Occasionally in business, we have to take a “Leap of Faith” and trust that things will succeed.
That’s the background story with today’s Success Stories podcast guest, Josh Wylie, with IGG Screen Printing and Graphics in El Reno, Oklahoma. It is a family business, and you’ll learn all about how their dedication to doing things the right way has proved to be the winning ticket.
So buckle up, sports fans; this one will be a lot of fun!
Occasionally in business, we have to take a “Leap of Faith” and trust that things will succeed.
That’s the background story with today’s Success Stories podcast guest, Josh Wylie, with IGG Screen Printing and Graphics in El Reno, Oklahoma. It is a family business, and you’ll learn all about how their dedication to doing things the right way has proved to be the winning ticket.
So buckle up, sports fans; this one will be a lot of fun!
Marshall Atkinson
Welcome to Success Stories brought to you by S&S activewear. I'm your host, Marshall Atkinson. And this is the podcast that focuses on what's working so you can have success too. Occasionally in business, we have to take a leap of faith and trust that things will succeed. That's the background story with today's Success Stories podcast guest, Josh Wiley with IGG Screen Printing and Graphics in El Reno, Oklahoma. It is a family business, and you'll learn all about how their dedication to doing things the right way has proved to be the winning ticket for their shop. So buckle up sports fans, this one's gonna be a lot of fun. So Josh, welcome to the Success Stories podcast.
Josh Wylie
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah.
Marshall Atkinson
And let me tell you have a reputation. Your shop has a reputation of doing things the right way. And I know that you didn't just roll out of bed one day, and do how to do things. You guys have been working hard on that, right?
Josh Wylie
Yeah, yeah. As soon as I learned how to screenprint we really started seeking out the best information we could find. One of my first classes was Charlene, that the STA, force, and we literally bought roller frames while we were in the facility and had them delivered back to our shop before I could get back home. So Alan had me with s mesh and roller frames before I ever left sei facility. So it was a high tension from there on out. We really just went from there on and really started following everybody I could find reading everything I could get my hands on making the best of friends with every mentor that would let me sit down and talk with them.
Marshall Atkinson
I love that action. You know, so many people, they talk a good game, you know, and they're the Facebook warriors, right? And they're not like doing the things,
Josh Wylie
right. Yeah, we have a lot of conversations on the trying to switch other shops or roller frames. And they're like, We just can't commit, we just can't commit. But when you talk about the problems they're having, they will commit the roller frames, our problems will go away. They're really good printers. Their frames are just the problem.
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, well, it is screen printing. Yes.
Josh Wylie
That's how we introduce everybody in the shop. Like, I know, there's not as much fun as the rest of them. But this is the most important room in the job.
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, right. Right. All right. So we're gonna probably get into more of that later. So let's start off with the first question here that I have for you, which is really all about your business. So IgG is a family business. So I want to kind of just get the lay of the land, the origin story, right? So talk about the background and the company and maybe your customers a little bit and just kind of the general history of the shop and what you guys have been doing.
Josh Wylie
So me and Vaughn got it to doing embroidery and little heat press and sign jobs. When we first started. And we came in to El Reno. We found out within the first six, eight months that it was really weren't going to make a whole lot of money just doing brewery and signs and heat press. So we got with GSG and bought a small Sidewinder mixing kit and started getting after it. And realize that wasn't for one person, it was really hard to manually screenprint you know, the standard garage setup. We were in a shop, an old mechanic shop, that we had just crammed everything into small Ecotec dryers as fast as it can run, you know, 500 shirts a day on a manual is really all one person can do. And the jobs really started stacking up. And we were just doing as much as we could. At that time, I was still having a lot of surgeries from my accident. So I would print as long as I could. And we would shut down for a couple of months while I'd have surgery. And while I was down, I will read and watch every video and do everything I could to learn to be a better printer. We got so busy. We were doing about $27,000 a year, two years in a row. And we just had no room to expand. We had just maxed that building out. And so Chris and Yvonne decided to sit down with GSG. And then we went ahead and I made friends with lOn. And we sat down and went over how a shop needed to be laid out and what it needed to be to grow where we would like to be where we wouldn't need to be to make money on that size of shop. And we kind of took a huge leap of faith between Chris Yvonne and Casey to invest in an auto a dryer and get it going. So we decided to make that side of the shop and this took about a year to get that going. So we went ahead and bought a coder and I image in the small shop and crammed it in the tie This whole you could get in when the installer came in. He's like, Are you sure we're in the right shop for coder and I image and I was like, Yeah, we're good man. Come on in. So we figured out how to get all that going first, because if you can't feed the beast, there's really no reason and having a beast. So we got with it, I followed Mark Coudray around the country, show after show begging to get into the catalyst program. And he gave me a pretty good run around until he was like, Alright, I'm gonna let you and He won't leave me alone, because he let me in. And I just pretty much ate it up and spend every day I could at 5am doing his work first, and then running the company in the afternoon. And we literally added $200,000 worth of business. The first year, we had an automatic press ready to go.
