That thumb drive is where a bunch of our digitizing was located. Only there? Yes, only there! How stupid is that? Totally ridiculously stupid. Totally difficult to find any of it, not backed up… stupid, stupid, and stupid.

If you don’t do anything that stupid, you are superhuman… or more likely a liar. We all do dumb stuff and we get a blind spot to it, we don’t get around to changing it, it is too humiliating to think about it…

I personally have made simple changes at other people’s shops when I do consulting that literally has saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, but here you find Mr F’n Know-It-All with a dumb thing like this in his shop.

How to change those stupid things?  Take a walk around once in awhile and try and see things with fresh eyes and prioritize what needs fixing. Either pay a consultant (and I urge you to get references, famous does not mean good…) or get a non-competing fellow decorator to help you out or ask your employees what really needs fixing or ask your vendors (and then make sure they aren’t just trying to sell you something.)

We just leapt forward and from having things on floppies and thumb drives we now have all our stuff on a central computer, backed up in the cloud, and a production work flow that involves barcoding the art forms and the embroidery folks just scan the bar codes and the digitizing goes to the machine. Giant leap forward.

It was humiliating to realize how stupid we were for how long, but man it feels good to have changed it. We hired Scott from J &S to help us and yeah we could have worked most of this out ourselves, but reality is that we didn’t change until he came in last week, so he was a bargain.

Look around, suck it up, get some help and change that stupid stuff going on in your shop.