On today's Success Stories podcast, we'll talk to Ben Spurlock with SE Impressions in Lebanon, Tennessee just outside of Nashville. He's a second-generation t-shirt printer and has taken over the business from his parents.
How has he taken his business to another level with increased sales, new processes, standards, and organization? We'll learn all about that and more. So buckle up and get ready for a fantastic episode.
On today's Success Stories podcast, we'll talk to Ben Spurlock with SE Impressions in Lebanon, Tennessee just outside of Nashville. He's a second-generation t-shirt printer and has taken over the business from his parents.
How has he taken his business to another level with increased sales, new processes, standards, and organization? We'll learn all about that and more. So buckle up and get ready for a fantastic episode.
Marshall Atkinson
On today's Success Stories podcast, we'll talk to Ben Spurlock was se impressions in Lebanon, Tennessee, which is just outside of Nashville about his shop. He's a second generation T shirt printer, and has taken over the business from his parents. How has he taken his business to another level with increased sales, new processes, standards, and organization. We'll learn all about that and more. So buckle up and get ready for an amazing episode. Hey, Ben, welcome to the Success Stories podcast.
Ben Spurlock
Hey, Marshall, good to talk to you.
Marshall Atkinson
Thanks for having me. Yeah. And if nobody has met you before, you've been in industry a while and you've got a trademark hat you're always wearing but if they haven't met you before, kind of give us the lowdown about your shop and your customers and where you are and that type of stuff. Well, we're
Ben Spurlock
located right outside of Nashville about 20 miles east. Right now we've got four automatics and 32 heads of embroidery, running a DTF printer to my parents saw a need back in 1996, for athletic apparel, and stuff like that around Lebanon. And so they decided to start screen printing and embroidery mainly focus on athletic apparel back in those days,
Marshall Atkinson
right. And so you're just like the kid that worked in the shop.
Ben Spurlock
I was one of those kids getting paid 50 cents a screen to come in when I was 12 years old, and, and wash screens and do all the stuff nobody wanted to do. Thankfully, the chemicals came along way because I remember back then you had to wear the full on suit or you get burned.
Marshall Atkinson
And so now, what is your role with the company? Because your parents are kind of like they've kind of transition down a little bit and you're kind of running the show. So what do you what are you doing?
Ben Spurlock
So once I bought them out in September 2020, when they were retiring, I was running production and screenprint. Full on. We had some I run in embroidery production, but I was production manager over screenprint. And as time has went on my slowly I've handed that off to now I'm very little involved with screenprint day to day operations. I'm a little more hands on in the DTF room, but I'm trying to end off as much as I can.
Marshall Atkinson
And you guys are on two shifts, right?
Ben Spurlock
Correct. We've been running a night shift for about, say, going on two years in December. And we've just now bumped it up to we've got two full automatics running from six o'clock to two in the morning.
Marshall Atkinson
And how has that added more capacity to you guys? How are you taking advantage of that?
Ben Spurlock
Well, luckily, we ran into a great screen printer. And he kind of took the role of hey, I'm going to take overnight shift, I want to grow this for you. And his goal was to keep adding people the headache has been working with production to make sure we left them enough at night, making sure they were set up to succeed at night. And to be honest, our production managers done a great job of doing that as well and setting them up to succeed. And then to get along. But there's nothing like coming in the next morning and 15 to 25 jobs you need out for the day are done ready to ship out.
Marshall Atkinson
I've done night shift over the years, right. And we always ran the really long jobs at night. And we did a lot of changeover jobs during the day because you might need somebody to approve it or a sample or whatever. Are you doing it the same way
Ben Spurlock
we try to give them the longer the longer runs if we have some and probably same night for you, you know, there's no questions when you have one art that they're setting up and running all night, our average run size is probably around 100 pieces. So we don't have a just ton of here's 20,000 prints go but we do when we do we try to leave those for them at night.
Marshall Atkinson
And I know, one of the challenges was always the day shift or the night shift leave the work area, you know, not the same way that the other team wanted it, you know, whether that was how they set it up, or they didn't clean up after themselves or whatever. How are you handling that type of thing.