Marshall Atkinson
Right. So you went from 27,000 a year to over a quarter of a million dollars a year, that's 10 times the growth in one year by focusing on the correct customers with the correct workflow processes. Yes, yes. And your company is owned by your wife's parents, correct?
Josh Wylie
Yes. And Yvonne? Yes. Right. Just want to
Marshall Atkinson
let people know who Christian Yvonne. Casey is awesome, too. She's watching. Let's not let her out
Josh Wylie
of the picture, too. Right. So he runs the sales and force side of the place. And if without her, I would have to deal with customers. And I don't do that much anymore.
Marshall Atkinson
Right, right. Well, everybody, it's important that I think here that everybody has their correct role. Yeah. Because we can't all do it ourselves now. And would you agree that a big problem we have, especially with startups, is that you have people wear so many hats, they can't get anything done. And then as soon as you start getting more people to focus on one direction, sales, production, you know, whatever, that that's when you really take off is because you can focus on one type of work and really make that the best, don't you think?
Josh Wylie
Yeah, once you can really trust the person you're sending that workout to frees you up and frees your conscience up, you're not sitting there working on it in the back of your mind, you just send the work to that department. No, it's getting done. And it's going to come out on time, it was really hard for me to step away, it's still hard for me to step away, I still have my fingers on a lot of things. And we're training as fast as possible to get me out. When I'm working on the business and not in the business, we do a ton better on our end, building out Printavo and building out automations building out our contract work, very, very big flow, I can fix bottlenecks that happen, I can fix production problems, and I'm not stuck in a department have to tell them to wait until I get done with production in that department to go fix their problem. I'm free immediately to go fix those problems that are stagnant right now growth of where we're at. And this small family business is training everybody to take care of their own department. And that's our biggest hurdle as a small company is each new department to handle something we used to do as a family.
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah. And so that first year growth when you got all the equipment and did all that miraculous stuff. How long ago was that?
Josh Wylie
That was in what? 2018 2018
Marshall Atkinson
So not too long ago. And where are you guys now?
Josh Wylie
Right now? We're probably gonna do 900,000 to a million dollars this year.
Marshall Atkinson
Okay, so you went from $27,000 a year to close to a million dollars a year? In about five years? Yes, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. So there's a lot of people out there listening right now. They love that type of growth. So when you're growing like that rates, what are the landmines that have popped up for you that you wouldn't remotely considered?
Josh Wylie
Oh, the logistics of moving the garments through the shop, the receivables, controlling the KPI
Marshall Atkinson
speaking my language there, Josh.
Josh Wylie
Turning the cash flow of how we've always ran a business of other former Christina Vaughn came from cash flow was never really a problem. But here, your money's tied up. So when we moved to 100% cash up front that helped our cash flow a lot. But we were sitting on big jobs. You know, when you see that, oh, man, I got a $13,000 order, but they only made a $6,000 deposit. And it takes them two months to come pay you for the rest of it. That's a lot of your profit tied up because all you did was cover your consumables. So we made some really how to check stuff in and how to build out software to make it user friendly for our whole shop, how to get the right amount of data coming in ask enough questions from the customers. And as soon as you stop asking questions to the customer, you're going to make a mistake. As you guess Do you expect the art department to understand what you were thinking, the logistics sides of things that you don't see as you grow. And I thought along days, you're recovering the timeframe to make meet the deadlines. So it was a lot of 16 hour days, 14 hour day. And it's just a life of love that, you know, trust the process, you're headed down the right path, you've just got to fix the problems as you go.
