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5 calls a day. 100 proactive customer touches a month.

Your front-desk person can do this — Kevin Baumgart breaks down the exact system on this week's Print Hustlers.

New episode out now 🎙️ by @inksoft

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4 months ago

24 years. 210 employees. 12 automatic presses. Three shifts.

If Rodney McDonald could start US ColorWorks over?

"Take outside money. Scale faster. Take more risks."

He and Tony bootstrapped everything — $1,000 in the bank and Thursday-night business plan presentations at each other's houses. No investors. No outside capital. Every piece of infrastructure self-funded.

It worked. But it was slow.

His belief now: learn the industry for 3–4 years in small scope, then go back and raise capital and really push.

"You have to be prepared for the hard road. But you also have to accept it as a challenge — not as something that's going to overwhelm you." by @inksoft

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4 months ago

Most shops try to keep every customer they get.

US ColorWorks made a different choice.

Rodney McDonald describes their ideal customer clearly — and just as clearly describes the ones they walked away from: always late on payments, always something wrong, never appreciate what you do for them, treat you like a vendor not a partner.

"We've done everything we can to avoid doing business with those kinds of customers."

When you stop chasing bad business, you have the capacity to say yes to great partnerships. Even projects you've never done before — because you know together you'll figure it out. by @inksoft

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4 months ago

Printful is now FYUL. And they're not just a merchant platform anymore.

They're in corporate. They're in contract decorating. They're calling on the same customers US ColorWorks has.

Rodney McDonald is direct about it: "They've almost become a competitor at every stage — not just in my part of the industry, but all different parts."

But here's how he thinks about it:

There's more market than people think. There's a real shortage of quality decorators at real scale. And being more nimble than a global operation is still a genuine competitive advantage.

FYUL has even visited US ColorWorks to study their operations. And Rodney let them.

"We're an open shop. Anyone can come in. We just ask for the same opportunity in return." by @inksoft

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4 months ago

Most business partners have never had a real conversation about who does what.

Rodney McDonald and Tony Mizzi figured it out over 20+ years at US ColorWorks.

The system: Rodney handles day-to-day. Customer calls, employee issues, active projects. Tony handles what Rodney calls "eating the elephant."

Any massive project — a new building, a huge customer onboarding, a new production line — goes to Tony. He works on it
exclusively until it's done or delegated. No interference with daily operations.

Neither of them knows the full details of what the other is managing on any given day. And that's the point.

Clear lanes. Complete trust. No bottleneck. by @inksoft

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4 months ago

Rodney McDonald has hired a lot of people at US ColorWorks.

And the ones who didn't work out? They usually had the skills. They just didn't have the values.

His rule: hire for culture, hire for characteristics, train for process.

You can teach someone your workflow. You can't teach someone to care. by @inksoft

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4 months ago

At what point does running a shop actually get easier?

Rodney McDonald's answer: $5 million.

That's when you can finally have one person who does one task and gets really, really good at it. That's when your infrastructure can support a base you can actually grow from — and take risks from.

Before that, you're still doing everything. After that, you're building something.

Where are you in that range? by @inksoft

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4 months ago

Jayson Tompkins called US ColorWorks during COVID with a problem:

A customer needed 30,000 shirts per week. Across 300 different designs. Shipping to 18,000 different addresses.

No shop had the software to handle it. No software existed to automate it.

So Rodney McDonald said yes.

What started as an insane one-off customer request became the foundation of one of the most advanced print-on-demand systems in the decorated apparel industry. by @inksoft

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4 months ago

Rodney McDonald describes it as "scale creates scale" — you have to be big enough to have the infrastructure to get bigger. And the move that unlocked 2012? Hiring their first real director of operations.

Not a manager. Not a supervisor. Someone who could manage the operational flow of the entire company.

It didn't pay off immediately. In fact, 2012 was one of their worst financial years. But by 2014–2015, everything shifted.

The lesson: the hire that changes your business won't show up on your P&L the same year you make it. by @inksoft

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4 months ago

Every shirt gets scanned before the press even touches it.

Medium black Gildan 5000 + yellow smiley face transfer? The system already knows if they match.

If they don't — red screen. Machine stops. Loud alarm.

Josh says he never hears it.

Because the system upstream is so dialed, it almost never happens.

This is what operations at this level actually look like. by @inksoft

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4 months ago

Here's the caption:

The guy printing 20,000 shirts a day just said it out loud.

DTF is the superior product.

No flaking. No cracking. No degradation. And if you do a wash test head to head against DTG or screen — DTF wins.

Josh Kent has been an early adopter his entire career. First to go all in on DTG. First to go all in on DTF. And SunFrog is now 100% DTF across a 200,000 sq ft facility serving some of the largest licensed apparel brands in the country.

He's already been where you're going. by @inksoft

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4 months ago

20,000 pieces. Per day. On demand.

Not in batches. Not on a schedule.

One at a time — 20,000 times.

Josh Kent of @SunFrog built one of the most automated print operations in the country, and he breaks down every part of it in this episode. by @inksoft

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4 months ago