like MMA. And I was extremely intimidated and scared I just kept showing up, kept showing up. I'm still very new. I'm still a white belt. But you know, I'm not as scared like I'm now you know, sparring and live with guys bigger than me and more experienced and doesn't scare me when, a few weeks ago that would scare me to death. So, you know, doing things more often probably reason why you're afraid to make sales calls because you don't make sales calls, pick up the phone, make sales calls, and then listen to your customers and they may cuss you out. They may get mad that you're going to hear. But once you face those things and make five or 600 calls, you can easily make another five or 600 calls. And it'd be way easier. So, you know, if your listeners, if you're in the shop, you're sweeping floors and burning screens and stuff, and you got people for that, instead you're doing it, you're doing it because you're hiding, you know, got a shop, going office, make calls, talk to those bigger clients, you'll see your business grow. And it's really not rocket science. That's pretty much it.
Marshall Atkinson
Perfect. Preach it, love it. Lastly, let's focus on your business partner and wife Danielle, how do you guys manage to work with your spouse in the business? So spill the beans and how you guys manage that? Because I don't think I can ever work with my wife. So how are you guys doing that?
Jonathan Tynes
Yeah, that's a loaded one. Well, a few things here. One, he gotta have a mutual respect and enjoy being around them daily. But that is not always the case. Like, you know, most people that know me and Danielle, they see us constantly together rerouted to work together, we work out together, we hunt together, we're always together, we love being around each other. But what people don't see is we do fight, we do disagree. And we do crave time away from each other sometimes. And so understanding that, and having a clear communication has helped the biggest thing to understand, or I'd say the number one factor is respect for each other, and respecting the position in and out of the home. Let me give an example. We first started snowmen, not so much kick print, you know, we had some issues where Daniel was being the boss and I was being the boss and I would go in the shop and she would go in the shop and we'd say different things. And Daniel love to run presses. At times, it was just like Zen and relaxation to her and me, I had a different set of stuff. And so sometimes we would go in and it caused an issue where we had, you can't have two leaders, that's two heads equals a monster. So we had created our own little monster kick print by our employees were very frustrated for a while they're going okay, well Daniel said, do this, you said do that. And we started having really big issues to the point to where either Danielle was gonna go and leave the business, or I was gonna leave the business or the business was gonna shut down. That was That's how bad it got. And then what we did is we basically sat down, I was like, you know, I love you more than anything in the world. How can we make this work? And we realized that we had to have a rolls in, in and out of the home, we can't just go in and just both be the boss. And that's when I decided that I'm the CEO, we decided wasn't me decided we decided I'm the CEO and the boss a kick print. If I make the final call that call stands, if it's financial, I relinquish that to Danielle. And then Daniel asked that if she is dealing with financial stuff, does she not have to talk to the clients that she's making the financial decision for? Let me give an example of say, Hey, I just ran this by my accounting department, we can't approve you for net 30 Well, they're gonna let me talk to them say sorry, they don't don't have a phone line, I can talk to you, I can tell you, it's not gonna happen. She doesn't like that kind of confrontation with clients. So once we figured out, like, literally just said it, and then wrote it down. JTS is the owner, he's gonna run the production, he's gonna run sales. He's ever the final call runs through him. And then I have a sales manager, I had a production manager, we run those, you know, I give them their duties. When they have issues. They don't go to Danielle, they go to me, when it's financial, or like, hey, my paycheck didn't come through Daniel knows all finances and books, once we respected each other in those roles, and have respect like now, a lot of times, like Danielle literally believes in me and thinks that I can do anything in the world. I think that's very powerful. She really thinks that I could do things that I don't believe in myself and vice versa. So that actually is a big thing. Like not, not everybody should work together. And it doesn't mean if you can't work with your spouse that you don't love them and you don't believe him. So I'm not saying that. But I'm saying if you choose to work with your spouse, you're going to have to not look at them as they're an idiot. Because if you think they can't do it, then it is going to come out of your mouth because you spend all of your time at work a lot of your time work and with your spouse. And so when you're never away, the filter leaves and you start really hurting each other whether you realize it or not. So you got to be careful with that.
Marshall Atkinson
Do you have rules like we don't talk about work at home?
Jonathan Tynes
No, we don't because a lot of people do they set those boundaries. You know, if we weren't passionate about what we do, then I think we probably would just be like let's not do that. However, because we talk about it all day long and we just end up not talking about it as much at home when we go home. You know we got a farm house and all that for a reason. We are businesses in town and it's very you know I'm in town type stuff. But when we were at our house, it's chickens and deer and woods, we literally live in the woods, like it is literally in the middle of nowhere. So it's like a different world when we go home. So because of that, that kind of changes the landscape. And we often don't talk about work as much. But you know, if we didn't talk about work at home, if something come up, I'm not going to be like, I only talked about this, but we need to get in cargo work. So we talk about it that, I don't know. So whatever boundaries, like if you start looking at your spouse, you're less attractive them because now they're a business owner or my business partner, and you don't view them as like your mate as much. I think you probably need to set some boundaries, or maybe have the discussion. Your marriage is more important than your business. At least I think so. So I think you need to set those boundaries and be respectful. If it doesn't work out. It doesn't mean you failed as a couple just doesn't work out for some people. For us. It's drawn us closer, growing a business together has we fallen in love way more working together than if we worked apart?
