Episode 189 – The 4 Ps of Marketing

Custom Apparel Startups

Episode 189 – The 4 Ps of Marketing

This Episode

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Marc Vila & Sara Isom

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customapparelstartups.com

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CAS Podcast

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ColDesi

You Will Learn

• How the 4 Ps can help you understand your business goals
• How using the 4 Ps can help you make better advertising decisions

Resources & Links

• Colman and Company Blog
• ColDesi Learning Center
• Leasing Equipment

Episode 189 – The 4 Ps of Marketing

Many small business owners get into their business with an idea, rather than a full plan. You want to make t-shirts or print signs. You know it’s profitable and you’ve already got some referral business. It’s not that hard to make some money and get overwhelmed with business. What IS hard is growing your business to achieve your dreams and goals.

One of the first steps to understanding how to create a great marketing plan (that will lead to success) is understanding the 4 Ps of marketing. In so many words, it’s understanding your businesses goals, so you can make truly educated marketing decisions.

So, what are the next steps for your marketing?

• Should you start a TikTok?
• Should you do local paid advertising?
• Would doing Google ads be a good idea?
• Is renting a booth at a farmers market going to be profitable?
• Is hiring a marketing firm/person the right move?

Anyone who tells you they have the answer to these questions is wrong. None of these can be answered correctly without knowing your 4 Ps. So let’s get to them!

All Marketing revolves around the 4 Ps:

Product:

The number of products categories, product lines and variations your company sells.
For example:

• Product Categories: Workwear, Signage
• Product Lines:
  • Workwear
  • Men’s Workwear
  • Women’s Workwear
  • Signage
  • Printed Graphic Decorative
  • Indoor Signs
• Product Variations:
  • Workwear
  • Women’s Short Sleeve t-shirt
  • Women’s Long Sleeve t-shirt
  • Women’s Polo
  • Hats (One)
  • Signage
  • Room Names / Braille
  • Restrooms
  • Directories
  • Maps
  • Instructions (wash hands)
• How a product is presented or packaged and served
• How will your customer place their order?
  • ecom, call in, email, in-person.
• How will your customer get their product?
  • Personal delivery, by mail, customer pick up.
• Do you install or instruct?

Price:

• What is the fair market rate of each item sold?
• How do customers pay? Can they pay online? Deposits? Pay in full?

Promotion:

• What channels are you currently utilizing?
  • New business: Nothing because your business hasn’t started.
  • Existing business: Google My Business? Social Media? Word of Mouth? YouTube? Paid Advertising?
• What channels are you capable of utilizing?
  • Can build a website? Can you hire someone to build one?
  • Can you afford a paid advertising budget?
  • Are there live events you can attend?
  • Do you have a personality for social media/YouTube?

Place:

• Are your products sold online? In store? 3rd party?
• Do customers need to be local?
• Are your products only sold with your physical presence? (e.g., signs)
• Is there anywhere you won’t / can’t sell?

BONUS

Once you have 4Ps then you need to look at your demographics

• What is the face of your customer or their profile / avatar?
  • e.g., local small business owners – Dentists, Drs, Pharmacy, Interior Designers, Real Estate, Golf Course

Now that you have the 4Ps and your Demographics. You can start answering questions:

• Should you start a TikTok?
• Should you do local paid advertising?
• Would doing Google ads be a good idea?
• Is renting a booth at a farmers market going to be profitable?

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello and welcome to episode 189 of The Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. My name is Marc Vila, and today, we have a fantastic guest with us, Sara Isom. So welcome to the podcast.

Sara Isom:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Marc Vila:
Thank you. So Sara works on the marketing team over here at ColDesi. She’s a marketing manager over here. And the topic that we’re going to discuss today are the four Ps of marketing, okay? So why don’t you tell us a little bit about why you need to know about the four Ps and then we’ll get into what the Ps are after that.

Sara Isom:
So the four Ps represent the, I’d say, format of any marketing-based strategy. In order to understand how your marketing structure should be built, you need to answer the questions under each of the Ps. Once we have the answers, we have set our foundation to building out a true marketing strategy. So while tactics and channels can change constantly for marketing, this remains the same. Understanding these Ps will help you gain the knowledge, the information and the foresight to build a strategic strategy for your marketing.

Marc Vila:
Okay, great, great. So to bring that back, to layman term it, is that somebody is going to ask you, “Should you open up a TikTok account?” or you might ask somebody, “Should I open up a TikTok account? Should I bring my business to TikTok?” And there’s some other things I wrote down here, “Should you do local paid advertising? Should you do Google Ads? Should you rent a booth at a farmers’ market?” So in general, all of these are great marketing ideas for the customization business, just as a general standpoint. So being on social media, yes. Having a website, going to local farmers’ markets, these are all great ideas, but when it comes down to your business, actually figuring out if it’s right for you depends on the answers and the information within your four Ps of marketing.

And I love relating things to the real world, right? So I like to barbecue grill. It’s one of the things I like to do. I’ve got a bunch of little hobbies and that’s one of them. And somebody would say, a friend of mine had said, “I was thinking about making a brisket,” right? And I knew about what they had in their yard. And I just said, “You can’t do it with what you have. You don’t want to do it with what you have. Here’s an alternative recipe that’s pretty close with the tools that you have.” So somebody would say, “What’s the best barbecue you could make?” And somebody’s answer might be brisket, right? Well, not for his backyard. You just had a gas grill with nothing else and that’s not really something that’s known to be done. A smoked brisket is not really something you’re going to do in a gas grill.

Sara Isom:
And maybe one day, but not today.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, Not today. Yeah, not today, not with the tools that you have. So that’s what this is about, is, should you start a TikTok and start doing things for your business on there? Well, I don’t know what tools you have. I don’t know what is in your business space to really properly answer that. So if anybody comes to you in your business and doesn’t know much about it and tells you, “You should be doing this,” or, “Why aren’t you doing that?” you always have to remember that they may or may not know those four Ps of your business and the advice might not be sound or the suggestion might not be the best one. So you’ve got to do what’s right exactly for your business and it’s going to revolve all around what these four Ps are.

So why don’t we dive into those? We’ll describe what these four Ps are, help you to figure out the answers for yourself and it’d be great if you put these into a Word document or an Excel or something like that, so you can start to track this information for yourself. And then at the end of it, with some examples, we can actually answer some of the questions we brought up in the beginning. So why don’t you tell us the first P in the four Ps?