Marshall Atkinson
Right? And let me tell you, you're this is an audio thing. I'm over here shaking my head up and down. Yes, you're saying, and I love it, you know, and so the my focus and specialty has always been workflow, right? It's getting things through the pipe, you know, with as less friction as possible. And I think the thing that you've learned, right, and you've come to appreciate, is that the preparation determines your outcome. So if you start off with really good information from the customer, right, because that's where it starts. That order information, if it's correct, if it's timely, if you know, if you can get them to do that part. There are a lot of things downstream from that, that seem to flow much easier and better. And if you can get 100% of the money up front, right? When you have no accounts receivables, you're in such a stronger financial position to do everything, that you can run your business so much better with just those two things, better information and the money up front. Would you agree with
Josh Wylie
that? Oh, harbor said it was really hard. It ruffles a lot of feathers up front. I would say in your first 90 days, you're gonna get a lot of kickback from your customers. Oh, man, you need my money up front. Like, yeah, we've got to operate, we've got to pay for everything. It makes the customers come get their garments faster. So it's not taking up space on your production floor. On a shop with the growth that we had. Space was our number one enemy immediately. Like we built a huge shop, thinking we were going to have all this room and room for days. When you start adding in tables and place for you know, 7000 shirts, you don't have no room anymore. We under built room wise, we outgrew our screen room, we outgrew every room that was designed the shop no longer does what it is it got outgrown, and we put something else in there because it needed to be bigger. And it was just amazing at everything you thought you were ready to pour, and you weren't wanting to start throwing down at you and seeing everything going on. And then the COVID years hit, and it changed everything for us. And we're just now getting back on our feet from that. But we're running full steam. And it seems like we're ever evolving. I think that's the hardest part of this industry. You can't just keep doing like you always done, you've got to hold distantly. And if you don't evolve, you're dead weight. And it seems like every 90 to 180 days, there's processes that used to be I don't know, had to happen, now that are obsolete, because we've skipped the step we've made it where that is no longer needed. And it was paperwork, or it was handwritten. Now it's an automation in Printavo. Or it's a message that's automatically sent out now. And it's harder for us to keep consistently changing and do it the same. So we tried to slow down a little bit. But if we don't change and keep up, we seem to get behind. It's a computer, do the work for us. We need to let the computer do the work. And let us be busy with something else. Right.
Marshall Atkinson
This is perfect segue into my next question, Josh,
Josh Wylie
you're ready? Yes.
Marshall Atkinson
So you guys, like so many people out there, right? You continually want to learn and grow? You were just talking about that, right? So when you find that best practice that software, you attend that class, you talk to Mark Coudray, or me or anybody out there, right? And there's better information. And there's a better tool out there, right? How are you actually injecting that into your business. And here's the thing, and not worrying about making that error. Because if it doesn't work the first time, it's just not going to work. And you should like, keep whacking at it until it actually works. Because that's where you learn when you fail. So talk about how you find that piece of information and how you implement it and keep that going until it actually is successful. Maybe give us an example of something like that and show us how you did it.