Marshall Atkinson
Because you see another side somebody?
Jonathan Tynes
Well, you know, here's another thing too. So going back to the respect, Danielle is the boss it's no monster because we had been down this road with kick print. It made things way easier with snow monster. So I immediately established Daniels the balls Daniels the ball stick people come to me because I'm the face of it. And I did the marketing for it. But it was actually pretty cool to be like I'm actually don't operate snow monster. I mean, I own it, but I'm not the operator. Can't even really make a good snowball. So you don't want me making snowballs, Daniel gets big into the concoction and creations. Now what I do is I look at the numbers. I know I look at like for example in square it tells you what customers have lapsed, which customers haven't been in six weeks. So I can build an email campaign and shoot out and go, you haven't been here in six weeks. Here's $2 off your order, come back and then I tried to decrease those lapse numbers. But stuff Danielle's not going to do. Like she she doesn't like care about that. She cares about the the operations and the quality and the team. And that's been really big. It's kick print on the boss. And but here's what the reality though. You have to have that like, respect. There's an old saying when I was in ministry full time, just quick story. I was a youth pastor. I was teenager, I jumped up and it was like 70 kids in this building. I guess they weren't worshiping God, how I thought so. So I blasted him and I'm just kind of like being harsh behind the pulpit. And the pastor got up and he was like, Yeah, you know, and he was supported me. And after the event, he called me in his office, and then totally just let me have it. So hold on a second. You just said in front of all of those people. That was right, like you agreed with him. He goes, Yeah, cuz leadership stands with leadership. He's got up to whatever one you're an idiot like you really are, they would have never followed you again. And so once we realized that leadership stands with leadership, and that always stuck with me. You know, if once we realize like, if Danielle calls me a moron, or I say she's an idiot, it's no Masha. You know, I mean, we talk pretty blunt to each other. That might not be how people talk, but we're just pretty hardcore with we just say what's on her mind. But if I were to do that in front of her employees, it's no monster. Do you think they would follow her as well? Probably not. Same thing. So she treats me with respect at Kick Print. And sometimes she would blatantly disagree. And she would pull me aside and go, Hey, I think you need to rethink about this. This is not a wise decision, blah, blah. And then I'll come out and make it look like it was my decision to change my mind versus her go. And well, I don't agree with that. And I think that's the biggest issue is if you have to have that respect, you can't get an argument or you know, in front of your staff and then expect them to take you seriously there has to be a flow of command. Somebody has to be in control. And you have to decide that and if you can't decide that you can't work together, period. Like you can't if you can't figure out who's the boss, then you can't work together. And so kick Trent I run things snow monster, she runs things. The reality is is behind the scenes, we both discuss things, but I make it like someone had to be fired. It's no monster. She goes, Can you fire them? I go, nope. As you said, You're the boss. They're not me. I said, I'm gonna eat you snow cones. I'm gonna come in and you know, half off people and hug and kiss babies. And I'm getting drunk and leaving. I said, but I'll help you run the numbers. I'll make sure that you know, whatever. I said, you know, same thing. It kicked print, I got fired. Somebody got a reprimand I'll do that. And once we set those boundaries, everything. That's really the big thing is respect. If you can't determine who is in control, what's the flow of things? I will tell you this though. Let's just say hypothetically, someone's listening to this. Their husband got a wife in the shop. Okay. And your wife can be a major compass for the heartbeat of your business. It's a great asset. I think it's my competitive edge. Is having Danielle in my corner, believing in me. I'd say this too. This isn't Marriage seminar on this podcast. But I will say this, you know, a lot of times you want to like it's easy to insult the person you live with everyday because you see their weaknesses, learn to see their strengths, because other people see it. And you need to see those strengths. That's something that we have done. I, you know, Danielle does didn't believe in herself very much, you know, it's no monster. And then I started really building her up and me, and she has created things that have caused thousands of people to show up, like, I mean, our first weekend, we told 400 people 500 people showed up, you know, it looked like a concert and a snow cone stand. We had just unreleased, but she created the products. The products made it easy to market, and working together. You know, she told me, Hey, thank you for believing me. And then we kicked her. And I'm like, Thank you for believing in me. I actually have a hard time getting on podcast because I get self conscious AHA sound. And if I sound dumb, or whatever, she's been the biggest person, like you need to get on podcasts, you need to talk like you're good at this. So I think that's a big thing. You have to respect each other. If you don't have that respect, you should definitely not work for each other because you will destroy your marriage.
Marshall Atkinson
That's perfect. And I'm so happy that you came on the podcast today.
Jonathan Tynes
Yeah, me too. Man. It was fun.
Marshall Atkinson
Thank you for sharing your story of success with us today. So what is the best way to contact you? If someone wants to learn more about what you do? Or how you can help
Jonathan Tynes
them? The best way is email, don't call and don't call my office because my team has been trained to push everyone to spam that asked for me. So if you call the office asking for JT and doesn't matter what you say, I have instructed them to not connect you they will then connect you an email if it's important, email goes straight to me and I will respond. JT is what they call me, Jonathan Tynes jt@kickprint.com. And that's it.
Marshall Atkinson
It's all there is doing. Awesome. Well, hey, thanks a lot, Jonathan. Appreciate you, buddy.
Jonathan Tynes
Thank you very much.