Sara Isom:
All right, so you will see in the real world the Ps are represented, usually the first P and these aren’t always in the same order, would be product. And it’s the information surrounding the product that you have and that’s product or service. So this would be represented by the overall product, product lines and variations of those products. So really getting to know the product or products that you are selling. That could be what the product is, what does it do, how does it serve the public, but then even breaking it down further into what does your product represent and what represents it. So what is the product? What are the categories? What are the individual lines?

I think an example that I usually give is a bakery and representing the different product categories would be something like cookies, cupcakes and donuts and breaking it down by product line. If I was looking at donuts, it might be cream-filled versus a different kind of donut. I don’t even know donuts, donut holes, right? And you can break it further down into the variations of donut holes. So really understanding that knowledge. Also representing within this product element is the packaging, how things are carried out, can a product be delivered. Understanding all of these, and a lot of it seems operational, gives the marketing or the person that’s either on the marketing team, if you have a team, if there’s an individual doing it within your company, it gives us an understanding of where we fit into the mix, what is needed from marketing in order to service these products, the product lines and so forth.

Marc Vila:
Okay. So in our industry, we’re typically going to be in apparel, promotional goods, customized goods, anything like that, so from science to wall art to T-shirts and everything in between. So if we were to break down your product categories in this example, potentially your business could focus on workwear and signage. Maybe you mainly are working in healthcare and you have a few other areas that you work in. So I made some notes based on the example that you provided or based on your description, I made an example. How about that?

Sara Isom:
Mm-hmm.

Marc Vila:
Okay, so for one, we are not getting going to get into a debate of whether a donut hole is a donut, okay? But I’ve imagined that there’s some sort of debate there. So we have product lines or product categories. So if you’re going to define your story, this fictional story, the categories would be workwear and signage, right? That’s the two things they do. They’ve got a UV printer that they print all different types of signage on and then they have mostly workwear that they’re doing. So potentially they’re doing scrubs, they’re doing polo shirts, hats, jackets, things like that. And like I said, mostly medical and potentially in some other areas that have a similar clientele.

On the workwear, now you’ve got product lines, right? So you’ve got your workwear. You do men’s and women’s workwear. That’s just simple. You just offer two different categories. You have men/unisex and then you’ve got women’s cuts for the people who like that. And then the second product line you would have would be signage. And in your signage, maybe you do printed graphics that are images of doctors or images of landscapes and then you also do other types of indoor signage as well. Now the next step below that, and if you have your categories or product lines and you have your variations, so in your workwear, we have women’s short sleeve, women’s long sleeve, women’s polos, hats. And then you have all of that broken down. You can imagine all of the different product lines you have under workwear and the same for signage, right?

Signage, you may have room names with braille printed on them. You’ve got restroom signs, directories maps, instructional things like in the bathroom, it says, “Wash your hands.” So it’s important for your business to go through that first P, even though it may seem really obvious and simple I would say, but you should break down. What are the categories you have, what product lines are under those categories and what are all the variations? And you may not have to define, and I don’t know, and you can tell me if you do, but should you define every variation? Because I feel like, in apparel and promotions, it can get … How deep do you go? Because you don’t necessarily want to say T-shirts and then have every single color listed down because some T-shirts have 40 variations. So where do you start and stop there?

Sara Isom:
Well, you get as detailed as you possibly can. And that’s honestly to understand what it is your marketing will be supporting. If you miss one variation, then you might not support that in your marketing efforts. If we’re talking about red, white, blue and green T-shirts and I never mentioned blue anywhere, then I’ve just left that out of all forms of marketing and promotion, which would be terrible to do in the case of anything that you’re trying to sell. So defining things specifically, even mapping them out, you’re going to have to have that somewhere and why not have it out there in the open so that all of your marketing can influence every variation possible because you’re going to need it.

Marc Vila:
Right. So if you may want to be doing some promotion around like pink ribbons, if you don’t necessarily list or remember or recall or tell somebody you offer lines of pink apparel, they may not consider that in the marketing.

Sara Isom:
And you’ve just missed out on the entire month of October celebrating Breast Cancer Awareness.

Marc Vila:
Right, right. And so in this plan where you were breaking down everything, what if you did actually link to products that you sell? So it wasn’t available that not necessarily you physically put in your Excel sheet every color because that does change over time too. They’re going to, apparel manufacturers, add and remove colors all the time. So what if you maybe linked to the shirts that you sell, so it could be dynamic in your Excel spreadsheet or something like that?

Sara Isom:
Oh, that’s absolutely doable. It’s just more of answering the question for marketing in order to get the understanding of what’s available. When you market it, you market it, but you don’t want to then be blamed for not marketing something that’s on the list. You might not market everything on the list.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Sara Isom:
But you don’t want to miss out on marketing, if that makes sense.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that makes sense. And in the beginning of your small business, this may all be you, right?

Sara Isom:
Yes, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
You may doing it all by yourself.

Sara Isom:
And it sounds like it’s incredibly tedious, but in the same sense, it is already part of operations. You have the list somewhere. You know what you are selling. So it’s just making sure that you understand that when it comes to all things marketing. Because again if you’re selling online like a lot of businesses do, you want to make sure you have every variation because not everyone wants the same thing. There’s uniqueness out there. And then also understanding that you might have variations that you want to do in the future and it’s great to map those out, because the bigger you get, the more product lines you’ll bring on, the more variations and the more money you can potentially make from bringing on multiple variations or product lines.

Marc Vila:
So when you’re defining your product then, theoretically could actually map out the core products that you sell now, right? If we look at apparel manufacturers, blank manufacturers, anything like that, even if you’re selling promotional pens, there are just so many variations out there. There’s really too much for you to truly sell to your customer. There’s books alone of just pens, a whole book of pens and to hand that to your customer can be pretty overwhelming. And the same thing with T-shirts and everything like that. So most of the time, small business owners and people starting up and getting successful pick the lines that they carry. This works with the decorating method that I do. This works with technology that I have these. I like the finished product. I know how much I can sell it for. The type of customer that I sell to likes this.

