On today’s episode Ryan Williams returns to continue the conversation on the transition from operations to leadership, as well as how Ryan approaches problem-solving within his organization. We also discuss the advantages to working behind the scenes and how Ryan prefers to lead from the background.
Ryan Williams, a former Navy SEAL, experienced entrepreneur and founder of Industry Threadworks. As he was building his previous apparel brands, he noticed that most print shops were notoriously unreliable, inaccurate, and had generally poor communication.
After hearing from many of his peers who had their own companies and were dealing with similar issues sourcing apparel, he decided to create Industry Threadworks to address those common problems. In doing so, he created an accurate, reliable and friendly solution for companies that want to place a turn-key order package, and return to focusing on running their own businesses, having peace of mind that their product will be printed according to spec, and delivered on time, consistently.
You can learn more about Ryan and his organization at: https://www.industrythreadworks.com/
Episode Transcript:
00:39
Now here’s your host Marcus Aurelius Anderson. In this episode of Acta Non Verba, we hear part two of my interview with Ryan Williams, former Navy SEAL and founder of industry threadworks. In part one, we talked about Ryan’s military background, his history of building apparel brands and the adjustments and thinking required to move from being an operator to a leader. You can hear part one on episode 37 of Acta Non Verba.
01:09
In part two, we continue our discussion on pragmatic leadership, the problem Ryan is solving with his company, and we even discuss religion. You do not want to miss this episode with Ryan Williams. You can find out more about Ryan and industry threadworks at indu I look at it as like percentages. So we’re like, we deal with a lot of fulfillment with our stuff where we were running an analog system for fulfillment, which our first warehouse, we’re running an analog system called the.
01:37
ShipStation, which is great. Anybody that’s on e-commerce, like ShipState or Shopify is great for e-commerce platform, but it’s not the most efficient way to like batch out fulfillment issues. So we ran shipstation.com, which is like 10 bucks a month or something like that. And it was really good. It was really good for where we’re at. We’re shipping, you know, maybe a couple, a couple of dozen or like 50 orders a day, and it was, it was good for that, but it relied a lot on human air factor. And we built our warehouse up. We had grid systems and it was very well organized.
02:05
So we kept the human error factor down to about one to 2%. So let’s say it’s 2%. So if you’re doing a hundred orders a day, two emails come in like, Oh, you screwed up my order. Okay. No big deal. We can handle two orders a day. You’re doing a thousand orders a day. Oh, that’s 20 emails a day, you know, in a year or a month, even that’s what six, 600 pissed off customers, 600 emails. That’s a full time, maybe two full time people that are dealing with that. Now you got to pay their salary. You got to pay HR. You got to do all this stuff.
02:33
for a 2% difference. So something that is very small on at the volume scale, percentages aren’t that big of a deal. But once you ramp up in volume, these small things can become massive issues. So we switched over probably about a year and a half ago to a fully digital system. And now we have everything’s like we have iPad, everything gets skewed in there, we have iPads, it’s fully accounted for digitally. So we really don’t have, I think the last like 50,000 orders we shipped out, we had two missed orders. And that was in the first week that we were just
03:03
learning the system. So we really have no human error anymore. So even at that 2%, we could scale to a thousand or two or three thousand whatever a day and we’d have to address the people issue and the space issue. But the system itself is completely fine to handle that volume. But it wasn’t until we got to that initial apex funnel point where we’re like, oh man, this is going to be an issue. But it wasn’t before that. And that’s why when we talked to a lot of the Paralines and their building and scaling.
03:29
one of the first things I asked him was like, you know, how big are you now? How many are you shipping out and where do you want to go? Because you have to find where that value apex is for the point where, okay, is it worth you committing to a three to five year lease on a warehouse and then buy more systems? You got to buy more racks. You got to do all this stuff. And then you got to commit to three to five more people on your staff. Now, and how you’re not just running a few people. Now you’re running a team. Now your role.
03:55
as an operator in the business is going to be different. Now you’re going to be a manager. Now you’re going to be expected to lead it. Does that pull you away from the vision that you were so clear on before when you’re building this brand? Now you’re spending 40, 50, 70% of your time managing people. Are you really building the business? Is that really helping you towards your goal? Probably not. I’ve done it that way and it’s very distracting. So now we have the fulfillment capability and that’s one of the things we recommend to our clients is like run it yourself as long as you can. Once you feel yourself.
