How I built my business to over £250k in annual sales in 2 years

Dear Founder,

I'm Kieza. Nice to meet you! Let me tell you the story of how I built my business to over £250k in annual sales in 2 years.

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The year was 2018. I had just become a dad at the top of the year while in my mid twenties after moving back to my home town - London - following leaving Leicester where I was studying for my Masters degree and had set up my first business. In actual fact - I was in the middle of experiencing my first major career failure. I had grown that business - my first merchandise company - to over £100k in annual sales whilst I was studying my masters degree part-time, which wasn’t a shabby achievement.  A few mistakes later and I found myself starting again from scratch at ground zero, but this time I had many lessons learned.

I’m going to walk you through how I picked myself up by the bootstraps, dusted myself off and tried again, as well as the lessons I learned along the way. So buckle up and enjoy the ride.

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Challenges

1. No capital: I didn’t have any money to start this business. In fact, I had just gone bust. Plus, I had another human being I needed to care about - my beautiful baby daughter - so I couldn’t be so frivolous. I had to figure out how to build this business from scratch on no budget through cash flow.
2. No team: I was doing everything completely on my own - getting customers, finding space to house my equipment (with no budget), printing customers T-shirts and shipping them out, answering inbound enquiries, sorting out admin and paperwork, doing the bookkeeping, and putting out any fires that would arise. It was gnarly.
3. No online presence: I was starting the business from scratch, which meant no website, no logo, no social media audience, no testimonials, no social proof - nothing. Building trust with strangers when you have close to zero digital footprint. I had to rely on my personal reputation and network for referrals in the earlier stages.
4. Stress Management & loneliness: Having just gone through a traumatic period of failure, it affected my mental health and decision making. I was dealing with a mountain debt, questioning my own self worth, and difficult conversations with friends, family, suppliers, and customers from my last business. When you go through business failure, a lot of relationships become strained or even burned, and it can deeply affect your self esteem if you don’t develop an iron mindset. Not to mention, I was going through this completely on my own.

What I did - step by step

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1. Business Naming

The first thing I did was come up with a memorable name that describes what we do - Merch Masters. The name came to me over a year before I actually started the business and it was suitable so I ran with that.

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2. Find somewhere to live

Both literally and figuratively. I moved back home with my mum - which is humbling for a lot of people - and I had some friends who also ran their own T-shirt company who were kind enough to give me some space in their light industrial unit free of charge for a few months. Honestly, it pays to help friends and relationships during the rough periods. I would have had nowhere to store my equipment if it wasn’t for these guys, but having a base of operations helped massively.

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3. Get a part-time job

To support myself while re-building my business I got a part-time job working with young people in my local borough. I’ve always found it fun and relatively easy to connect with young people and facilitate learning, workshops, and activities with them. So I fell back on that skill and got a gig that paid a living wage while I gathered myself and prepared to rebuild.

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4. Finding customers

I was fortunate that I still had contacts that knew me for making clothing and merchandise products, so I would still get enquiries from my old contacts and loads of referrals. I took on any work I could to start generating revenue. The main objective in the beginning wasn’t to make tonnes of money. It was all about generating content and social proof. Every new customer no matter how big or small, was an opportunity to demonstrate our (my) capabilities to new prospective customers and get testimonials that could be used. At the start I was probably generating about £2k - £4k per month in sales and I was doing most of the work myself with minimal operational structure. By month six, I was at around £7k per month in revenue.

4. Generating Content

I set up all our social media pages and posted videos of the production process and images of our work. I purely focused on output, not so much quality. It was fast, raw, and unedited. I just needed people to see that we can do the job. Instagram was the perfect platform to do this on because it’s a visual platform and I didn’t need any fancy equipment. I could capture content on my phone and post it straight away. Within a few months I had a few hundred followers on my page - and I didn’t even have a logo or website yet! But I could easily demonstrate the quality of work my business was capable of.

