Impressions - April 2023 - 42

t hink .
mak e .
d o.
better business
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Deep Dive
into Effectiveness
Making sure your efforts result in concrete gains to the bottom line
BY MARSHALL ATKINSON, CONTRIBUTING WRITER
When it comes to your shop, what are you most effective at
doing? Here's what I mean. Let's say you place two social media
marketing posts on Instagram to boost sales. One of them gets
several hundred likes and dozens of comments. The second one
translates into over $17,000 worth of new orders.
As marketing aims to generate sales, the second Instagram post
is more effective at producing results. Likes and comments are
vanity metrics. You can't buy groceries with them.
Being effective means being successful at producing the desired
result. Do you want to be liked, or do you want more money in
the bank? More sales were the intent of the marketing. Therefore,
that is how you rate the effectiveness of the effort.
The Difference Between Effectiveness and Efficiency
Being effective is all about intention. Efficiency means you are
achieving results with minimal effort and energy; however, being
efficient doesn't always help achieve an intended outcome.
If you printed 2,000 shirts in three and a half hours, that could
be called efficient. However, if you incorrectly printed the entire
run, that same " efficiency " got you nowhere. The intended result
was a quality production run, which would have been a better
outcome if you took five hours to run the order instead of producing
them at an ultimately worthless three and a half.
Another example can be found in the way art is sized for youth
and adult shirts. Typically, these require two sets of screens. However,
I've seen jobs come through to production with only one set of
screens prepared because the art department wasn't clued in on
the different-sized shirts. When the screen-printing crew worked
its way down to the youth sizes, the image was too large for the
shirts, and production ceased. The miscommunication cost the
company money as there was significant idle time while the art
was resized and screens burned.
Time Management
The most important skill you can develop to become more effective
is better time management.
Do you know how you spend your time every day? What about
your team? One way to know for sure is to log each different
activity for each day and see how long it takes. There are apps and
P.42
ImpressionsMagazine.com April 2023
You are only making money
when you are decorating, so keep
those machines running!
tools for this, or you can use a legal pad and jot down a few notes.
When you track your activities, you can label which of your
daily tasks are essential, which can be delegated and which can be
eliminated. Unfortunately, people often get caught in a rut or start
doing useless things for reasons that may have once made sense
but have long since lost their value. The vital part of this exercise
is to identify how you are spending your time and redirect the
negative or non-productive time into something better.
For example, while many shops have a full load on their plate, you
constantly see people engaging in social media posts on Facebook
and Instagram. While that might be fun and even could be labeled
as " marketing, " is that really the best use of your time?
I've also seen shops that lay out their inventory on the floor
by placing the boxes with inventory for orders in areas for each
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Impressions - April 2023

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