04:22
start to get pulled away from the main focus and drive of what’s pushing the brand forward, it’s probably time to look at outsourcing that. And we pull a lot of clients at that stage where they’re like, hey, we’re doing 80 orders a day, but we’re in a thousand square feet and I don’t want to get a 5,000 square foot warehouse and hire five more people. Like, cool, put it on us. We’ll get you set up in a week and we’re back and rolling. You can scale infinite. You never have to worry about hiring another person. You never have to worry about getting a new warehouse. You only pay for what you need. So it’s kind of like, I built this because…
04:50
It was sorely needed and I wished it existed when I was running a clothing brand. So I’m like, okay, we’ll just build this because nobody else is and it’s needed and everyone else fucking sucks at it. So we’ll build it and we’re going to be the best at it. And you own it. Now you own this space and everybody else is fighting to get in there. Right. And it’s fun too. Like, I love it. Like I, I prefer being like, I’ve been in the front face of the brands before. And it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of responsibility.
05:18
You can’t ever screw up. Everybody’s involved in every point of your life. You, you know, you get drunk, you say the wrong thing on Instagram. You’re like, Oh my God, you’re such a dick. And you’re like, Oh my God. So I much prefer being in the background now behind the scenes. I love the logistics and the management and the numbers. And to me, it’s like, it’s like Tetris, like 3d Tetris. So I really enjoy the game that we’re playing on the backend of building the digital and the physical infrastructure to support this stuff. And I’m lucky that I found this kind of little.
05:47
niche that fits perfectly with what I enjoy on a day-to-day basis and the things that I’m good at. And then we built a team around not replicating me, but basically finding people who are better at the things that I was kind of good at, but not world-class at. So now we’ve developed these systems and processes and these people and roles that we can truly be world-class within our little niche. So it’s been an interesting journey, man, dude, myself, like my own personal journey.
06:15
Dude, I’m still trying to figure out where to go. An interesting thing on that too, is that I’ve always told our team, you can have any job in the company you want, you just have to make yourself the right person for that job. And now, my wife who’s the COO is, I never thought this would apply to me, but she leads the team better than I do. And so now we’re probably going to move her up into the CEO position because she’s better at the CEO, like the tasks and working with our team, the dynamic that they have.
06:45
leadership style she has with our team is better than me. And that was an ego hit too. I’m like, what? I’m not even the CEO of my own company anymore. And I was like, but the same thing. I got to take that long term ego, put it in my pocket, crush it and be like, who really is the best person for this job? Is it just my ego saying I want to be CEO? Or is she really the best person? And she is. She really is the best person. So then I found out like, okay, what do I do after that? Like literally, what does my business card look like?
07:14
Let’s just say like Ryan Williams, a random dude at industry threat works, you know? But we realized that it actually is really good because it frees me up to go do more of outreach, kind of like basically just being a lighthouse and talking about the things that are going on, the things that we see, broadcasting experience and helping people grow and scale their own companies. And I really realized that that’s the best possible outcome is that I could grow somebody inside our team. I mean, thankfully, it’s Disney.
07:42
I can grow somebody in our team to be such a good leader that they can replace me in that position. And then I can be freed up to go light the fires in the lighthouse, build that up, broadcast the signal as bright and as loud as possible, and help other people avoid crashing the same rocks that I crashed into on my own journey. Like you said, you have the ability to put your ego aside. And again, it’s your team that has, it’s about the leadership. So I remember when Ed was talking about this, how when he leads, he’s very power handy. He comes at you and he gives it to you. That’s his style.
08:12
And that’s how his team responds. However, if I’m doing that and I’m power-handing everybody and I’m separating my team, like half the team’s like, yeah, we’re gonna go kill it. The other half’s like, well, I’m a little bit intimidated and I feel like I’m not on the same team. Now I’ve unintentionally, now we’re butting heads. We’re supposed to be going this direction, but half the team feels alienated. This other half feels like this half is a part of the team. And unintentionally I’ve created all this conflict. But again, with Disney being there, she’s able to communicate with them better.
