Worthwhile Projects for the Slower Months

SHOP MANAGEMENT

Worthwhile Projects for the Slower Months

For shops wanting to avoid layoffs, here are some ideas on productive ways to keep employees gainfully employed. January 21, 2011
By Greg Kitson, Contributing Writer

Slow times are a great opportunity to give the press a tune-up. If you hire a service tech to come in, I recommend having your production manager and lead operator observe and participate so they can learn how to maintain the press themselves.

No matter what industry you are in, every business has seasonality. One of the biggest challenges of seasonality — especially in a tough economy — is justifying staff retention and avoiding layoffs.

Decorated apparel professionals have a unique skill set. Depending on where your shop is located, you may not be likely to lose employees to another decorated apparel shop, but you may lose them to a hardware store, restaurant or a store at the mall. So rather than risk losing those skills in which you have invested, it’s in your best interest to keep those people productively and gainfully employed during the slow season.

Because my slow season is in January and February, I instituted a holiday shutdown about 10 years ago. I know that if we don’t have an order from our core corporate customers by Dec. 10, we are not going to have any more significant order volume.

We get everything produced and delivered, and when we close down the day before Christmas, we may have only 20 to 30 orders in a system that often has 200 to 300 orders. Thus, our volume is down to about 10% of what it typically is.

We come back the first Monday after New Year’s Day. Our paid staff holidays are Christmas and New Year’s. New Year’s Eve and Christmas Eve are not paid holidays on our schedule, but we have a fairly liberal paid-time-off (PTO) policy. Staff is aware that we always have a holiday shutdown, so it is in their best interest to keep back five to six PTO days for that period.

Training & Maintenance
After the holidays, it may be several weeks before orders get back up to speed, as our customers also are returning from the holidays. For the first week back, we either schedule a half day of training or a half day of maintenance and cleaning, along with half days of production to get cash flowing again.

The type of education we do includes CPR training for our staff to get recertified. We also have an automatic external defibrillator (AED), on which everyone gets trained. I also try to have our ink suppliers come in and talk about inks and ink-mixing systems, modifying and curing. They also discuss dye migration, including how to identify the problem and what can be done to prevent it. Another topic might be how to adjust the press when printing on a rough surface, print order and similar topics.

Another task we do during this period is preventive maintenance. After a busy season, everything in the shop is wearing a fuzzy, gray sweater. We tear the shields off the presses, get out the WD-40, citrus cleaners and toothbrushes, and de-lint the presses. We try to bring our equipment back to blueprint condition — or as near to new as possible.

We start from the top down because as you clean, you knock debris off the press, and it falls down. So the last thing we clean is the floor. After that, we schedule the maintenance people from the manufacturers to come in and put the presses back into shape and help us identify problems.

A good example might be a gas cylinder that is hissing, and we may want to replace it on the second head. Together, we evaluate what we need in our spare parts kit and do some rebuilds on that. Bringing in a service technician for a day can be fairly expensive. To get the most out of it, my production manager and lead operator participate and learn how to troubleshoot, fix and maintain the equipment.

Typically, we also do extensive housekeeping in our screen room. Dust in a screen room means pinholes, so part of the housekeeping includes washing the dust from the walls. The floor is swept and mopped. We have about 500 screens in our active inventory, but by the end of our production year, there will be 30 to 100 that need to be re-meshed. We have enough screens in our inventory that we don’t have to re-mesh all the time. As the mesh blows out, we build a pile in the corner.

Customer/Vendor Visits
We also schedule customers to come in and see the shop during slower months. The advantage is we can sit down and show them the scope of everything we do, and we have the luxury of time to talk with them. The disadvantage is they don’t see the shop in full production, which is not nearly as fascinating as when we are running 5,000 to 6,000 shirts per shift.

When it’s slow, we also have time to set up a piece of artwork and put a squeegee in the clients’ hands and see them get excited about it. We also take them into the embroidery department and watch their heads go up and down as they watch a needle on an embroidery machine.

Digital direct-to-garment printing is the newest addition to our apparel decorating toolbox and is a mixed blessing in any shop. The perception of direct-to-garment printing is that it is the answer for all things decorated; however, the reality is that it has its strengths and weaknesses just like screen printing and embroidery. We do not sell direct-to-garment printing unless we show it, and slow months are the best time to show everything we do to prospective customers.

We also have our apparel vendors come in during this time. Every year, the major manufacturers decide to do things like have a new name for pink or add five shades of teal. When the reps come in, they review the 35 new shades and explain how to use the color card. They also discuss how to distinguish between the four shades of gray: ash, heather, oxford, charcoal, etc.

They explain what the differences are between a 5.1-, 5.6- and 6.1-ounce T-shirt and how each is manufactured. We also learn how some shortage problems originate, as well as how to remove oil spots in the middle of a shirt.

My staff will ask a lot of questions that I think they should have known, but it was never presented to them in such a way that they could put the puzzle together. It’s often something that our managers know, but they don’t convey to the staff.

In November, I always do some intensive financial planning because that gives me an opportunity to have some impact on my tax bill for the year. If the company is having a good year, I need to figure out how to minimize taxes; sometimes, this means purchasing new equipment. If so, new equipment we purchased in December is arriving and manufacturer’s reps come in and do the installations. This means we have to learn how to operate and integrate the news “toys” into our system in January and February before we resume the normal craziness in March.

Improving Shop Layout
We also spend slower months doing minor and mid-size reconfigurations of our shop floor. We have a fairly large storage area that is designed for customers who call us and say, “We need 30,000 garments a week from Friday.” If they need 30,000 garments by Friday, then we need to have room to unload 12 to 20 pallets. So we have a large storage area with pallet racking. We may completely tear it down, clean behind everything and put it back together. This usually takes a couple of half days.

During the course of the year, I also purchase screen printing “stuff,” including screens, equipment, flash cure units, etc. I usually buy them at auctions and on eBay, and we recondition them. Then, we either use them in our operation or resell them. I can buy used retensionable frames for $10 to $30 each and sell them for as much as $50 to $60 each.

Additionally, the slow months are a great time to redo the showroom. Clean it and get rid of old samples. Have your apparel reps go through the racks and find out if they have discontinued anything. With old blank samples, we either print our company name on them to use as a giveaway, sell them in a garage sale or donate them to a charity.

Marketing is another good activity to revisit during slow times. That is the time to talk to business owners, human resource managers, summer baseball coaches and fall football coaches about putting their orders together. You also can do table-top trade shows and visit individual athletic directors.

There are lots of other tasks that you can accomplish during a slow period that will help improve quality and productivity in your shop, increase sales or enhance efficiency. The key is planning ahead and making the arrangements for times when you know there will not be enough orders to keep staff busy. We have found these activities have allowed us to retain key employees while still benefiting the shop.

All shop owners have a unique seasonality challenge. I encourage owners and managers to keep a “get-around-to-it” list on their desk or smart phone. Every time you think about something you should do to make life easier and/or more profitable, write it down. If you can discipline yourself to do this task, you will fill the slow times with profitable and productive projects.

Greg Kitson is founder and president of Mind’s Eye Graphics, Decatur, Ind. For more information or to comment on this article, e-mail Greg at greg@mindseyeg.com or visit mindseyeg.com.

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