Ben Spurlock
We haven't seen it as much you know, every printer does something different. You know, we have a guy who loves to raise every head and on a six head machine or an eight head machine given that you don't have to lift the head to get the screen out. So there's been some adjustment and you know, we've it's kind of you go back leave it just as good or better than you found it because they don't want to walk into a situation where it's dirty or it's not set up for them to work at And also we had a problem with squeegees, you know, just throwing them and I got a m&r squeegee washer that now people fight over who's going to wash squeegee. So day shift throws 12 and 12 flood bars before they leave, they start it. And then night shift does the same, they fill it up. So just working around finding ways to let them get along has been an adjustment, but we figured it out.
Marshall Atkinson
That's great. And so how are you scheduling your jobs to those presses, you're doing everything in advance. So you know, several days in advance, what equipment and what shift is printing some, you know, these 20 jobs or whatever, they you know exactly where everything's going.
Ben Spurlock
Yeah, so that's part of the daytime Production Manager, she plans it out in an ideal world, or four and five days ahead, you know, just as much as me that when it gets busy doesn't always happen. And you know, if there's jobs that had to go tomorrow, you know, nightshift could run them tonight, and we just pray, there's no mistakes. But as long as we're ahead, you know, we can divvy up those jobs as needed. One thing we've kind of started doing is our biggest presses, 10 colors. So we don't do a lot of hot color jobs. But as soon as that day shift guy just gets stuck, they're doing a color after a color after a color all day long. We started giving some of those to the nighttime people that way, you don't get frustrated just sitting up eight colors all day?
Marshall Atkinson
And are you training your crew so you can redeploy and move people around just so people learning and training and people can you know, there's no drop off when you get sick or somebody goes on vacation?
Ben Spurlock
Yeah, so the production manager, there's a girl that helps right under her. And she was actually out last week. And you know, I didn't go back there maybe twice to hold weight. And that's kind of what I wanted to set up. I love having to press operators on each machine. I know, you can't always have that that way. But if you've got that in somebody's out sick, you're not down a press, you just slide one over. And then the same thing goes with nine, they've got five people that they rotate whose load news pool and who's doing what, and we've got a full time catcher down there. But the other ones are basically can bounce around. And when people are out, we don't seem to miss a beat.
Marshall Atkinson
Is that like detail? Like you're scheduling, like a grocery store, I guess or whatever, like who's doing what each week? And you can, there's a chart.
Ben Spurlock
I mean, we had the main press operators, they run their machine, if they're there, they're running the machine, you know, we've got a chart of of who's out for the week. And that way, you know, we can look to two weeks ahead and say, Hey, I say it's gonna be out this week, and Derek's gonna run his press, and we haven't taken care of in advance. Okay, good.
Marshall Atkinson
All right. So let's talk about sales. Right. So that's the lifeblood of any business. So who were your key clients? And what have you done to attract more quality customers over the years? Talk about maybe how your parents did it. And you know, and juxtapose that to how you do it.
Ben Spurlock
So like I said, earlier, my parents really focused on athletic sales, they wanted to do teams, they wanted to do athletic merch. And to me, you're setting up the same amount of screens to do 12 pieces, or 1000 pieces. Even if you're doing a little league Jersey, and then back then we would screenprint the numbers still, we'd use stencils. And to me, I just felt like we're killing time, there was so much more we can do. And we started looking more and more towards the corporate world. And when we started going that way, we've grown by word of mouth. And since probably 2012, we're growing 25 to 30% a year. And we still don't have an outside sales team. We've got four girls that work up front that are kind of inside sales, but most of ours has been word of mouth growth and basically growth internally.
Marshall Atkinson
And so when you started going in another direction, what did your parents think?
Ben Spurlock
They weren't opposed to it much. You know, Mom was active in embroidery and dad was he was a finance guy. So as long as his numbers on paper looked good, he didn't mind but I remember when I first got there, if we got five jobs done for the day, we could go home, and I looked at his board and I said that won't work at that time. We had two manual presses. I said what if those five jobs are both all 5000 piece orders? I said there's no way we can get done with them. And so from then on, that changed that outlook for him. But I think once they saw how accident prone athletics can be, you know, you we still run into it. We do a league and little Johnny don't know what size little Johnny wears. And so you're redoing a jersey for him. corporate world. It's a little different.
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, a little Johnny's eating too much ice cream.
Ben Spurlock
Yeah. You can't tell Johnny's mom that anymore because she'll take offense to that.
Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, we all have those Karen's in our life, don't we?
Ben Spurlock
Yes, some days more than others.