08:39
They respond to her better, not that she’s a better CEO, which is that the end of situation and again, like you’re saying, now you can step out. And that’s what I was wanting to kind of get into as well as you were talking about, you know, like personal development and like your own vision and the work that you do on yourself, because where you’re at now, that is even more important. It’s even more paramount to be able to look at yourself and call yourself on your own bullshit or be very honest about needs to be done to go to those next places. So do you have like a.
09:05
I don’t know, like a meditation type practice, or what do you try to do to give yourself some of these, this space to find that vision and to really find what is your lighthouse for what you want? Yeah, there’s a few key things that I’ve found help keep me on track. And obviously these won’t work for everybody. I’ve tried some things, I’ve tried waking up in the morning and sitting there contemplating like that vision for the day and all I’m thinking about is, dude, I just gotta go pee. Like I can’t think about this stuff. So I found like for me,
09:34
It’s pretty simple. I only have a few things that I do and they, they, they helped me, uh, maintain accountability and structure. We’re also giving myself enough flexibility to, to move and, you know, more throughout the day on what’s needed. But before I go to bed at night, I will look at my schedule for the next day and just see what I got to do. I’m not so anal. I’m gonna like lay out my clothes from the next day or whatever. I’m just going to like think in my mind, okay, this is what I need to do. So I generally need to dress up, dress down. Does it matter? Do I need to travel? We got what cars are we going to take the next day?
10:02
What am I going to wear? What time do I need to wake up? Right. And those are just things I have in my head before I go to bed so that I can literally just plan what time I need to wake up. No big deal. And then I read for minimum of 10 pages a night. Usually most nights, um, max I can do is like 35 pages for I’m just like mentally burned out to read it again. Cause I can’t remember what I just read. Yeah. I’m the same way. Yeah. If I find myself rereading stuff and like, okay, time’s up. I just put the book away for the next, the next night. And then I get up in the morning. I’ll re-examine my day just to get it fresh in my head. So I have a plan for the day. Just mental plan.
10:31
And then I’ll spend a couple of minutes, like my dog, he lays in our bed at night. And then as soon as I’m up, he gets to my chest and he just looks at me. He’s like, morning, good morning. So I’m like, okay, I spend a couple of minutes hanging out with Bowie, talking with Disney, just like slowly kind of getting up that’s like five minutes. And then I get up and do normal routine, go to the gym, whatever, go to work. That’s the only routine I really have. Disney, I have to spend time because we, we work together too. Plus obviously we live together. So there’s a few things that go into that where we have to kind of.
11:00
Uh, make sure we’re feeding each other love and the ways that each of us needs it. Of course. One thing I’ve found that in the evolution, my own role in this company is that I need to have time to focus on creating, not creating content per se, but really focusing on the vision and thinking about everything that I learn. Cause learning is great, but I’ve found that it does take me a little bit of time to kind of pull everything together and figure out, okay, this is what I’ve learned, how does it apply to my situation and where can I start adding these things in? So every Wednesday.
11:29
I stay home from the office. I try to work on writing some things. So we got an information product. We’ll work on about like how to build and scale a cold and brown. We’ve been working on for like a year and a half. It’s been like 90% done for a year. So every day this last week, I’m just trying to get one more thing done. So we’re getting like 1% more done every day. So in about 93%, so seven more weeks will be completely done. But I found having that day to myself to just kind of not be in the hustle and bustle of the office, just to be away, have my own timeframe.
11:59
I can get in my head. It’s kind of like, you have the shower in certain personal time and you just have these ideas that come to you. I was trying to expand that time. So for me, when Disney’s at the office and I’m home alone, that’s my time to really kind of just relax a little bit. I’m not distracted. I mean, I can put some of these, uh, these things that I learned into place within the structure of the company, figure out how to execute them and do any writing or things I need to do in a more creative focused way, and then come in on Thursday. And our Thursday now is like our. We have.
12:27
two Mondays in the office. We have Monday, Monday, and then Thursday’s like our new Monday because I come in on Thursday, I’m like, dude, we got it. Here’s where we’re going. Here’s what we got to do. Here’s the plan. I throw it up. I’m like, hey, poke holes in this plan. Tell me where I’m wrong because I don’t want to start executing on this if there’s some glaring holes in the boat here. Let’s make sure we plug the holes as best we can. Let’s put a big motor on this fucker and let’s get going. Just having that time to myself really works, but it only works because I know now that my trajectory and my role in the company has changed.