Josh Wylie
So we'll do one with marketing and one with like on press. Okay, so on press. Obviously things don't work out the first time ever. So I've got buddies across we're GSG and one of my best friends is Mark Dalek and Steve Guthrie at GSG. They'll come into the shop and check it out. Tell you what you're doing. and wrong, you shoot the ideas off of them. You print test screens, do your emotion, measure it, put it out on press, print it, if it doesn't work, go adjust your settings, come back and do it again until you get what you're expecting on press, then you document that information. That's how you use your separations. That's how you check your percentages to tell you know what you're actually laying down on press. And that was so mundane to me and took so long. And I can see why shops ignore it. But once it's dialed in, you can almost set it and forget it. And then you set your SOPs on how your steps are done. However, all your traps are done, how everything's chosen from there on out. And we did that work when we were young, and it has served us so well. We know what's happening. If something's wrong, we know exactly what to fix. We know where that was skipped in the in the process. And it's rarely easily definable where we made the mistake and documentation on that side is so necessary, it's not even funny. And the shops that don't document it, you cannot do it twice. So if you don't document why you made the mistake how you made the mistake, where it cost you money, you're going to make the same mistake 20 times just because you're guessing every time we guessed a lot when we were young. And then I met everybody that I needed to meet. And we started documenting everything going through the processes. And I mean, our printing changed within 90 days of how everything was going once we decided to put the work in and
Marshall Atkinson
documenting this is taking photographs, taking videos, the creating a spreadsheet, creating like a recipe book for how you do things. Like you do all of that
Josh Wylie
all of it. I have a binder that all my employees make fun of me about we have recipes in and everything we document everything that comes off the press and save it in production notes. So when we have repeat orders, or famous for onion burgers in El Reno, and SIDS is one of the biggest ones, it's a seven color back. And it needs to look the same every time because he's selling the shirt over and over again. And we have exactly how to set it up on press the angles of the squeegees the pressure speeds, everything off contacts across the board, you set it up just like it was last time and it'll run exactly the way it was. We might have to adjust for the temper here in the shop for winter or summer if it's moving speed wise, but you can set it up and get it dialed in within the first turn. Right.
Marshall Atkinson
So you're using all the tools try lock, right you're measuring your ALM, you're measuring your screen tension. You're using a donut probe to measure your dryer, you're doing all that,
Josh Wylie
oh yeah, the dryers map the drains are in between 15 and 20% Aom. We've got ever all the exposures dialed in to a tee with LTU. We still use a single point light source. We're still old school there, we take the extra time to burn, we go the extra step with the IMS to go unidirectional. Instead of bi directional control the size of the dots instead of having them elongate, we fit the time to hold a 2% dot all the way up to 98 percent.on I image J m&r Brian's always like, see, you can hold the information if you try. You just gotta document it and figured out and use the right rip curve. It's all data and it's all spending money. Like I said, you're gonna throw 10 $20,000 and time and investment. But the money we've saved on the back end is tenfold easily. On the marketing side, when you look at it to promote your business. Everybody's like, how do you get your name out there? And where do you spend money first, you can almost not afford to spend the money marketing these days. If you're not digital, you're dead. And it's a $10,000 investment to get a website going to get an email marketing program going to have a monthly Google budget going that's built correctly. And we tried every cheap way to do it. And every time when cheaped out, it costs us money, we didn't get our return on investment. Then when we finally found companies that that's what they did for a living, and we paid them the astronomical amount of money up front a $1,500 ads build fee and say, right now I pay somebody 700 bucks a month to manage my Google accounts. And they adjust everything for me they build my ads for me that's what they do for a living is build Google ads, not something like us. We're learning how to do it. We're constantly adjusting. We get set it and forget it and say this is working out a little bit more money here. Move it around, adjust it and we get inquiries every day that we are just leaving alone and it works. We paid email marketing, and we tried to do it ourselves. I'm not a writer. I don't know how to write. If you want me to sell you something face to face. I'll sell it to you all day and I'll land and sell but me writing it up and typing out. I sell to you. I'm going to fail every time But this company does great, they get our photos, they branded looks just like our website. everything's good to go. Now we're tracking all that data. Now we've got from the cows program, we know we all need to know where it's coming from. We track our phone calls, we record the phone calls, it's really changed our life on where the data is coming from. And we know where to put the money. We're not just blatantly Hey, we spent 500 bucks on Google last month, and we don't know where, what they clicked on how they clicked on, or we spent $1,000 on Facebook, boosting random ads. And we don't know where the money came from. Now we know exactly where the cost per conversion is, we know who the phone calls came from. And we know the ads are not just a bulk ad, we have 10 ads that are just for T shirts. And you click on T shirt, not just one ad, so we're not paying for a bunch of random clicks and just wasting our money. We're paying for what we're asking people to click on. So we really learned the hard way, probably only $20,000 in Lost marketing budget that we had nowhere to understand where they were clicking on or why we've got the conversion. Now, we're spending less money each month on Google ads and getting more return on our investment to the point we're ready to ramp it up and hire somebody just in to fill those incoming inquiries.