So for example, if we’re using the example we just mentioned here and you’re going to offer polo-button-up-style shirts, right? Well, if most of your customers are going to be in medical and then maybe some of them work in outdoors like golf, we say, so you have dentists, doctors, psychologists, maybe some golf courses and trainers. If this is a real estate agent … If this is most of your customer range, you’re going to want to pick apparel that suits that, right? So a polo shirt that is probably resistant to sweat and staining probably is good for all these folks. Because real estate and golf, they’re outside. They bump into things that are dirty. And medical, of course, there’s tons of dirty stuff happening there.

So something that’s stain resistance is probably good. You’re probably not going to want something that’s a really thin fabric, that’s cotton, that has no stain resistance, and as soon as the white bumps up to something, you have a stain, all right? So these are the thought processes that you go through and you create your product lines and you get as detailed as reasonably possible. And then maybe the suggestion we said earlier, you can link to these products somewhere, so you can reference them yourselves. And as you grow, it would be great if you brought on an employee to help you market or sell or you decided to do some work with an agency or a freelance marketer that you’ve got something you can hand them right away and you could say, “I put together my four Ps of marketing here a while back and I just updated them for you. Take a look.” And then this gives, whoever’s going to do that sales and marketing, a great opportunity to completely understand what you have to offer.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Okay. And then you mentioned about how a package is presented and served to the customer, which is another thing I wrote some notes on here. So this actually is particularly interesting because it’s important to write it down even though it’s so obvious to you, but how is your customer going to place their order? Are you doing an ecommerce store? Are you doing things via email? Are you selling via a forum or Facebook group? Is everything in person because this is going to definitely change the types of marketing you do? And a really good example would be, if almost everything is in person, the service you offer is you go to these offices and you visit them every month or every week and you take orders for new employees, for people who need replacement apparel, you also help them with their signage, so you’re actually doing a little bit of design like, “Hey, that wall’s blank over there. Maybe we should put something there. What do you think about that?”

So if that’s the case, then some sort of marketing plan that when you show up there, you’ve got a booklet to share or you’re wearing one of the examples, “Hey, by the way, what I’m wearing here, this is a brand new product line that we have. It comes in all these different colors. Here’s a little booklet of it,” that might be an important piece of marketing or sales for you. Compared to somebody who is selling online, having a sample book, it’s relatively useless to them, right?

Sara Isom:
Absolutely. And even we can go as far as if people are coming to you, then you need to brand your company externally and internally in the business. So that could be the difference between if you live in the northern states, then you’re going to need to get an outdoor rug when they enter the building, so it represents a comfort level. Your building might need to be cleaned up on the inside. Things might need to be branded. You might need those pens to walk away with. Whereas if everything’s digital, then you need a very nice strategy from an email standpoint to make sure that you’re doing those personal touches in the customer journey. You need to have that built out.

I use an example of, again, the bakery and the difference between the dine-in and the carry-out. If somebody dines in, you might want a perfectly branded paper plate for them to use or a napkin that establishes the brand of the bakery. Whereas if they carry out, you might want imprinted boxes with the bakery information and even how to get in contact with the bakery. So it’s different obviously for this world and the products within it, but it’s really the same. It’s like, “How are you going to continue to brand yourself?”

Marc Vila:
Right, right. That’s great and it’s a great point, because if you’re delivering the product via mail, do you want to have a fancy colored box that it comes in? Do you want to have special packaging? Do you want stickers to come in the box with it?

Sara Isom:
A handwritten note.

Marc Vila:
A handwritten note. These are all great things. Where if you’re delivering and setting up and doing everything in person, you may decide that, “Well, what if I got a clothing rack that I can bring and I literally bring it and unpack it outside of the car and then hang stuff on it where people can try on samples?” And then when you deliver the product, maybe you don’t necessarily need a box and paper and stickers and all of these things because you’re going to hand something to the person. Maybe use a baggie or maybe just the shirt by itself is just fine.

And then further, talking about signage, if you’re installing the sign yourself, you don’t have to deliver it in any way. As long as it travels safely with you and you’re going to probably bring your own hardware and know where to put it and the finished product is up on the wall versus if you’re mailing it to them or just giving them the sign, do you want to provide hardware or not, instructions on how to hang it up? How is it going to get delivered properly? How is that going to look?

Sara Isom:
But that delivery and setup, that’s huge because you want to make sure if it’s you or if it’s someone that you work with or that works for you. You need to make sure that they’re branded, that their customer service is on point with your brand, so that again we’re creating that customer journey. So those people that are getting the install are getting the quality that you want your company to represent.

Marc Vila:
Right. Well, because anybody wearing some sort of a one-piece overalls, you can just go in any building and start installing things and nobody’s pretty much going to stop you, right? If you just have a one-suit thing with a name tag on it. The reason I know this is because I’ve watched a lot of movies.

Sara Isom:
Well, and I trust men in overalls.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, see, exactly. So in the movies all the time, if you want to install a secret camera somewhere, you just put on the overall or I don’t know what you call the one-piece mechanic type of uniform. I don’t know the word for that. Somebody does, yelling it out there, but if you have a name tag, you can just walk in anywhere. But the point is because they look like they belong there, they look good. You mentioned customer service being friendly. So these are all things are in part important if you’re hanging up signage and there’s marketing opportunities along that way. When they come, they could deliver a final invoice, but with that could come a postcard or a coupon or a way to get referrals, something like that.

So there’s a lot to be said there. Maybe even if you have printed signage with graphics, for example, that you hang up to decorate places, maybe there’s some sort of a marketing program where you say, “Hey, if I could put my logo tiny in the bottom corner, you get 10% off,” right? There’s a million marketing and opportunities, but you’re not going to think about those or be in the right mindset or be able to share that with a marketing agency or a marketing person unless they really understand all of these things down to how it’s delivered, how it’s ordered, what products you’re selling, all of that.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Okay, so now that we’ve got product, the next P we have is price. So that sounds pretty simple, right?

Sara Isom:
Yeah. Again, it sounds simple and it is in a way. So of course, price, it’s the cost of the product. And really what you’re looking at is, what is the fair market value? What are your competitors selling the product or service for? And then what is your target audience like buying this product or service at an average rate? Understanding, “Will you be able to offer any sort of discounts? Will you have payment options? Do people pay upfront? Do they pay in installments?” Understanding the entirety of the pricing of any product or service within your company is really what we’re getting at here.

Marc Vila:
And I think that there’s something to be said. By the way, I don’t think that’s your email that’s going off. I think that’s on your computer, is it?

