Doing things other people don’t like to do
I just finished a meeting with a new friend who runs a fairly large business which provides promotional products to businesses of all kinds. This could include tee-shirt silk screening, custom hats, mugs, plagues, trinkets for tradeshow give-a-ways etc. Say you’re a general manager at a Mercedes dealer and you want to give away 500 fleece vests to your best VIP customers. You’d call my buddy. Or, you’re putting on a local golfing invitational for corporate or charity purposes and you want to give all the entrants a custom golf head cover with the event logo on it. You’d call my new friend. You get the idea.
Here’ s the amazing part. Getting a logo that is suitable for embroidery or printing typically requires a vector (EPS etc) version of the image. You think the typical Mercedes manager has the high-res vector of the original Mercedes logo? 99% of the time the answer “no” and “I have no idea what you’re talking about”. Yet, this promotional products business is a HUGE business. Most small businesses want their tee-shirts or windbreakers printed but all they have is a business card. Maybe they hired a graphics designer 5 years ago to make the card but never got (or asked for) the original vector artwork. Since the vast majority of customers who order products like this do not have imagery suitable for commercial printing, my friend realized there was a business opportunity. Now, he just asks for his customers business cards or letterhead and he tells his customers they don’t need to worry about the complexity of the printing process. He charges them a small fee to “prepare” the artwork and he does all the dirty work involved to find suitable vendors of golf head cover makers.
Today, he was telling me that he now has 100 employees in China working in a new 16,000 square foot facility doing NOTHING but tracing artwork via Adobe Illustrator for purposes of printing. One hundred people tracing logos! That’s all they do!
That logo tracing side of his business brought in approximately $5,000,000 last year!!!
I expressed my amazement and he simply said, “what it really boils down to is that I’m in the business of doing things other people really don’t want to care about or do”. How true! If you’re running a car dealership, do you really want to get a tutorial on the printing business? No. Do you really have time to source golf club head cover manufacturers in China? No! Being really, really good at something that absolutely nobody wants to do isn’t a bad way to make money. Hmm, guess that is why I keep paying my housecleaner…
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