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, I think that's just awesome, Josh. And, you know, it's always struck me as really ironic that you see people who spend 100 or $150,000 for their shop, you know, presses and whatever, right. But they're trying to make it all work with free Wix website. You know, it's just crazy talk to me, right, just thinking about this stuff. And it's like, I don't want to understand it in that goes along with a whole, you know, I get all my industry information from Facebook groups. That whole thing, right? Yeah, it's still understanding that either, so call me a weird, I guess. But I just don't think that sometimes people are looking out for their best interests all the time,
Josh Wylie
I really checked out a Facebook that was we're in Shirt Lab tribe. We're in Catalyst, I'm in Lucians group, which is Mark's group. And then I follow Michelle's group, and backbase virus group. That is where real printers are at real printers are talking about the printer, I want to be as where those guys are at. That's the stuff where I read and I have to read nine times understanding what the guy is actually doing is, you know, there's no other level than we are.
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. Right, right. It's funny how you know you're in the wrong group, when you see a post that says 100 Guild and blanks to color once you got your own group to be.
Josh Wylie
We have conversations behind the door, you're like, do you see that post? Yeah, I saw that post, you know, I gotta go like the amount of shops, the cleanliness of the shops. You try to help those guys like you want to be the next generation of guys to help. But nobody's really open to listening to the help. So you go where people will help me. I help where I can. But I'll just ask for help. If you don't want my help. I'll ask for the guys. And I lean on my mentors for you. I call them both Cordray. Dalek lon, Richard, I've got a list of guys that I call them. And you can go on there and email on any of those guys call them and they return your phone calls. And that's, that shows a line of respect that we're worth your time to take a phone call from this, and stuff like that. So that was really important to me when I was young. We all got now I've been in a lot of tables, dinners, eating dinner with y'all. And just sit down, shut up and listen. And a lot of these younger kids, you don't always have to be talking to learn something. You can sit back and listen to the pros that run huge shops and the one Ward after award after award and listen how you should present yourself and present your shop. And I think I've learned more stuff sitting down at a table and listening to the older generation than I have anywhere else talking.
Marshall Atkinson
Exactly. Well said well said Josh. Like once you hear so far, be sure to subscribe so you can get the latest from Success Stories. And now here's Zach shortly with the SMS spotlight on our
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Marshall Atkinson
So you guys Have these golden nuggets of information? Right? How are you actually putting that? To use the action? Like, I loved how you started this podcast with, I was at a trade show, and I heard about roller frames, and I bought them. And before I got home, they're already waiting for me. That is action. Right? Yes, that's awesome, right? But that's not usually the case. Right? So let's just say you're on a phone call, you're on that dinner, you had a conversation or you had a, you call somebody up? And then they told you, Baba, Baba, bah, whatever. That's right. How are you taking that information, and actually getting it installed. And actually, here's the thing, getting your people to do because we all know, it can't just be Josh doing everything, right. You gotta have the folks that work for us understand and buy into it and make the mistake, because they're not going to do it right the first time, right? And not feel like they have a psychological safety to make the mistake and not getting yelled at. Right. So how do you put that new thing, whatever it is, into IgG get it to work,
Josh Wylie
that was a learning lesson for me as the boss to not this is my way or the highway type deal. So to implement it, you have to let them fail sometimes, because they look at you like deer in headlights, because the things that I learned are over my head, sometimes, for much larger facilities that are much well more oil than we are and they've made $100,000 mistake that they can absorb, we can absorb a $10,000 mistake, that's detrimental to a company my size, and you have to let them fail. And then you come back and say, Hey, you failed because you made this mistake, you skip this step. And now we're here, if you would have done this step, this step in this step, you would have got it. And once they've made the mistake, it's a whole lot easier for me to implement what I've learned. But if it's going and they've always done it that way, and it's been working, it's never easy. The steps that I'm going to involve, it makes the process more complicated. But it runs smoother. Once you get it figured out. And it's an everyday thing, that's our biggest deal. You've got to let the employee fail and not prosecute them right there on the spot. I've learned to bring them back in the back and kind of have a one on one, and then go talk about it as a team and come in and sit down and train, maybe get on pressed and show them how I would do it. Show them how I would run the department because I can run every department with my eyes closed. Having the confidence to train somebody how to stretch mesh correctly, you're gonna pop screens and when somebody pops a screen, they freeze, they're done like they're scared even touch it for almost a month. So you've got to kind of guide them. And I'm still learning on a daily basis on how to be a guide. So we try to implement something. And each department we used to try to implement it all at once. And it was too much for everybody to handle. So we tried to take baby steps. We've got maybe 10 goals for the year in each department. And we tried to implement maybe one or two or three depending on what we're implementing in each department. And sometimes it works great. And sometimes it implodes on itself. But three departments might run good, one department might need work. And then you you start seeing bottlenecks, you start seeing things that work at their shop and need to be tweaked to work here. So write down what you made mistakes, loosen sleep over it, you know, keep driving past your exit on the highway, because you're working in your head trying to fix the problem, all those things. So that's kind of how we implement things here.
