Update: Growing Our $180K/Year Custom Printing Label Business
This is a follow up story for NOVA CUSTOM PRINTING. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 2 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
My name is Michael Nova and I am the director of Nova Custom Printing. We work with both corporate and startup clients to help solve their challenges with unique branding and marketing solutions, designed to help them stand out in the marketplace. This includes creating specialized products such as:
- Custom signage for retail, trade shows, and events
- Promotional items
- Window displays
- Rigid or custom flexible packaging for products
- Posters, postcards, and business cards
- Custom printed t-shirts, jackets, hats, and promotional activewear
- Custom die-cut stickers cut to shape
- Custom decals
Here’s the link to my original Starter Story interview.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
The economy has made business challenging in the past few years. As a result, it’s difficult for anyone in our industry to say that we have been growing during this time. As I speak with many other companies in the industry, we all conclude that if you can maintain where you were to where you are now, you are doing great! So it is with our business.
I think the most important thing that I’ve learned throughout the past few years, is that to become successful, you need to help your clients become successful.
This means concentrating on helping the client achieve their goals. If you can help them do that, then you become an invaluable partner that engenders long-term loyalty. For instance, it can mean something as simple as having a conversation about where the business is now and where they see themselves in the near future and having a short discussion about how you can help them achieve those goals, whether that be by offering them products that might help them or working out a long-term discount to help them get to where they want to.
Unfortunately, so many businesses have gone under in the past few years that we have all lost clientele that was important to us, however, thankfully, new businesses are starting up on a daily basis, and we are finding more and more startups approaching us with new business.
The great thing is in the past two months, we’ve seen a 50% increase in orders, so things are very busy at present. Of these new orders, 25% have come from brand-new clients, so our business is gaining new clients at a faster rate than in the past two years since the pandemic.
One really up-and-coming field is serving both new and established businesses that are manufacturing and selling CBD oil products. It’s a new and growing marketplace that people are making a living on, even by working from home. We recently posted on starting a CBD oil business, and find ourselves serving more and more of these companies as time goes on.
In terms of exposure, our business has increased our reach to a larger audience because of all the search engine optimization work we’ve been doing on our website to make sure that all of our content is high quality and helpful for our blog readers.
It has to be all quality content, with no fluff and concentrating on delivering content that is usable for the reader. This is crucial because search engines want good quality content to give to their readers.
In our blog posts, we cover all the topics from saving time and money on printing to the different types of printing that are available and the pros and cons of each. In this way, we are educating our readers about the process to make it easier for both them and us. If we are both on the same page, it not only saves time, but clients know exactly what to expect from the work that we do and are never disappointed.
If they are disappointed with a thing, we make sure to make up for it to ensure their complete satisfaction. We also make sure to post our blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, and our Google business page so that it reaches the largest audience possible.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
The biggest challenge in the last year has been getting consistent business coming in on a daily basis. Because of the economy, we’ve been running hot and cold, and not as consistent as we would like in terms of revenue. Again, as I mentioned previously, this is an industrywide issue, so until the economy improves, everyone has to hustle for clients.
Prepare yourself for all possibilities of what might happen that can create a challenge for your business.
Thankfully, we’ve retained the bulk of our clients over the years so we have a lot of repeat orders, and orders from those clients, but ideally, we would like a more steady stream of new clients that we can help serve.
Other than CBD oil products, there is also a small growth in new cosmetic businesses that are starting up, however, that was a growing field over the past decade and seems to remain stable. We are concentrating more now on how we can better serve our clients by spending more time with them and learning more about their challenges and how we can help them grow their businesses.
I think the most important thing that I’ve learned throughout the past few years, is that to become successful, you need to help your clients become successful. It’s not about you. It’s about helping the client achieve their goals!
Spend more time with your clients and get to know them and how you can help solve their problems. This engenders loyalty, and when you care, it shows.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Well, we created a nonprofit worldwide community website of people sharing their incredible experiences of overcoming adversity to inspire others to never give up.
It’s called RiseUpEight.org. We’ve interviewed both celebrities and people from all walks of life on how they were able to overcome challenges in life. At this time, there is so much adversity that people are facing daily.
We wanted to create this to help people get inspired and carry on regardless of their circumstances. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and we hope to continue building the website throughout the next five years.
As for Nova Custom Printing, we are constantly striving to improve our quality and will continue to do so. We still offer the fastest service in the industry in the fastest-paced city in the world of New York City. We are also looking at ways of serving our clients even faster!
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their businesses?
This is something that I always speak about with entrepreneurs. As entrepreneurs, we must understand that the struggle is inevitable. Adversity will always come when we least expect it, so we need to be prepared. During down times, use that time to work on your business and yourself.
Take the time to learn new skills or ideas or ways of doing things that improve yourself and your business. Prepare yourself for all possibilities of what might happen that can create a challenge for your business.
I always say, “Don’t look at adversity as the enemy, look at it as your ally.”
When you sign up to be an entrepreneur, you are signing up to face adversity. They go hand-in-hand. But the great thing is that the more you face adversity, the stronger you become. Unfortunately, it only strengthens you so that you can handle the next bout of adversity with more grace and experience, but fortunately, you will get through it!
It isn’t until afterward that you realize that you learned something valuable from the experience. You will likely never repeat the same mistakes twice if you are paying attention to what you are learning, so it’s important to be mindful and live in the moment.
Have gratitude for what is working in your life rather than what is not working, because what you focus on becomes your reality. If you focus on the problems and what is not working, then you will become stressed and your health will suffer, making it more difficult for you to spend time fixing your business or fixing whatever challenge you are up against.
If you focus on what is working and what is good in your life, then it gives you the energy to attack the problem. So gratitude is very important, both on a personal level and a business level.
Be grateful that you have a business in the first place. Would you rather work for someone else, having your boss looking over your shoulder as you do your work? Or would you prefer to have the freedom to run your own business and live your own life without anyone telling you what to do? That right there is something to be grateful for. Isn’t it?
Where can we go to learn more?
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