Marshall Atkinson
So Don't you have a sales team? And it's not what your wife was doing? Right? Like, kind of walk us through that a little bit? Well, she
Ben Spurlock
kind of does everything. Now. That's what happens when you marry into it. But she was doing a lot of the contract work. So we were about 30% contract customers, and we like to stay under that 30%. We don't want to become a fully contract shop, and we don't want to absolutely kick it to the curb. But we found that 30% is kind of in our sweet spot. But yeah, she's handled that. And since when she got pregnant, we hired somebody to take some of that off other. And so luckily, the past six weeks have went smooth without her. I don't know if that'll hurt her feelings or not.
Marshall Atkinson
Well, you know, here's the thing is you always need to train your replacement. Yes. Especially if you want to move up or do other things or do things that that we don't even know that we need that right now. But if you are locked in on something, there's no way that you're going to be released to do the new thing, because everybody needs you doing the other thing.
Ben Spurlock
Yeah. And that was kind of one of my thanks to I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm still first one there every morning. But I wanted to make sure that, you know, we had a little bit of freedom, and didn't have to be married to the company, SSA. You know, I used to only schedule my vacations around three day weekends. So Labor Day or something like that. And we take the Friday off and have a three day weekend. But I wanted to make sure there's people there to do her job. There's still some stuff that only I do. But it doesn't have to be done every day. And it's fun.
Marshall Atkinson
Okay, so getting the jobs out the door efficiently and a lower cost, you know, that always requires a mindset of focus on standards and process and organization. So what do you guys do? How do you guys think about this?
Ben Spurlock
When I was in production, and I'm like a time management freak, I like, will be driving in my car, and I'll calculate the fastest way to go places across town. And I'll go that route every time. Like, that's just how my mind was. And when I was back there. The goal was, how much can we get a day? How much can get out the door today? And then once you figure that out, you start saying, How can I speed up these presses? How can I give the people what they need to make them being able to sit there and run a machine all day, because that's the goal, when we're tearing down when you're looking for screens, all that wasted time is t shirts that could be going out the door? So we started looking at, hey, where are these printers wasting time? Where's their downtime? And you know, we even sent them home with a survey a couple months ago. And you know, the production manager looked at where were wasted time and said, Hey, how can we fix this? So we found people to do what they were wasting a lot of time. And that way they can just stand at the press and go in?
Marshall Atkinson
Are you doing what I call the scavenger hunt. Like we pull all the jobs for tomorrow today, all the shirts and screens and inks and samples and whatever we need. And we prioritize those at the equipment in the order they need to run in. Are you doing that?
Ben Spurlock
So yeah, each day, I mean, we've got a lady has dedicated her jobs. So Stackhouse shirts all day long. We've got a lady whose jobs dedicated to taping the screens and get them to the press. So in an ideal world, they have their screens for tomorrow or early in the morning right now. And we'll feed them jobs. As the day goes on. If there's stuff that comes in and needs to get rushed out, you know, the lady stacks them out and we can push it in front of another card if need be.
Marshall Atkinson
Like once you hear so far, be sure to subscribe so you can get the latest from Success Stories. And now here's Devin free. With the SNS spotlight
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Marshall Atkinson
How are you dealing with the ink it makes right or your papa screen or whatever I mean, like we're gonna things always have in the back of my mind is I can get off row one color in there while we're rebooting the screen and that way we're still moving forward. Are you guys doing tricks like that?
Ben Spurlock
Yes. So there's one machine that I mean his jobs to do one and two colors all day long. They're the workhorse machine that just get it out the door get it out the door. And if they have a screen pop or something we pull one from his stack and give it to a press while they're waiting on a screen and get burned, or whatnot.
Marshall Atkinson
Well, that's cool. And what system are you guys using?
Ben Spurlock
We use Printavo are using the Power Scheduler? We have not we looked at it, and we tried, you know what we were doing worked. And so she didn't never get into the Power Scheduler. We've played with it a couple times, but never just dead said, Hey, we're going to this event, are you keeping
Marshall Atkinson
track of your KPIs? You know, set up times, and run times and all that stuff.
Ben Spurlock
So about, probably a month ago, I had a big shop that's around us come in the door. We had a talk, show them around the shop. So I'm DTF. They don't do that. And we really started measuring performances. And we've started doing that as a, like, we're going on week three or something. No, last time we had a conversation. I wasn't doing that. But things have changed since then.
Marshall Atkinson
And how are you doing that just with a piece of paper using an app? What are you doing?