12:56
It wasn’t a good choice, you know, six months ago, but it’s a right choice now. I think that that’s so key. And, and even now you, you’re showing a great example of how, again, Tim Ferris or Vaynerchuk or whoever, they may have these incredible routines that they write down or, you know, Jocko gets up at 4 30, but you said something on social a while back. You were like, people were saying, you know, do you, the first thing I do is make my bed and you’re like, I have more important things to do. Total fucking waste of time. Right. Total waste of time. It’s like, yeah.
13:22
I have more important things to do than to worry about this, this and this because those aren’t priorities. So they’re prioritizing things that are not worthy of that moniker. Yeah. Politically, I disagree with a lot of what McCraven is saying anyway. But my big problem with that was that it’s like, oh, make your bed and it’ll give you a sense of pride. I’m like, dude, if you’re giving yourself credit and you feel pride for making your bed, fuck you. Don’t even try to be an entrepreneur because you are going to go nowhere. Nobody should give you credit or patch you on the buck. You should feel zero sense of pride.
13:52
for making your bed. Like, yeah, it looks nice, but you know what? You gotta do the dishes too. You gotta vacuum your house. You gotta fluff the pillows. Like, do you get pride out of that? Like, no, it’s just nice to have a clean house. If you’re so anal that it always has to be clean every day and you’re spending 90 minutes a day cleaning your house, like, are you a house cleaner now? Are you an entrepreneur? You’re a house cleaner. Like, what are you? My big issue with that was that you’re giving yourself too much credit for a very menial task. I do laundry, I’m patting myself on the back, I feel pride for doing laundry. Like, dude, there’s some things that just need to get done.
14:22
And I don’t feel one way or the other about them. I try to make them impact my life as minimally as possible so they don’t add drag to the primary projects. But yeah, I was surprised how big that quote caught on. I thought it was brilliant. As we’re going through all these things, whether it be, you know, hardship in the military or entrepreneurship, as you know, my big thing is adversity and how it’s omnipresent and how it’s always there. Can you tell us about an adversity that you went through in any capacity where
14:52
At the time it felt like, fuck, I’m never going to get through this thing. But then when you did, there was like this big lesson or gift that you got from it that you couldn’t have gotten in the other way. Is there something that comes to mind? Oh man, this is one of the things that made me believe in God. Like not in the God sense of like a bearded man in the sky, but God’s sense of like, you know, whatever you want to call it, fate, the universe, like however you want to describe that, the energy, that notion of God, some people, yeah, exactly. So some people have a very traditional view of it. Some people have, you know, other views of, but.
15:22
One of the things that made me come to the realization that God mathematically must exist or some other force or some other plan must exist was that there are so many times in my life where I wanted something so bad and I was like dead set. I gotta have this. I’m like, oh my God, my life’s gonna suck if I don’t have it. And I was so dead set on it and it didn’t happen. I didn’t get it. And I was so bummed. I’m like, dude, what the hell? This is unfair. This is terrible. And then every single time…
15:49
It took a while, usually like, you know, three months later, sometimes three years later, I was shown a situation where it was kind of like the universe of God was showing me, hey, bro, like, here’s what would have happened if I let you get what you wanted. And usually looking back, it was like, dude, I’m so glad I didn’t get that. I’m so glad that what I was asking for and what I wanted so badly didn’t actually come true. And the thing is a quote for it, I’m probably gonna mangle it, but like, sometimes the dust gifts are unanswered prayers. And dude, I found it to be so true.
16:17
I found this to happen so often in my life that it was predictable. And now if it’s predictable, now we can overlay a mathematical equation on it. Now I’m like, okay, what are the chances that this is all happening a random coincidence? And it was so skewed to being super obvious that there was a plan for it. I came to the realization that there’s no mathematical way that this is all coincidence. It’s mathematically impossible. So the only logical solution is that there is something else at play. There is some other plan.