Sara Isom:
No.

Marc Vila:
No? That’s not where the sound is coming from.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, I don’t have sound.

Marc Vila:
Oh, I didn’t think I did either. Well, anyway, maybe it’s another room. If you’re hearing that, maybe actually it is your email out there listening. Maybe it is. I think I’m muted here. Oh, it’s coming through my headphones. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. That sound’s not coming from my headphones though. All right, so price, there’s something to be said about strategy with price too and you could probably write this down that you’re going after a premium market, so you’re going to be selling the premium price. Why? While going back up to the product, I deliver it, install it, help them decide where it’s going to go, make the suggest, “I’m doing design and installation and production. Therefore, my sign costs $200.” They can buy one on the internet maybe for 50, but it doesn’t come with any of those things.

So the price, what does it go for is important and then also the strategy behind it, “I sell a premium product.” Also going back up, “Well, the polos that we sell are moisture-wicking, stain-resistant, odor-blocking, all of these things. They’re great for the market that I’m in, compared to, yes, there’s a polo you can buy for five bucks that doesn’t have any of those properties and it’s not really ideal for my customer base.” So that’s an important thing. You want to mark down what you’re selling. Do you have a pricing strategy? And there’s all different types of ways to do pricing. I think we’ll probably have a whole podcast on this.

Sara Isom:
Oh, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
But let’s just say you want to sell everything at a certain margin and that’s how you price, so everything needs to be at X percent margin. So you can write that down in your pricing and just talk about that as a strategy. And then within price, it’s also about how the customer interacts with that pricing, so, “How do they pay? Can they pay online? Is there a portal they pay online through or do you just literally give them your Venmo or does it have to be checks? Do they pay a deposit? Do they have to pay in full? Is it all paid for at the end?” These are all part of the strategy, and marketing, as we talk about marketing as an entity, now in your business, marketing just might be you.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Or it might just be your wife or your husband or your son.

Sara Isom:
Which is a lot of small and medium-sized businesses. Believe it or not, 90% of small and medium-sized businesses are marketing internally.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s expensive to hire somebody.

Sara Isom:
Absolutely, it is.

Marc Vila:
And you have to be prepared to take that leap to hire an agency or to hire a freelancer or to hire a full-time employee to do that. And you have to grow yourself to be a part of that. Now, the most likely for you to be successful and get to that point is by doing exercises like this because you’re thinking a growing larger business. You’ve got a plan. And when you are ready to hire somebody or hire somebody to do something for you to take over marketing, whatever your plans are, you’ve got all of this in place. You’ve got the strategy, the pricing, the products and the other Ps to be revealed there. So it’s all part of the strategy. It’s important that you write all the stuff down. And in regards to pricing, how else can it affect marketing? Is there anything else you want to add?

Sara Isom:
Well, first, I want to say, I can’t stress this enough, understanding what your competitors are doing from a price standpoint is something that you really need to figure out and that’s as simple as doing some secret shopping, calling them up, searching the web, placing some orders just to see how they’re pricing items, asking about their discounts, asking what discounts they have. Do they have age discount? Do they have a veterans discount? Do they offer special certain times of the year? Getting into that really helps you establish some of your goals of what your pricing structure should look like and any opportunities you could take advantage of from a discounting standpoint. But yeah, really it breaks down to just … Again, a lot of it sounds operational, but it’s what marketing will use to promote your products.

Marc Vila:
Right. Actually, that’s interesting because there’s two ways. There’s your own strategy that has to do with the customers that you have and then what your competition is doing. So in your market, like you mentioned, if they have an advertised pricing, because this is a tricky thing that happens all the time in business, that if they have advertised pricing, they almost never sell at that price. So you think you’re coming into the market equal to their price, finding out that they discount everything 20% or the other way around, they advertise, and this is actually the one that I see a lot, especially in the custom apparel business, is T-shirts from 3.99 and then somebody will post to a forum, “How do I even compete with this company who sells three shirts for three T-shirts for $3.99?”

And then that’s not the whole price. Because they’ll have a setup fee and they’ll have a whatever fee and a waste disposal fee. It’s like tires are the same thing, right? Like, “Get tires for $99 a piece,” and then four tires is $700.

Sara Isom:
Or they’re simply selling that 3.99 shirt, it starts at. They might have a shirt and it might say, “Happy New Year 2001,” and they’re selling it at 3.99 and that makes sense, but then everything else jumps up to $15.

Marc Vila:
Right. So it very well could be cheapest T-shirt, white only, front print only, single color. They may have very strict guidelines to that. And maybe that’s exactly the opposite of what you sell because you know your product lines. Your product lines, if we’re talking again about *T-shirts, you’re using a higher end shirt, you offer a bunch of different colors, and if you print digitally, then you don’t have any color limits. It doesn’t cost you more money to print more colors because you’re using a digital T-shirt printer or a transfer printer. So in these cases, you’re not necessarily comparing apples to apples per se. So it is important to dive into what your competition sells for and then knowing the products that you want to sell.

One of the problems that we run into in small business owners, customization for sure, is they see the product catalog of everything that they can decorate and it’s like phone book thick. In the future, if you’re listening to this and this is 20 years later in the future, there used to be a book that you got that they’ve left on your doorstep with all the numbers of things and then-

Sara Isom:
It was yellow.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it was yellow. And then eventually, nobody used it, but they kept delivering it. So then basically people just left a trash on your doorstep for a handful of years and they’ve stopped it now, so-

Sara Isom:
I think it became a door stop.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it became a door stop. So anyway, we could say that wraps up price there. I’m was diverging too far, okay? We’ve had enough there. So let’s go ahead and go into the next one because we’re making pretty good pace on our episode here. So the next one we have is promotion.

Sara Isom:
Yeah. So basically how you advertise your product or service. This is where we get into a little bit of the difference between marketing and advertising. So with promotion, you would have to ask yourself, what are you capable of from a marketing standpoint? What are you currently doing? What could you currently be doing? And that’s anywhere from, “Yes, I have a website, but I’m not managing it, somebody else’s and we really don’t make updates,” to, “Yes, I have a Facebook page and I’ve dabbled a little bit in advertising, but I just don’t know if it works for me or not.” Because we get the gist of your capabilities, then we can start building the strategy behind that and we can find out and start understanding what channels might have worked in the past, and looking into the future, what channels might be adequate for your business and your business model.

