If you could benefit from some free business advice from an organization of retired but hardly tired executives, you’re in luck. In Madison, such an outfit exists in the form of the Service Corps of Retired Executives, and one local businesswoman believes they stand out because they have no hidden agendas.
Kim Erb, owner of Ameriprint Apparel in Sun Prairie, not only leaned on SCORE as she dealt with the growing pains of her business, she benefited from the management perspective of an experienced executive with a fascinating personal story.
All for free.
Being fit to print
Ameriprint Apparel is a screen-printing, embroidery, and promotional-products business. Its customer base includes a mix of businesses that staff employees with jackets, hats, sweatshirts, and T-shirts; schools that purchase spirit-wear and sports packages; and fund-raising organizations that want special products for charity events.
The business began with multiple production facilities on a Town of Sun Prairie farm and a retail store on State Street. When its group orders grew, Erb closed the retail location in 1997 to focus on custom business, concentrating on customers that wanted a group of T-shirts or a group of sweatshirts. Overhead dropped dramatically — operating a retail store on State Street was expensive — and Ameriprint saw its profits rise.
Erb first contacted SCORE in the late 1980s but only to answer a couple of questions — nothing too strategic. The most recent encounter was about five years ago, when she sought advice on consolidating into one production facility away from the farm. Thanks to SCORE, she realized there were fundamental business practices that immediately needed her attention.
One reason Erb wanted to consolidate into one building was to improve communications with staff, but SCORE counselor Darko Kalan had some additional management advice. “When we started getting into the problems, we realized that a building would suffice, but not at that point in time,” Kalan notes. “We had to focus on cleaning up some problems, cleaning up the process, cleaning up the management, and basically setting a different strategic direction.”
Among the issues were the lack of an employee handbook, a lack of job descriptions, and no process for evaluating the job performance of employees. With no documentation to back up personnel moves, the business was vulnerable to a lawsuit. Job performance reviews are “predicated on the quality of work, the quantity of work, your performance, what you add to the organization, and peer relations,” Kalan notes. “All those things come into play, and none of that existed here.”
As often happens with small companies that go through a growth spurt, there were growing pains. “We were processing more and more orders, and with that you had to hire more people,” Erb explains. “As we added more people, they had to work with one another, and then we didn’t have enough space.”
Based on previous corporate experience with companies like Rocky Mountain Bancard in Denver, Kalan knew how to manage people, how to set performance standards, and how to set up job reviews. “He said, ‘You have an internal structure that is not helping you, and you have to [re]build that internal structure first,’” Erb recounts.
She went about the task of writing evaluations predicated on new job descriptions.
Employees helped write their own job descriptions to establish a baseline of where everyone stood, and the company established workflow standards and procedures.
By getting those processes and procedures in place, Erb could begin to look for a facility and align it to her new processes. “Then you know what you need,” Kalan says. “How big is the box that you need? Then you make the decision: how big do I want to get?”
In February 2012, Ameriprint moved to a new production location on Sunfield Street in Sun Prairie. The facility is an important end result, but the most important business benefits that Erb derived as a result of working with SCORE was the realization that she had to separate things that had become entangled. When she was able to step back and let the dust settle, Kalan helped her develop strategies to look at her business not as her life, but as a business that required her to lead and examine things analytically.
“It was my life, and it had emotional things like people and relationships,” says Erb. “When you’re a small-business owner, you become totally entangled in other people’s lives. When they go through divorces or they have deaths in their family and you’ve met their mother and father, it’s just normal for them to become part of your family, too.
“Then somewhere along the way, and for me it was this growth spurt, I needed to step back and look at it like a business. I had to be leader. I couldn’t be everyone’s friend or mom or sister or aunt.”
(Continued)
SCORE travels
Given Kalan’s corporate and personal background, he probably could help any business at any stage. At various points in his career, he ran the finance, information technology, and operations areas for Rocky Mountain Bancard, a credit card processing company based in Denver. The company had 1,200 employees and a large merchant base — upwards of 40,000 — that extended from metropolitan Denver southward toward Mexico. One claim to fame of Rocky Mountain Bancard is that it was the first business to use automatic teller machines, or ATMs.
Kalan’s service to Ameriprint Apparel was somewhat synergistic. While at Rocky Mountain Bancard, one of the departments that reported to him was involved in something similar to what Ameriprint does — embossing. This embossing work was done on credit card plastic, so imagine the importance of placing the right information, from bank identification to consumer credit card numbers, on the card.
“You have to create very strict inventory controls so you don’t put Bank A’s information on Bank B’s credit card,” Kalan says, “and then, of course, there are all the [personally identifying] numbers that go on them. So it was high-security, high-intensity control as to what goes on what because your liability would just explode if you printed the wrong thing.”
Kalan’s journey to Wisconsin started when Rocky Mountain Bancard was acquired by U.S. Bank, which wanted him to work in Minneapolis. Instead, he decided to take a position with CUNA & Affiliates, and he’s been in Madison ever since.
That’s not the longest journey he’s ever taken. Kalan is originally from Slovenia, then part of the former Yugoslavia. His father was a diplomat who served the government of Josip Broz Tito, and was assigned to Yugoslavia’s embassy in Washington, D.C. to help manage the post-war Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. He served in Washington from 1948 to 1953, and his family, including 10-year-old Darko, joined him in 1950.
By the time Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, work on the Marshall Plan ended, and the Yugoslav government wanted the Kalan family to return. They instead moved to Colorado, and asked for and received political asylum. Darko would eventually become a U.S. citizen.
That was very fortunate for Madison area startups. When Kalan helps businesses, it’s usually a startup business, but he counsels existing businesses like Ameriprint about 40% of the time. Either situation provides satisfaction, but he is sometimes amazed at how ill-prepared some would-be entrepreneurs are.
A lot of the people Kalan sees want to get into something they are familiar with, such as the restaurant business. Often, they have worked as a server and would like to own their own restaurant, but have put little or no thought into issues like purchasing, inventory control, cash-flow management, or even capital.
“When you ask them what kind of assets they have, they might say they have $5,000,” Kalan notes. “Then I ask, ‘How much do you think you need?’ They say ‘about $100,000,’ so I ask them where they are going to find someone to give them that kind of money. Then I start to ask about other equity they have, whether it’s in a house or a 401(k), and it turns out that all they have is the $5,000.
“You kind of take them aside and say, ‘Don’t quit your day job.’”
For Erb, the thing that separated SCORE from other business-consulting options was that its counselors have been in her shoes. “In this case, you knew they were speaking from true experience and they were speaking from the heart, and they were genuinely interested in your situation,” she notes. “Being self-employed, I was on an island and trying to figure it out as I went along. This was a wonderful resource for me.”
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