Marshall Atkinson
I've done that, like, where am I? You know, I really liked what you said. And one of the things that I've kind of championed over the years is that, you know, learning this industry is kind of like driving a car, like you remember back when you were 15. Right? And your dad or your uncle, whoever taught you to drive, right? You can read a book, you can watch a video, you can have a conversation, but the only way to learn to drive a car is get behind the wheel and drive the car. Right? Yeah. So the only way they learn how to stretch the screen or mix ache or run or press or, you know, make a Facebook ad or whatever, right? Yes, actually do it. Right. Yeah. And so you know, let's just get out of the way, you know, early, hey, you might hit the curb with the tire. You might like drive weird or go around the corner too fast. And you have to overcorrect and score. You know, here's the thing, you're stretching screens. Let's go ahead and those stretches screen and let's just pop it on purpose and get it out of the way. And now let's not freak out about one and a half. Yeah. And so it's like let's talk about what's going to happen and give them the safety they need to say you know what, that is a mistake. You know if it happens You know, because what you want to do when you're driving a car, you don't want to overcorrect the turn. And now you're into the tree the other way, right? So what happens if this happens? And let's maybe let's practice it a little bit, right? And so I think if you talk about the danger sometimes and even like, show him, Hey, let's try to make that happen. And let's so we learn what not to do. Right? Sometimes that's like the best thing almost right? When there is a problem, and there is a mistake, we can correct that. And another way of doing it is to use the phrase, you know, help me understand, right? So somebody made a mistake, you say, help me understand why this is a big issue. Right? So Mark Coudray taught me that, like forever ago, right? helped me understand why this is a problem, which is a non confrontational way of talking with an employee and going, Hey, I just want to learn what happened here. Right. I'm not saying you're a dummy. I'm not saying you're worthless. Or you know, sometimes when mistakes happen, you get this crazy look on your face. Right? Not you but yeah. Right. So it's just helped me understand I want to I want to learn what happened here. Oh, yeah. You skipped step four. That's what happened. Yeah. Yeah. Right,
Josh Wylie
don't you think? Yeah, yeah. Now I tell the new employees, we got the freshman 1500. I expect you to make $1,500 of the mistakes in your first 90 days. Later on 90 day probation work, it's going to cost us money. And we're going to have misprints. And it's not only misprint, since last time, you're learning we're going to have to slow the process down and not make a profit that day. Because we had to shut the afternoon down and train. It just is what it is. And once you think you'll be a little bit more comfortable, like, I'm understanding, it's gonna you're gonna cost me money to train but once I train you from the ground up, and you get it right, you're gonna do it right every time. It's just gonna become second nature to you. They fry squeegees in the chemicals all the time, the new kids always fry squeegee because they don't get the 701 off it fast enough. They freak out. And I'm like, it's money, but it's just a squeegee. Did you learn the lesson? Do you understand how fast you have to get the chemical off? You know, did you clean out your bucket and put fresh water in today? No, that's yesterday's water. Well, there's your problem that that chemical just sits on top. And it's got to be fresh water every day. And there's these little things like that, then they become self sufficient. And you don't even have to ask them any more. They they just come in and start getting the work. That's the best feeling that you know, you taught them nothing to where they're at now. And now you trust them. Give them the attaboys and say, Hey, you're doing good. You're making mistakes here. I've kind of learned being a coach and a little league baseball coach, you give them some attaboys at first, and then you break them down at the you make them feel good. And then tell them what they need to work on and go from there. You can't just constantly tell them what to do and bad. You got to tell them what you're good to. So we'll do we'll do the correction
Marshall Atkinson
sandwich, right? Positive, negative positive? Yes.