16:46
call it universe, God, fate, whatever you want to call it, but it’s mathematically obvious that there’s nowhere the choice of something exists. So once I realized that, I started to dissect religion. I started to figure out, okay, what do they actually believe in? If you look at the church and the teachings of Jesus and the format of the Bible, if you pull the word God out of it and you replace it with the universe or fate, whatever, it’s the same thing. They’re talking about the same thing. Like, what is prayer? The power of intention, the power of positive thought.
17:16
power, putting your mind into the universe and saying, this is what I want to happen. Once you remove manmade constraints of what we have put around that term, I realized that they’re all basically saying the same thing. And I realized that, okay, now if there is a plan for this, then that means that every adversity that I’m facing is not random happenstance, no matter how bad, it’s for a reason. Sometimes it’s not about you.
17:44
Two, sometimes you can be faced with something and how you handle that, you might just be completely screwed, but the way you handle that might be a lesson for somebody else because everything’s connected. So you might not even know the answer or why this was important and it might not matter to you. It might just be something bad that happens to you and there’s no lesson that you get out of it, but maybe you are the lesson for somebody else. So once I realized that, I kind of reframed all the adversity stuff and I realized that it’s like you say, these are.
18:11
These are some of the best gifts that you can get because that’s the only way that you get that you get better is by being hardened by forging yourself and going through these, you know, these trials and these adversities in your life. Because I mean, and honestly, like if you were to have an avatar of yourself, you’re playing a video game, right? So I’m going to play like I’m playing the game of life and I’m this being of like, okay, I’m going to be, you know, Ryan Williams. And here’s my, I want to go through this, this and this. I want to learn this to the end. If you go through the story, nobody’s going to choose a life. It’s like, you know what?
18:40
I want to be born and I just want to exist and then I want to die. Nobody’s going to play that game. That’s a shitty game. Yeah, exactly. So there, because there’s no progression. So, and if you’re not progressing, then what are you really getting out of life? What are you, what are you even doing in life? Why are you even living if you’re not progressing? I think sometimes like we get complacent with these things and then something happens to knock us on our, on our ass. Sometimes those are the best things to shift you from complacency to realize like, oh shit, like.
19:08
The meaning of my life is not to exist. The meaning of my life is to progress. That’s obviously different for every person, but dude, the meaning of life is not to just sit there and to just to have a graceful existence. Like, dude, how fucking boring would that be? No, thank you. So whatever adversity comes, I found myself many times just being like, dude, this sucks. I don’t know what to do about this. I don’t know how we’re gonna get out of this. I don’t know what the answer is, but I trust the plan and I know that something will come up and we’re gonna find a way out of it, one way or the other.
19:37
I absolutely agree with you about this higher power component or the dogma and semantics attached to those truths. Because if you look at religions or even some powerful philosophies, like you said, if you remove all the stigma, all the dogma, all the semantics about, because everybody wants to have the copyright of who’s right in this thing. It’s like, my God or Allah or whoever it is. And if I’m offending you, then I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m telling you my truth. But they’re missing the point if they’re offended by this. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Exactly. It’s like, listen to what I’m trying to say.
20:07
And again, it’s like all philosophies, all religions, they’re telling their truth and they just happen to have a name for it because of the region that they’re in, because of the timeframe that it happened. And other than that, you’re missing the point. Again, what are they trying to say? Be good to each other. Don’t be a dick. Hey, give somebody some grace, give somebody some empathy. Maybe they’ll do it for you.
20:27
Right? I mean, it’s not that hard. Just be a good person. Yeah, just don’t be a dick. That’s going to be your new t-shirt. Don’t be a dick. Don’t be a dick. All religions. Don’t be a dick. Yeah, exactly. So there are some people that we know that go through adversity and they’re like us. We they see it sort of robustly. It’s like, OK, where’s the opportunity that I’m missing? Because this punched me and knocked me down to get my attention. That’s why it sucks. Like adversity pisses you off because it wants you to be fucking present because you won’t listen to it any other way.
20:55
It’s like, I’m trying to be nice to you. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you’re throwing punches and you’re dropping your hand and you catch me a few times, but then when you hit me, it’s like, dude, keep your fucking hand up. It’s like, oh, okay. Right. Yeah. He’s not messing around. So what happens? How is it that people can go through adversity and just stay stuck? Why, why is it a person like you that can continue to elevate and learn while other people stay stuck and they do that at 25 and then that’s their life until they’re 75 and they just die? I think for me, it’s a sense of self-awareness where I realized that.