Marc Vila:
That’s good. So when it comes to kind of promotion, promoting your business, if you are a brand new business and you’re a startup, because some folks listening right now haven’t even started yet, they’re right at the beginning of the idea and other folks have been doing this for a while and some are very, very established. So you answer promotion differently depending where you are. And if you’re a new business, these are theoretical things. So you mentioned a website. Are you very capable of building a website already? Do you have that skillset? If you are, then probably building a website’s pretty good idea because you can do it on your own. You have that capability. If you have no technical capability of building a website, then you’re going to want to work into your plan, “Do I want to pay somebody to build a website? How much is that going to cost? Does it matter for the products that I want to sell?”

Because in the new business, everything here is theoretical. The concept of doing the signs and the apparel for those businesses mentioned, the doctors, dentist, real estate agents, golf, I think is what we said, that’s theoretical right now. So, “Should I have a website for those folks?” would be a question. And I’m thinking just answer it for this one, business-to-business sales professionals, educated folks, nice offices, when you show up and go to sell to them, they may want to look up your website later or share it to the owners or the board or whoever’s in the decision-making process. So having a nice, classy, upscale-looking website that shows how you can represent them is probably a really good idea.

Conversely, if you sell T-shirts, local stuff to tourists, they’re probably not going home and then jumping online and ordering something from your website because they forgot to get a shirt like a Finger Lakes T-shirt or something like that, “I forgot to get it. I’m going to order one online now.” No, they’re probably not going to do that. So having the website matters less, but how you can promote what you’re capable of doing and theoretically of what you would do is really important, and then of course, if you’re an existing business, what do you have right now.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, and the capability, it’s not all on you. An example would be there are certain places within the United States where you might not be able to run a local radio advertisement because the range of the nearest network is not close enough to fall within your demographic. It would be spread among an 80, 90-mile radius, which wouldn’t be adequate for radio local. That being said, not everything is under your control, but establishing elements of control is a good idea. And by capability, it’s not only what are you and your staff, if you have staff, capable of, but also what can you afford? What does your budget look like now?

Because what this portion of the P should help represent is what is the best bang for your buck? What is your best return on investment? And the idea is to always start off frugal because you need to put more money into your business in other areas than marketing. But again, marketing represents the lead generation that you need to grow your business. So in order to first stabilize and establish, you really need to set forth a very stringent plan on what can truly be done from a marketing and advertising effort.

Marc Vila:
Right, okay, and it’s tricky, right? Because promotion, marketing, advertising, all of these words that mean different things, but they’re lumped together, none of it’s ever guaranteed.

Sara Isom:
Never.

Marc Vila:
Right? It’s never guaranteed, which is why it’s important to establish a budget. And these are all separate topics for a different podcast, but it’s good to overlay all this information. So it’s good to understand what’s available for you in your area. You mentioned maybe radio is available for some people and they want to do that for certain reason. I can’t think of any of those reasons at this point in time, but somebody … If you’re a car dealer, for some reason, you have to be on the radio screaming, by the way. I don’t know why that’s the case, but you have to scream on the radio. But for a local sign shop or an apparel business or some sort of customization business, the radio may or may not make sense. Are there billboards in your area? Are there print advertising in the area?

Sara Isom:
Or even trade shows.

Marc Vila:
Are there trade shows? Yeah.

Sara Isom:
When you think of the difference between paid advertising and not paid advertising, there’s so many efforts that you can do that don’t cost money. They cost time and energy, but they don’t cost money, but they might not be within your area. We’ve talked about selling to golf apparel. Well, say, that you just had an online store and you were selling golf apparel and you really wanted to get into some of these golf outings and things like that happening, but there were no local golf clubs, then you’d be out of luck.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Sara Isom:
If you really wanted to get into farmers’ markets, but there’s no farmers’ markets in your area, you’re out of luck. Not everything is within your capability, but that’s part of understanding your area and what’s going on.

Marc Vila:
Right. So this is a great both actual and theoretical that you can … And this is part of the promotion thing. You should probably be writing both of these things now, “So what am I doing right now?” And it literally just might be, “Well, nothing,” if you’re brand new, right? But it might just be referrals and that’s it. You’re only working on referrals and you’d like to go your business to the next level. So you need to write down the next piece. What are the ones that are potential piece, potential promotions, right? So that’s where you could put, “Well, I could potentially print. There’s these local print advertisements I could do. I potentially put up a sign at the elementary school.”

There’s a million different things you could do and I’m not saying that any of these are good or bad ideas because I don’t know your business, right? I don’t know these four Ps that we’re getting into right now for your business, but you can figure out which one of these are. And then just from a standpoint that you mentioned about starting frugal in the beginning, I do like that. If you’ve got a really deep pocket and you’ve got an investor or you have a ton of money you’ve saved up, then yes, it’s very easy to say, “I’m going to put 2,000 here and 2,000 here and 5,000 here and 8,000 here and I’m going to spend 20,000 something dollars to start marketing my business.” Well great, you’re willing to take all that risk, but a lot of startups and even businesses that are been growing over years, you don’t have $20,000 you’re willing or able to invest in marketing. So you can start with frugal concepts that you can test.

So there’s a farmers’ market that goes around your area within 5,000 miles and there’s 40 stops throughout the year, right? So you want to decide, is that a good way to promote your business? Well, can you sign up for one or three maybe? Maybe you don’t give up on one, maybe three. Can you sign up for two or three or four of them? And you try them out, see how they go. And we’ve talked in the past in previous episodes about tracking your marketing and understanding the long-term value of customers and all of these things, but this is something you can look to test and start and you can also do the same with print ads. And you can do the same with all the other marketing channels.

You know you sell online, so you could do online type of advertisements, meaning on your website, email marketing, social media. Conversely, you only sell in person, so you can bring flyers, you can bring print materials, you can bring your clothing rack.

Sara Isom:
And making all printed materials if you do have a website digital with a QR code.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, combining these things together. If you have a website and you have print that you do in person, so your business card could have a QR code, say, “View the virtual catalog.” That business card with a QR code that says, “View the virtual catalog,” only works if you have all those things, meaning you’re in a position to hand out cards and you have a virtual catalog to do. So that concept in promotion doesn’t exist for some businesses and does … Somebody got scared. I don’t know if anybody can hear that, but that is, if you didn’t hear it, somebody screamed. And what you’re hearing is, in the office next to us, is the accounting office and this wonderful young lady that works in there is so frightened by people walking by.