Josh Wylie
So keep up the good work. And we need to fix these three things, too. So
Marshall Atkinson
all right, so let's wind up here. And let's talk about the future. So I know from having conversations with you. Over the years, there's been some thought about doing some printing in non textile area, which is really interesting to me. And really doing some work with prototyping. And I know Ray angry when was helping with that, right. So talk about that, and why you guys are eyeballing up because I think that's kind of interesting.
Josh Wylie
Because you always have your pronounced in our industry, you have slow times and busy times in our industry. It's a fact you have to slow periods in the year and the rest of the time we're humping. But in the manufacturing side, there's no slow times manufacturing is constantly happening. And the big manufacturing shops don't have time to r&d, they're too busy producing. So they find other shops that can control all the aspects and give them a recipe. Well, I never even thought about it. Most of the screenprint shops don't even think that they screenprint other things besides T shirts, or posters. But when I met Ray, and I didn't come in and look at our screens, because we were having some stretching issues he was so how's clean the shop is how uniform everything is on the environment, how everything is documented. We have all the tools to measure everything. We have the r&d mentality. So we've already done all the r&d. On our T shirt side. That's all these other companies are looking for. They're looking for a recipe. So they're printing a keyboard or they're printing a sock that has ridges on it, or they're printing an imprint a pad for the three M that needs a recipe it needs to be this thick, we need to know how much emulsion and you know how much ink you put down. We need to how long it took the care of the screen to produce this product. And they're willing to pay for that data because they don't have the time to stop their presses to do that kind of information. And, and you wouldn't believe the amount of shops and still don't do the time to do the r&d. While I'm sure you do understand the amount of shop. But when you go to raise side, that guy is on a whole nother level than most guys when it comes to screens. And it's fun to talk back and forth and just listen to him talk. Because then you start talking about our Z values, and how the measurement reacts under high tension, how things share our screams, that's really taken us to another level. And then you start talking, we have, say our most expensive ink is $500. For a gallon of pigment, you know, that's our most expensive ink we have, some of their inks are $500 at court, you know, for some of the electronic inks, so we wouldn't be so excited, we have a clean shop. But to take it to that level would be the next location, adding on to this shop and making a clean room because you have to provide dust free, you have to be static free for all these stuff. But filling out the recipe we have it already. So really just be changing substrates, changing kitchens, changing to the mesh counts they require and getting it going. And you could be r&d and something over in the side making a whole lot of money. And pretty much you're just playing, you're having fun, that would be so much fun to me is being able to play in the side. And you know, have it as your HD department, your special effects department, whatever you're not doing at the time, you're just kind of playing over in the corner and making money at it too. So paying for your r&d department. And you wouldn't even have to do cost the jobs, you could do five jobs a year in that department and pay for it. So there's just
Marshall Atkinson
so awesome to you thinking about this. And remember, right? Five years ago, you guys were barely doing anything. Yeah, a journey. What I mean, can you imagined five years ago, somebody saying, Hey, you can be doing r&d for the electronics industry. Right. Right. I said, You're crazy.
Josh Wylie
Now we're doing a nine color bag for shop shirts for fun, you know? Absolutely. So
Marshall Atkinson
yeah, it's just it's just amazing. It's just amazing. So anyway, Josh, thank you so much for sharing your story of success with us today. If someone wants to learn more about what you do, or how you could help them, what's the best way to contact you,
Josh Wylie
man, you can reach out to us on Facebook, you can reach out to us on our website. There's direct contacts there, you can always call the shop at 405-295-1669. You can email me at Josh at IDG sp.com. I'd be glad to help you with anything and point you in the right direction if I can't do it for you.
Marshall Atkinson
All right. Well, hey, thank you so much for your time today. It was really good talking with you and catch you later. You as well. Thanks for having me. Well, that's our show today. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, so you can stay up to date on the latest Success Stories episodes. have any suggestions for future guests or topics? send them my way and Marshall and Marshall atkinson.com And we'll see you next time.