Ben Spurlock
Right now we're using a piece of paper. And the goal is to get a Google spreadsheet that everybody shared, and we're not writing on paper and putting it in. But what we wanted to do is find a number of goal of screens a day, or prints a day, that basically we're looking to get towards. And so right now we're just collecting data to kind of figure out what those standards and measurements are for us.
Marshall Atkinson
And you know, your averages right now, like just so far, what are you hitting,
Ben Spurlock
I mean, one guy averaged 2800 prints for the days with Nike had 34 screens. And then the guy who does eight colors, I was shocked at this, he was averaging like 1600 For the week, on 52 screens a day. And I expected those numbers to be much different. But the shop, I talk to random one man at each automatic, and they had a catcher, and you know, they were looking for 700 prints a day.
Marshall Atkinson
Now, I'm not a big fan of that been. Well, and
Ben Spurlock
you know, they, the guy was much smarter than me. And he's runs a very successful business. And I, you know, I asked the reason for it. Because in my opinion, a puller, and a loader can get more than two times the work done as a single man. And, you know, we're kind of seeing that that, you know, they want to 700 for today, and we're averaging, you know, close to 2400 on some machines, which is three and a half times what they're doing is the stuff
Marshall Atkinson
that I've done, the studies I've done, you know, a decent auto, if you've got a really good team, of course, it all depends on the print stroke vertically, how long that print stroke is, because that's going to dictate the time it takes to print right. But you really should be around for maybe 500 impressions an hour. And then your, the setup time that I like to see is under five minutes of screen setting up and then maybe seven to 10 minutes transition after the job taking it down and putting the next one off, right. And then if you know those times, and the reason why this is important, is because then, okay, it makes your scheduling so much easier. Because if you've know your averages, then you can go well, here's what we normally do a day. And you can start looking ahead a couple of weeks and scheduled jobs and go okay, well, Thursday is full, you know, the as soon as we can start working on those Friday or whatever. And then that helps you with your customer relations and stuff because you're doing what you say you're going to do much, much better. Right?
Ben Spurlock
Right. And now that's been one one adjustment, that production manager I have, has never printed. She slowly started printing when she has to, but I wanted to let her figure out how long as five color takes how long the setup takes and and let her kind of figure that out. And you know, she be like, Hey, I've got 2500 pieces a color front and back do out tomorrow. Well, you're in trouble because that's gonna be hard for him to do. Unless it's a tiny left shift and she's done great. And to be honest, I never knew how production manager that didn't really print would work. But I mean her job is to sit there and set them up for success and get jobs out the door and she does a great job. Well, let me tell you the
Marshall Atkinson
most a good chunk of the time the easiest thing a shop does is the actual printing. Everything else is the difficult part is getting the shirts in and getting the screens made and getting the art approved in getting people trained and keeping the shop clean and like there's a gigantic list of stuff. If you think about it. Actually just printing the shirt is the easy part.
Ben Spurlock
Don't Don't tell printers that because most of them night Production Manager don't do nothing. You know that? Yes, I'm
Marshall Atkinson
quite aware of that. Right. Okay, and so you mentioned DTF a minute ago, right? So, you know, how do you see this running your shop and how the industry is kind of moving there. Right. And, and I know you've got some stories for examples, let's kind of share that a little
Ben Spurlock
bit. Yeah, we started doing DTF probably shoot two and a half years ago. And I really, I didn't know much about it. I hated DTG. And I watched the video and said, that is really cool. And I bought a machine, we had no plan on how to use it. At the time, we were just going to run one offs. And, you know, when you get the five t, that has five colors on the front and stretch, instead of burning five more screens, that's what we're gonna do to it quickly upgraded to a quicker and faster machine. And we have slowly started moving more and more stuff in there, I really thought it would pull a lot from our screenprint department, the embroidery department has had more pull from than screenprint. A lot of polyester polos, polyester quarter zips, it just feels better, you don't get the Pucker, you don't you don't have to worry about it. And they feel great. So the local soccer team, you know, was one of the first DTF customers, we switched over from embroidery, and they won't send us anything. But DTF they don't want to embroider anything anymore. So we're finally starting to see some people say, hey, I want that transfer thing instead of, you know, screenprint in order even when it's an order that can be screenprint it.
Marshall Atkinson
You know, and a lot of people think that transfer word is kind of has a negative connotation to it. So I know that some people have been referring to it as a digital heat applied technology. Yeah. Which just sounds cooler.