It’s comical and it’s a joke within the building. I’ve gotten coffee or water and I’ve just walked into the kitchen and she’s done that scream and that happened the other day actually. And one another gentleman was coming by and he’s like, “I always ask her if it’s my face that makes her scream.”

Sara Isom:
I just wonder if hypertension is covered under work [inaudible 00:43:45].

Marc Vila:
Yeah, she’s young right now, so she’s okay, but in 20 years, there will be. And yes, high blood pressure medication is covered by her insurance, by the way.

Sara Isom:
There we go.

Marc Vila:
So I think we’ve covered up promotion a lot. There’s so many different things we could talk about, social media, YouTube channels, live events, paid advertisement, whether that’s print or digital, billboards to radios. So there’s a ton of different things, but to sum it up, you should write down what you’re doing, what you want to do because maybe you have a gut feeling that it’s a good idea or you desire to do it. For example, not to diverge too much, but you just might want to be a YouTube type of personality, you enjoy it, you like the camera, you like editing and you want to do it. Well, that’s okay to put that in your promotion area if you’re not doing it yet and you desire to do it.

Go back up and figure out what product and price you can add or remove or change to make that channel come true. It doesn’t have to be locked in. This is your business. That’s the great thing about why people do all this stuff, is because it’s your business. You could do what you want. So do the things that you are doing. Do the things that you want to do or potentially could do or you think is a good idea. And then I would still write down the things that are potential in your area that you might not think is a good idea or want to do yet, but you should acknowledge that those opportunities exist for promotion.

Because you may look at all of this together and say, “I’m not a fan of print ads, but when I’m looking at all this and I’m looking at my customers and what I charge and the service I offer, and as I’m visiting them, I see all of them have this one publication that’s thrown around in their desks. This is the fourth time I’ve seen it, so I know that they’re looking at it. I’m not a fan of print ads, but I actually think this might work for my customers. I’m seeing it right there.” So then you can test it out. So that’s why it’s important to write down just the potential opportunities too.

Sara Isom:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
Anything else you want to add, then we have the last P?

Sara Isom:
No, I think we’re ready for place.

Marc Vila:
Okay. So place, as you mentioned, revealed the final P. So I have some notes, I can read them out here. Are your products sold online, in store? We addressed a little bit of this earlier, but this is very specific.

Sara Isom:
And they blend. They all should sound like they’re blending together a little bit because they all represent the entirety of the operational aspect of your company. So places where you sell your products and that means distribution channels and how your customers are receiving those. So again, online, if you have an eCommerce store, if you sell in person, if you sell third party where your audience receives this. So if you’re selling through a third party, say that you have something like you have an Amazon store, are they getting most of their stuff from the Amazon? Do you have more clients on the Amazon side of things or your ecomm side of things? Where are the majority of your customers purchasing? That gives you a great understanding of the effort you need to put towards that area.

And then the other efforts that you need to open up. Because if you have an eCommerce store and you also sell in person based on the number of customers coming to one area is where you should start putting your marketing dollars or more marketing dollars. If you want to improve an area, you need to adjust those marketing dollars to the next channel, but it gives us an understanding of all of that.

Marc Vila:
Right, we have a lot of customers that sell eBay, Etsy, Amazon, for example. And if a good portion of your sales are actually coming from eBay traffic because of the product and niche you sell, it happens to live there, then eBay has ways for you to promote your ads. And you may find that you want to try to do paid advertisement there. The place where your customers are is really important to the overall marketing health. If your customers need to be local, meaning that you help design signs, so you’re physically present for all of it, then doing some online ad that’s outside of your area really doesn’t work because you’re not going to travel 150 miles to print and hang up a sign that costs $150, right? You’re not going to do that.

So you need to make sure that you’re focusing all of your marketing on what’s going to happen within the area, “Well, I’m willing to work in a 50-mile radius. So now that I understand that,” as the person in charge of your marketing, “I need to understand that all of my marketing needs to be designed that can handle within this 50 mile radius. Anything beyond that is going to be a waste of time, energy, money, absolutely, etcetera.

Sara Isom:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
So even an example is a YouTube channel might not make sense for that. There’s just things like that.

Sara Isom:
Absolutely. And honestly, looking at your audience now against the audience you want to have and looking at where they are purchasing from. Your audience now might be the demographic that you have today, but it might not be the demographic that you need to grow your business. So ideally, again, this is a little bit of competitive marketing, but doing your research in what other competitors are bringing in from a demographic standpoint, “What do their customers look like and how are their customers finding them?” is always a great way of building your strategy and future strategy when it comes to your marketing and advertising efforts.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, no, that’s great and I love that they all do kind of blend together.

Sara Isom:
All blend. People think that you’re answering the same question over and over again and you are in a way, but it all means something different. It goes in a different pot.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, no, it’s very true that it’s so related, but when you add all this stuff together, you really get a really good picture of how you can market, what you can market, where you should do things and you actually start answering your own questions where somebody will come to you and say, “Oh, a friend of mine had a little T-shirt company that they ran and they made a bunch of money on YouTube.” And in your head, you could be thinking-

Sara Isom:
“That’s great, but you don’t have a website.”

Marc Vila:
“And all of my customers are local because I walk in and sell. I just don’t really have a product that’s a YouTube-selling product because I sell to local doctor, dentist, real estate and the golf community in my area. So it’s just not where ideally I’d be selling. I have a different marketing strategy for that.” And all of that comes into play from place, price, promotion, product, all comes together if you decide how you properly market, who you’re going to market to. But there’s one additional bonus piece that you really need to answer, right?

Sara Isom:
And you’ve heard this throughout, it’s answering the question about, “Who is your target demographic?” So a lot of times we know that. We know our customer base now, and while that will change over time, depending on if we want to grow the business, we want to maximize efforts, but we know ideally who this custom database looks like. And that helps us fill in the blanks of the questions that will later answer, but it all falls into place with each of these Ps. You’ve heard Marc talk about the dental offices, the real estate building, that face of the people that have built your business, is a great thing to answer. This can be, I should say, looking at not only age, race, gender, looking at income level, occupation, marital status.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, education.

