Saul Nir is the co-founder of the Toronto-based custom printing company Artik. Over the years he has shared bits of business wisdom that he’s learned the hard way through multiple business startups. I was glad to sit down with him and get a complete picture of his experiences.
Our conversation was tangential and went off topic a few times, in this document I transcribed Saul’s answers to my seven key questions.
- When did you know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
When I was 19 year old.
- What was your first business? Even something small, like selling candy.
My girlfriend’s Dad was in the fashion business making dresses, he suggested I try selling them to my friends. I was 19 at the time and in the Israeli army, I would walk around the base with a bunch of dresses and to my surprise the soldiers and officers were buying them for their wives and girlfriends.
It was exciting to get this unexpected income and I was hooked on entrepreneurship.
- What were the initial struggles with your business?
My first real business was making my own line of T-shirts and selling them to stores and Sunday markets. I had several struggles:
I had to learn all the technical aspects of screen-printing, there was no ‘YouTube’ at the time and I was learning from books and from suppliers. It took a lot of trial and error to get good quality consistent production.
I had to come up with designs people actually wanted to buy. My first artistic designs were ignored by almost everyone. Eventually I went to Sunday flea markets and started selling more popular T-shirts with funny saying and images. (a popular one was a T-shirt with a duck saying ‘Frankly my dear I don’t give a duck!”) I learned that mostly people were looking for the perfect gift idea.
I was totally disorganized with no system, as I started doing custom screen-printing work, orders started coming in and I had expenses and income. I had no record keeping and no idea if I was making money or losing money. Mostly I would get cash and spend cash.
- Was there a turning point when things got better?
A few things come to mind:
– When I got a proper location with good setup my production flow was much better.
– I started marketing in local magazines and getting good word-of-mouth advertising.
– I got organized with better bookkeeping.
– I hired help and got out of the production and into dealing with customers and managing the business.
- If you could go back in time, what would you tell yourself when you were first getting started?
– Living in Toronto I would tell myself do whatever you can to buy the building the business was in because real estate in Toronto is going to go through the roof!
– Business wise I would tell myself that more than anything else I must invest in better systems and get very organized. Being disorganized is way too costly and a wastes a lot of time. I strongly believe a business must be organized to be successful.
– I would also tell myself to do self development work as there were things that were stopping me from succeeding that had to with personal obstacles not real business issues. For example, I learned that I worry too much about what other people think and this causes me to avoid risk so I will never fail. Once I got over that I was able to really go for it and my business took off.
- How have you seen the business world change over the years?
Three main things:
1 – Technology
2 – Technology
3 – Technology
When I started my business I was doing a lot of graphics for the T-shirts, to colour separate the design I used sheets of Mylar and would cut the shapes by hand. It would take me hours to colour separate a design. Now I can open Photoshop select each colour into a different channel and print directly to the screen in a matter of minutes.
Running the business in the past meant a lot of writing on forms and photocopying and searching through boxes of files, now everything is managed with database software, all the info and the graphics are available in seconds.
Advertising went from shot in the dark marketing that maybe works to Google targeted online ads that give you extensive analytics on what works and what doesn’t work.
- Quick! Come up with a million dollar business idea!
Drones are getting better and cheaper and so are wireless devices. Why not combine the two? Have a drone fly a wireless speaker near you as you work, have a TV screen hover in front of you as you do yard work, every time you turn, it flies around and hover in a couple of feet in front of you.
Thank you so much for your time and advice.
You’re welcome, I’m happy to share my experiences so it’s easier for you.
Artik opened it’s doors in 1985. Since then it has become Toronto’s expert t-shirt print shop with many thousands of happy customers.
We believe that happy customers come back and spread good word of mouth. That mindset of customer satisfaction has lead to Artik growing year after year.
If you’re looking for custom t-shirts, embroidered hats, custom sports jerseys, promotional products or any other promo idea, reach out to us! Our friendly staff will help you get started.