Ben Spurlock
Yeah, and you're right, because when they when you say transfer immediately people make vinyl, and nothing against vinyl. But the washability of digital transfers is great, you know, we've got a shirt that I've washed at times, and I Finally Quit washing it. And it's just a solid block, no cracking and no fading. So what it's also allowed us to do is, it's, I think it's going to change the lab printing game as well. You don't have to take equipment out to places that you need nothing but a heat press. And you can take different designs on site with some blank T shirts, and give people the same experience as if you were, if you're printing a t shirt. We did there been a couple of weekends ago, and there's 5000 people and we sold 1200 shirts. So one in five people were buying it and what they thought was that is so cool to watch you do that. And if you're not around it all day, or like now there's not really anything about cool about heat press in a T shirt, but they love watching their shirt get decorated. And we just let them pick their pick their design and and decorate the shirt we did right there for them.
Marshall Atkinson
And so talk about you've done some stuff to the state fair. And for John Deere, you know, give us give us those stories.
Ben Spurlock
So that's the event we were at was the John Deere classic kick comes around every two years. And they were coming to Lebanon and they didn't have a vendor and said, Hey, do you want to come do t shirts? The guy last time sold out in three hours? And I'm like, Yeah, okay, you know, it's one of those. You don't ever believe that when they say it. And that was the one I ordered 500 shirts on for a Thursday. And by one o'clock that Thursday, I was calling our lady who orders and said, Hey, give me 1000 more. We're not going to make it all weekend. Right? And so what happened there is that was at our State Fairgrounds. And the State Fair, solid was like, Hey, I reached out said, Hey, guys, let me come do this for y'all. And, you know, I don't want to have to pay for a booth. I said, and I'll give you a percentage of the sales when I'm done. And they said, what what do you need from us? I said nothing. Let me do what I do. And I'll cut y'all a check. And so our State Fair is in the end of August, which used to be our county fair now it's the Tennessee State Wilson County Fair. And about 900,000 people come through it in 10 days. So we're excited to see what it can do. We have no clue what we're gonna do there but it should be a good 10 days if we can survive. Well, good luck. Yeah. We need it.
Marshall Atkinson
So have you got anything to do? Going online stores.
Ben Spurlock
We do online merch stores or Printavo for for schools and companies that they if they want that,
Marshall Atkinson
if you but Are you actively selling it and trying to grow it? Because I know there's a lot of there's a big push for that right now. Because it really makes that customer sticky to you.
Ben Spurlock
Yeah, we've, to be honest, we don't we don't push it as much as we should. If somebody comes in and they want a merch store, then we open it, you know, but I heard a guy today that was in the shop and said, Hey, I want my employees to be able to go do this and this. And we're like, Okay, perfect. Schools, it's great for to, you know, one thing we started doing COVID that we kind of hadn't let go of is, we ship out every order to schools. And I, I would tell every shop out there, if you're doing a merch store, ship them out, because everybody knows schools are the worst that they're missing a shirt. Way, you know that every shirt was accounted for and shipped out? Right? Well,
Marshall Atkinson
the secret to that, you know, is poly bagging the shirts with the kid's name on it. And then that box goes to Mrs. Johnson's homeroom with a packing slip with all the kids names on it that are in the box, and just having more processes. And of course, the cost of all that is built into the pricing. So you do it right. But that prevents them from saying, Hey, we're missing a medium. And it's because everything's in there. And it's all detailed. Because if it's not, if it's just a box of shirts, when it gets to the school, all it takes is for them to open the box and reach in and take their shirt, and then walk off and nobody knew that that happened. And they're gonna blame you.
Ben Spurlock
Yeah. Well, and then it goes back to that end of the day. What do you do when you do all that? And then they say, I'm still missing one medium. That's what you DTF. But
Marshall Atkinson
yeah, of course, all day. All right. All right, then. Well, hey, well, thank you so much for sharing your story of success with us today. What's the best way to contact you as someone who wants to learn more about what you do? Or maybe how you can help them?
Ben Spurlock
They can email me at V Spurlock at se in person.com. Or just jump on our website and and find the phone number and give me a call. I'm always there.
Marshall Atkinson
Alright, and thank you so much. It was great talking to you and we'll catch you later.
Ben Spurlock
Sounds good. Thank you, Marshall.
Michelle Moxley-Hruby
Alrighty. 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@marshallatkinson.com and we'll see you next time.