Sara Isom:
All gives us an idea of how they get to you or how they should be getting to you from a marketing standpoint.

Marc Vila:
Right, right, and there’s so much to be said about that. I feel like that’s a podcast in of itself too, right?

Sara Isom:
It really is.

Marc Vila:
But you don’t answer the four Ps to get to your demographics. You don’t start with your demographics. The starting point, in my opinion on this one thinking about it, is which one you answer first can be different for everybody. And the reason why, even price could be first. Because if you say, “I want to make this much money and I can work this many hours, and in that many hours, I can make this many things,” then you immediately know how much you have to charge and then you back up …

Sara Isom:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
… and you could say, “If I need to charge $50 a T-shirt,” right? There are people in this world that buy $50 T-shirts every single day, right? Maybe not the people buying them every day, but every day those transactions happen. So you need to say, “Well, who would I sell $50 to? Okay, well, it has to be a high-quality shirt, it has to be this, it has to be this.” So now you start understanding the product that you’re going to sell, then you can start understanding, “Well, where will I sell it? Where are people that are going to buy $50 T-shirts? How am I going to promote? What’s the promotion that I run to move that?” And maybe in that case you may say, “TikTok and YouTube sound great,” for what you’re saying because you’re trying to sell a super unique high-value T-shirt.

You can really start with any one of these or you can start with the demographics. If you know that you’re a member of a local car enthusiast club, then if that’s the case, you know your demographic and you can start backing up to answering your four Ps there. But you’ve got to have all of this together and then you can start answering marketing, advertising type of questions.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, yeah. Because again, by establishing who your target market is, it helps you define your strategy. That’s not only any promotional or advertisement, but also marketing support. And it helps you build the customer journey that a customer would need to even make a marketing or a selling decision, a buying decision, I should say.

Marc Vila:
Right. Well, to wrap it up, we can go back to the questions we asked in the beginning, now that we know and just using the one example, but we can add in others if we want, but if we say that your business is selling to these local places that we’ve said numerous times and-

Sara Isom:
So we said dentist office.

Marc Vila:
Dentist, doctor, real estate, golf, that’s the area you live in. There’s a lot of customers you have in that and you have different product lines that you sell within there and you’re mainly selling to the business owner. And you sell a nice high-end, good quality product, so they can buy it and they look crisp and clean and professional every single day with your product and the same with the atmosphere that they’re in. So should they start a TikTok? Do you have an answer to that?

Sara Isom:
Should they start a TikTok?

Marc Vila:
Yeah, they don’t do TikTok. A business owner now doesn’t do TikTok. Should they have a TikTok channel?

Sara Isom:
And this is where I would break down it, to me, it doesn’t … Well, first off, looking at those business types, I would say, who is the decisionmaker for actually purchasing your product? If, for instance, the dentist, doctor or real estate agent, if they were the decisionmakers, I would say it’s not necessary if you don’t have a person that has ample time for it.

Marc Vila:
Right, and that’s what I would say too.

Sara Isom:
And I wouldn’t say that it would be an advertising effort. It could be a promotional effort in the way of just have it into spread your brand awareness, but not necessarily putting dollars behind it because it doesn’t seem like that’s your demographic. Now, if the decisionmakers within those offices were 20 somethings, then maybe that would be, but you got to look at your demographic.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, it’s a good point. I think I would just hard no. I think I would just hard no and I would say-

Sara Isom:
It’s always hard to-

Marc Vila:
Yeah, I would say if you can spend an hour and a week on TikTok, spend an hour and a week getting in the car, stopping by the local places that you can do that and drop something off, say hello, give them something for free.

Sara Isom:
Start sponsoring those golf outings.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, sponsor the golf outing. Show up when they’re having an event and just support them. Even if you’re not selling there, just they’re having some sort of a picnic thing on a Sunday at their golf club or the course, show up. Spend an hour on that rather than an hour on TikTok. But yeah, you make a pretty good point that there are always nuances that maybe if there’s a lot of young decisionmakers, maybe you can show up to the offices and do a TikTok with them and make them feel like they’re-

Sara Isom:
A little collab.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, a little collaboration or they feel like they’re part of your little community and it could ingrain them in. So I’m not saying that that couldn’t be very successful.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, we’ll see where TikTok goes.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. But otherwise, I would just say it’s just probably not necessary at this point in time, unless-

Sara Isom:
No dollars behind it.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And you could probably demographic that down based in TikTok’s advertising. You could specifically say that you want to advertise to 30 to 50-year-olds and they do have a growing population on TikTok. And you could ask TikTok just to advertise to those people if you wanted to. However, I just think that there’s a lot quicker ways you can get a return on your investment for this particular business. Now, should you do local paid advertising?

Sara Isom:
Well, if you’ve got the dentist, the doctor, I’m sure there’s more than one of them out there in your local area. That would be a great effort to maximize your return on investment by promoting locally. There’s so many different avenues of that from grassroots up to paid. Paid local. Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, so I would say paid local is probably great. If you notice the magazine that they all have, that’s a local magazine, if you notice the-

Sara Isom:
Sponsorship of-

Marc Vila:
The sponsorship, yes, of events or something like that.

Sara Isom:
Little league, farmers’ markets and this, because it sounds like everybody falls under healthcare, maybe not real estate. There’s so many efforts and then referral programs. Right now, small businesses live and die off of their referral programs, and making sure if you don’t have one, you’re establishing one. But keeping a referral program that truly does, you’ve got the numbers, you’ve got the data behind it, that would be where money should be put.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s great. So you could do … If we’re talking about local paid, you can have some sort of a way to promote financially that referral program. So the next one we had and we could short quick on these, but, “Would doing Google Ads be a good idea?” I’d probably say you can target zip codes and these people might be searching for, “Where do I get uniforms for my doctor’s office?” something to that effect. So I’d put it on a maybe experiment with, but you’d have to make sure whatever you’re advertising, you can definitely pinpoint to the zip codes that you work in, which you can do that stuff on most any platform nowadays.

Sara Isom:
Yeah, and I would say, before putting money behind ads, first truly establishing your Google My Business page, that’s where your effort should go. Google My Business will outrake most of your websites at this point. COVID put that into effect for us. And establishing a very firm Google My Business plan where you are constantly updating, making sure you’ve got your images in place, making sure that if you have products placed, that they are represented with the correct dollar amounts behind them and that you’re asking for reviews. It should be part of your referral program. It should be part of any customer experience. You should be asking for reviews and getting those. And just maintaining that to its fullest will give you a better return on investment than a lot of the paid efforts that Google will have. Most of the time you’re found through search engine optimization, which is Google My Business rather than paid advertising.

Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s a great interjection on a thought there too. So in these questions we’ve asked, these are just random questions, right? But it’s a really good point because when somebody says, “Should you advertise on Google?”

Sara Isom:
Locally.

Marc Vila:
“Locally advertise on Google?” the first question probably should be, “Well, have you set up a Google business profile that’s topnotch first?” And if you say no, do that. And then have the conversation about advertising on Google because that’s the free thing they give you at first, which will land you a lot of business. Yes. The next, two more quick questions is, should you do the farmers’ market thing for this business? I definitely think it’s worth a try. You’ll probably run into a lot of these business owners there. Maybe you’re not going to sell signs or uniforms at the market, but you may have a booth where you introduce people, “Ask me about uniforms for your professional business.”

Sara Isom:
Have some samples sitting out.

Marc Vila:
Have some samples sitting out. Ask about how to produce sign, “I could produce any sign for any business. Talk to me about it and you can have examples of hand washing signs and directions and directories and braille,” and all these things you can print with your UV printer if you have one of those.

Sara Isom:
Well, and there’s so many different things that you can do at a farmers’ market. If you don’t have somebody capable of sitting behind a booth or if you can’t afford a booth or if you can’t afford a booth and to brand the booth, which needs to be done, then you might just go to network. It might just be a handshake and a business card. You might be wearing one of your products or carrying a sign, something that can get you in the door. If the farmers’ market allows you to bring things in without necessarily having a booth, you might be handing out items there.

Marc Vila:
You might be able to even just sponsor with a sign, so you can make a very cool looking sign that they let you put up, that they let you just put up. So maybe your sponsorship is not a booth, but you just have a sign at the entrance that they let you put up a really cool looking design that you UV printed and then it says, “I can make any sign for any business,” and you have something very eye-catching for everybody who walks and sees.

Sara Isom:
Or for an even more frugal marketing strategy, which is what I like the most is, for the tax write off, you support the farmers’ market by printing signs for them and establish …

Marc Vila:
Yeah, there you go.

Sara Isom:
… that tax break.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. So there’s a lot of great things you could do there by partnering with them potentially …

Sara Isom:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
… for signs or uniforms or something to that effect. Okay, well, maybe we had some other random questions, but I think we’ve got the point across really well here. And I think the homework or what you would take home from this is if you’re about to start a business or you have an existing one, I would take out a Word document or an Excel sheet or something, write out your piece and your demographics and write them out and see if it makes sense. And if something doesn’t align right, you may have found a solution on why your business is a little stagnant or not growing as fast as you want or you’re not as profitable. We have people consistently talk about their success and how well they’re doing or we can see it in with the amount of supplies or apparel they purchase.

And we have consistently also have folks say how they’re struggling, “The ink costs too much for me to be profitable,” or, “The T-shirts cost too much for me to make money,” or, “I can’t sell enough, I can’t compete,” and theoretically, that means that your Ps are not aligned. If you’re saying that it cost too much to print something, well, you have a printer that that’s capable of doing something and you’re trying to sell in a market that doesn’t uphold that price. So you need to probably adjust your demographics or where you’re selling or how you’re selling or something like that, right?

Sara Isom:
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think, furthermore, if you look at your business model after completing the Ps and looking at your demographics, look at the ones around you, look at your competitors and you’re going to start to see holes. Some of the holes you filled, but some are empty. What are your competitors doing that is working? You can see this by filling out the piece. You can see where you’re lacking. And this will hopefully help you move the efforts to fill those holes and grow your business.

Marc Vila:
If you pay attention to this and actually do the exercise, you’ll absolutely see things. And overall, this one thing that popped in my head was I went to one of the fancy grocery stores and they had this caviar section, right? And it was just like, “I’m not going to buy that.” But they have $150 or $200 jar there. And for some reason, that popped in my head when we were talking about this and I said, “If you were selling that jar at a local farmers’ market where the demographic is not people who would spend $150 on anything that was that little for food, then would you leave the market and just be like, ‘How can I compete? The guy next to me was selling homemade cupcakes for $2 apiece. How do I possibly compete with that?'”

And I would say, “Well,” obviously this is an exaggerated example, “but that doesn’t make any sense. Well, why would you try to advertise that at a market where most of the food things that can be bought are like 5 to 10 bucks and you’re trying to sell $150 a jar of caviar? That seems absurd,” and it is. But the problem is that some people when they start a small business, they might not be as exaggerated as that, but that’s the situation they’re putting themselves in, is that they’re trying to sell way out of market, whether it’s too low on price for the technology they’re doing or it’s too high on price or they’re not trying to sell to the right people. They’re trying to advertise $6 T-shirts on Facebook and it’s like, “Well, it’s going to cost you $6 for every sale you make. Do you have an upsell opportunity? Do you have a long-term value proposition that you’re going to be making to make that worth it?”

So that’s why it’s really important to line these things up. You’ll what’s missing, you’ll see what doesn’t match and then you can start to adjust and really turn your business into the next biggest P, which would be profitable, right?

Sara Isom:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
The ultimate goal. So I think we covered a good amount of stuff today. So thanks for listening. And if anybody has any questions about any of this stuff, of course you can go to the customapparelstartups.com. Go to the website and you can contact us through there. And then as always, The Custom Apparel Startups Podcast is sponsored by ColDesi. So you can go to coldesi.com and live chat if you have any questions about equipment we have to offer, or of course, if you want to get in touch with The Custom Apparel Startups crew, you can always just go to coldesi.com and say, “I heard the podcast. I have a question for them,” and they’ll make sure they get you over to us.

All right. Well, thanks so much for joining. Sara will be back again, I’m sure, really soon. And in further coming episodes, we’ve got a bunch more guests. And for those who’ve been listening for a while, Mark Stevenson will be back here again. He’s just doing some different things, as you may have heard, if you listened to the episode where he said some changes were happening, but we’ve got a ton more stuff coming up and we have about six or seven episodes lined up, so we can get a little more regularly for those who’ve been missing some of these episodes. So thanks for listening and have a great business.

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