21:25
life is not that important. You know what I mean? Like we’re all going to die. So if you’re trying to get through life and be like, oh, I’m going to live life longer. Like for what dude? How about we live life better? How about we live life more? So it really doesn’t matter if you live to 98 or 95. Like what’s the difference, right? People are too afraid of death. It’s like being afraid of the sun going down at the end of the day. Like it’s going to go down. You can be afraid of it, but it’s going to happen anyway. So why not release yourself and worrying about what’s going to happen
21:54
if you’re going to die, because the fact that you’re going to die, free yourself from that and be like, okay, well, if I’m not worried about dying, now I can focus on living. And what is it about living that really lights me on fire? Like, what do I want to do with my life? What do I want to bring to the world? What’s my one flare, my one flame that I can put out and build a campfire of like-minded people to come around and share this with, right? Like build a community around this. And I think people get way too wrapped around the axle. They literally act like they’re going to live forever. And it’s just a complete
22:23
complete mindset shift and they’re wasting so much effort on this. I mean, yeah, you got to, you know, take care of yourself and be healthy and you don’t want to die, obviously, but I think people worry. They put way too much emphasis on it than they should. The awareness and the acceptance of knowing that you’re going to die someday. Dude, it really takes a lot of weight off your shoulders. And I know for me, it’s allowed me to really focus on what it is that I want to do when I’m here. And through that focus, I’ve been able to increase my self-awareness.
22:53
And be like, okay, if these are my goals, if this is what I want to do, even if I don’t want to build a big company, even if I just want to live more, right? So say it’s not money or building companies, say I want to have more experiences. I want to go skiing in Chamonix, France, or I’m going to go do all these different things, whatever it is, it allows you to focus on them. Be like, oh, I could die falling in a crevasse in Chamonix. Like, yeah, you know, you could, but you’re gonna die anyway. You know what I mean? So it’s a really small chance you’re gonna fall into crevasse. But if the chance of you regretting that decision, you know, when you’re 90.
23:22
and not really living any of the time that you’re given is greater than the chances you fall into your vast. You gotta go to France. You gotta go chase these dreams. You gotta go chase your vision because you’re just sitting on your ass waiting to die because you’re afraid of death. You’re just sitting in your rocking chair being afraid of the sun going down. The life doesn’t care about that. The sun doesn’t care whether you want it to go down or not. It’s gonna end. But what do you do during the day? What do you do with the time that you’re given and the light that you’re given? Well, being freed up from worrying about that really kind of helped me focus on progressing.
23:51
as a person and I don’t know what the end state of that is going to be. I mean, I hope I’m a much better person in three years than I am now because I will be a complete failure of a person in three years if I’m the same person I am today. If I haven’t progressed or learned or challenged myself to be a better person for years, I’m doing exactly what I was just running. I’m just waiting to die. I’m just doing nothing to progress myself. So that’s kind of my whole perspective on it is that.
24:19
Depth doesn’t matter because it’s coming for you anyway. It’s the time that you spend really living. Like how do you live a rich life? Not monetarily, but with the experiences and the things that are important to you, the things that you determine are important. And that’s why I think it’s so key to define what those are in the beginning, that roadmap. And be like, okay, what do I want out of life? I know for me, I wanna build this big business, but for a lot of people, that’s not them. They wanna build a white picket fence with two and a half kids. And if that’s them, dude, awesome, go do that.
24:49
They’d be completely unhappy on my journey and I would be completely unhappy on their journey. But I think that’s something that everybody has a real problem with on Instagram, where they see everybody else like on their journey and they think they need to go on somebody else’s roadmap. And you absolutely can. But even if you achieve that person’s version of success, if it’s not yours and it doesn’t, it’s not truly what makes you happy, you just completely wasted all your time trying to get there. That’s why I think it’s so important to sit back in the beginning, really analyze who you are as a person.