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5. Branding Identity & Web presence

I knew that in order to scale my business I would need to be able to build trust online with new customers fast, and to do this I’d need a well curated and established online presence which included a website, social media pages, and search engine optimisation, but they had to look good. I wasn’t going to settle for a bog-standard logo that looked like a GCSE coursework submission and appeared tacky because you only get one chance to make a good first impression.

I invested in having a brand identity created with a small design studio once I had a little bit of money set aside which included our logo, some icons, and a brand guidelines document. Fortunately for me, I have a degree in Graphic Design, so creative directed the process was easy and it only cost me a few hundred pounds, but it was worth it. From there, I used my website design and build skills in Squarespace to build our website in accordance with our brand guidelines where I showed off the work we had done, our services and capabilities, and testimonials of clients we had worked with so then when people visited the companies website they would feel at ease. 50% of the selling process was done through curated our online presence as well.

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6. Scaling

Now that I had some customers, a professional brand identity, a compelling online presence with social proof, and the capacity to deliver our services, I had all the basic components needed for growth. I aggressively focused on growth by asking myself how I could attract a larger audience to my social media pages and convert them into qualified enquiries with a tiny marketing budget. My process was as follows;

1. Identify My Ideal Customer: Before you communicate anything to anyone, you need to understand who your audience is. I looked through my past enquiries and most recent jobs and I realised that most of my customers had one thing in common - they wanted to sell the products we were making for them to their customers. If you want to sell a clothing product then you need to ensure that the product is made to a high standard, and this is one of the major things I realised mattered a great deal to my audience - quality. I called this target customer profile ‘clothing entrepreneurs’, and they consisted of clothing brands, musicians, YouTubers, events companies, and businesses that had loyal audiences they could leverage.
2. Our Solutions: By really getting to understand the wants, needs, and behaviours of my customers I was able to conceptualise and introduce additional services such as relabelling, finishing, and packaging, as well as special types of prints and embroidery that other service providers weren’t willing or able to supply. Soon we became a 1-stop shop for all your needs if you wanted to create high quality clothing products that you could sell, and I expanded our service range to include consultancy, design, production, product photography and e-commerce. This allowed us to increase our ‘wallet share’, and get each customer to spend more with us and making their experience of growing their clothing business easier by working with one provider for a range of services.
3. Paid Ads: I started to focus our messaging on what mattered to my audience the most - how to create high quality clothing products and avoid production disasters. Many of the people we worked with didn’t have a background in design, fashion, streetwear, clothing, or textiles, so they needed education and demonstration. I ramped up content production with more and more of what I knew my audience wanted to see from us, then I asked myself another question: How do I get ten, twenty, or even fifty times the amount of people to see our content? The answer being paid ads. I learned how to use the paid advertising functions in Instagram and Facebook, created a custom audience, then I boosted my highest engagement organic posts to this audience. I had some success with this which I measured in social media followers, social media engagement, website traffic, and number of enquiries. Once I saw that this worked, I increased the budget and created more tailored content. After stepping on the gas, revenue increased to £11k, then £15k, then £25k by 2019, and that became our average monthly revenue.
4. Improve sales efficiency: One of the major bottlenecks I encountered was in the sales process. Once I found a channel to attract our ideal prospects, filtering through them in large volumes became cumbersome - I needed to figure out how to streamline the sales process to filter out time wasters who were requesting quotes in our DM’s and emails so that I only spent time giving quotes to prospects who were likely to become buyers. I implemented a rule - nobody gets a quote unless they fill our out enquiry form on our website. If they didn’t want to do that, I could afford to move onto the next prospect because I had a full pipeline. They wouldn’t be a customer I’d enjoy working with anyway. Some prospects understandably preferred to speak to a team member first before placing an order, so I implemented a calendar booking system where they could schedule in a 10 minute chat with an expert member of the team (me). This allowed me to be responsive rather than reactive to inbound calls that would come in via our business phone system. I took control of the sales process at every step to alleviate the bottleneck and better serve qualified prospects without alienating people that we’re quite ready to work with us yet.

5. Build a Team: As the business grew I recognised that I couldn’t do everything on my own. I needed to build systems and find people who could support me. I found two people with complimentary skillsets to oversee and manage the production of our customers clothing products. They already had experience working with printers and manufacturers so I was able to handover this work to them and focus on more growth. To do this, though, I had to clearly define our service delivery process and train them on it step by step.

The Process

• Sales person books in the job to our project management
• Sales person creates a job spec and sends it to the client for approval
• Sales person introduces the client to their production manager
• Production manager gets a sample created
• Once the sample is approved, the rest of the products are produced according to the final spec
• Delivery from our partner factories to the client is arranged
• Having the right product, people, and systems in your business is a sure way to scalable growth. If you get even just one of these wrong, you’ll experience a plateau at some point.

Lessons Learned

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Ask anybody who has started and ran their own business and they could give you a bottomless list of things they learned from the experience. I’ve highlighted just some of my learnings and take-aways below.

Failure is just feedback: I’m probably one of the biggest failures you’ll ever come to know, and I believe that’s what has and will make me successful. If you have the opportunity to get up and try again after a setback, it means you have the opportunity to grow. Over the years I developed a mindset and modus operandi that means I’m far more comfortable with trying and failing than not trying at all. 9 times out of 10 you can learn and grow from the experience, and you only need to be right once. Don’t beat yourself up about getting something wrong. Reflect on it and move on.

Focus & Simplicity: Identify the things that work, trash everything that doesn’t. And be ruthless about it. In business, you can’t be all things to all people. But you can be the best thing for some people. And that’s more valuable for you, your customers, your team members, and your stakeholders. I’ve seen too many founders waste time on things that simply don’t move the needle in their business - and I’ve been one of them.

Data is everything: Hustling and doing whatever it takes to get your business off the ground is necessary in the beginning, but over time you need to learn how to capture data in various areas of your business so that you can make informed decisions. The moment I started measuring website traffic and lead conversions, pipeline size and value, average deal value, sales cycles, project profitability, and several other metrics, was the moment I began to have more control. There was one year where I increased my average deal value by 160% by focusing on the types of deals and clients that would improve our sales efficiency. Without data, I couldn’t have implemented the solutions I did to achieve that outcome.

One chance to make a first impression: When people visited my business website and social media pages, they were impressed. Said saw mountains of evidence that demonstrated that we were capable, trustworthy, expert service providers, and this made it an easy decision for our customers. A lot of the time people would tell me they already decided to go ahead with our service despite being in conversation with several providers, and this is because they perceived that we had exactly what they needed to get the outcomes they wanted. A profession brand identity and dynamic web presence can really turbocharge your growth in ways you wouldn’t imagine until you’ve experienced it.

Resourcefulness over resources: A lot of the time it’s not actually a money problem you have. It’s a creativity problem. I found ways to leverage the minimal resources I had through relationships, contacts, data, and systems. Always ask yourself how you can get maximum results with minimal resources and really think it through. You’d be surprised what you can come up with.

You are not an island: For a long time I had the mentality of a lone-wolf, being willing to go it alone if that’s what was necessary. Sometimes it is necessary to trudge forward along for the sake of speed and just getting things done, something I learned on my journey is that there is only so far you can go on your own. You need the right people by your side and in your corner to help you go the distance and open doors that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to on your own. So foster good relationships, nurture them well, seek to help people on your journey and form meaningful connections. You never know when you’ll need people.

To wrap it up, my journey was packed with lessons, some learned the hard way, but all invaluable in their own right. My hope is that by sharing my story, I’ve given you a bit of inspiration, a few practical takeaways, and maybe even the push you need to chase after your own entrepreneurial dreams. As a founder, the one thing you and I have in common is that we couldn’t live with ourselves if we didn’t at least try. So keep on going, stay resilient, learn along the way, and build the business of your dreams.

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All the best,

Kieza

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