25:17
where you’re at, what you want out of life, and then make a roadmap from there to that point of like, what’s my ideal life? What does that look like? And once you have that position, then you can create a roadmap there. It’s going to make a lot more sense for you. And you’ll be happy on the journey because you’re building, you’re creating it in ways that are meaningful and you’re going to enrich your life along the process. And like you said, it improves the quality of your years as opposed to just extending the years. Because again, if you’re elongating your timeline, but your life is no different than
25:46
there’s nothing important going on. I mean, how is your life any different than when you’re dead? If you’re not making any sort of impact or trying to do something with it. And then even like you were saying, understanding that there are certain things that we want to do this flame, like you said, that you kind of rally around, but then asking yourself, why do I want this? What would having that do for me? Why is this so important? Is the answer always more, or is there going to be a set point where I know when I’ve got to that place? And if you can’t answer that, then again, you’re probably going the wrong direction. Yeah, exactly.
26:15
Life’s a trip. It is, and we have to enjoy the journey, my friend. Listen, brother, Ryan, I cannot thank you enough. I want to be respectful of your time. Love the conversation. I learned a lot. You so multifaceted. There’s so much to you. You’re a renaissance man. You’ve got so much value to give. And where can people learn more about you and what you’re doing with industry through our words and everything? Oh, dude, thanks for the opportunity, man. I really enjoyed our conversation too. Appreciate you. I probably do most of my stuff on Instagram, which is…
26:43
Invictus 5326 on there. We have a lot of like tactical stuff on YouTube as well and like how to build a business and mainly apparel brand stuff. But same thing. It’s a youtube.com slash Invictus 5326 where you just search industry, industry threadworks. Those are the two main social channels. We have our website, obviously, uh, industry threadworks.com. But if people are listening to this and like what this is about, our, our website is probably kind of bland.
27:08
compared to what we put out on social. So we probably enjoy social a little bit more. Yeah, his YouTube stuff is amazing. They geek out on all the like specifics about what’s going on, like with inks and things like that and all the colors and textures. Oh yeah, we nerd out on it. Yeah, but that’s that’s why you’re good at what you do. And real quickly in a nutshell, so somebody comes to you and they have an emblem or an idea and then what happens from there? You guys just do it. You provide everything. Yeah, our big goal is the best people that we can serve are.
27:37
Apparel brands that are doing high five to around six figures. Our goal is to help them scale to seven and beyond. We’ve done that a few times and it’s we have the system and we have the digital and physical infrastructure to support that. That’s what I build this whole thing around through that process. We realize that we also can help regular businesses like a lot of our clients now are like restaurants and bars and things like that. So brands that have merch, but.
28:00
aren’t really happy with the merchant, whether it’s the quality or the fit, or they send it to people and they’re not really confident in sending out the product. Like, oh, it’s got my shit on it, but they’re not really happy with it. Dude, that’s a horrible feeling to hand somebody that has your brand, your logo, your creative vision on it, and you’re not happy with the product. That’s huge. So what we do is try to utilize the machine that we built for apparel brands to get regular businesses really high quality merch at scale, something they can be proud of.
28:29
that when they hand it to somebody like, this is my vision. This is my thing. This is, I’m proud to send you this because I know that it represents everything that I represent in my company. And it’s surprising that the price difference on that is so small. It’s like it’s like a dollar difference between like a really crap shirt and like a pretty medium quality shirt that you’d be happy. It’s like a dollar difference. But people don’t know that because they don’t know the industry and all the stuff. So people looking for like 25 shirts were not a good choice because we only the way we’re built.
28:56
We’re only geared to be efficient at meeting the high volume. So 50 is the lowest we can go. A hundred units per design is about where we start to really engage. If they’re doing, you know, 300, 500, a thousand plus, I can say with confidence is there’s no better solution for apparel production or fulfillment in the world than us at that meeting to high volume. There you go. Everyone. You heard it here first. Ryan Lim was making it happen going out.
29:21
He’s been there, he’s done that. He wants you to win and he has all the systems and stuff in place to allow you to do that much more efficiently at scale so you can work on other things. So Ryan, I can’t thank you enough, my friend. I look forward to talking to you again soon. I look forward to seeing you in person to give you a big hug at some point whenever all this stuff kind of gets squared away and, um, dude, I can’t wait, man, dude, thanks for the opportunity. I really enjoyed our combo today. I did too, man. I appreciate you, my friend. See you next time. Thanks brother. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
