TBT: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Fast Growth — What Fifteen Years of Shop Talk Says
In December 2024, Pam Ikegami published The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Fast Growth in Screen Printing, a profile of Vlad Kalman at Printing on Main Street.
$3,500 in sales in 2019. Around $320,000 in 2020. Ten to twenty local businesses cold-called a day. Five thousand dollars of blanks bought before he knew distributors existed. A DTG department that lost money. And the line that made the piece worth writing: he was in debt despite the sales.
I ran those lessons against the shirtboard archive using the same method as RAG from the forum we’ve all used and the discharge piece.
Most of what he learned, the board already knew. One thing he did, the board says doesn’t work.
Revenue is not profit, and the board has said so since 2011
The oldest joke on the forum. mk162, August 2011: “The best way to make a small fortune in the screen printing industry is to start with a large one.” (t1080.6)
blue moon, talking a funded newcomer out of it a few weeks later: “I can tell you that I have never worked so hard for so little money.” And the question he put to him directly: “Are you willing to work 12 hour days seven days a week and take home $500 a month for the next 12 months?” (t1231.34)
The cleanest statement of the principle came from a shop that shrank on purpose. LuckyFlyinROUSH, 2018: “We are down about 100k revenue from last year, but profit is the exact same….and I’m not working 80 hour weeks.” (t22648.48)
royster13 said it in eight words in 2014, about a shop chasing a Seahawks championship run: “Cash flow does not always mean making money” (t10808.12).
The cash-flow trap, and how little the board actually says about it
mk162 in 2011 gave the best line in the archive on it: “cash flow is everything. It doesn’t matter how much work you have, if you aren’t getting paid fast enough, it won’t matter. The amount of cash is important, but the velocity of cash is more-so.” (t1008.36)
RICK STEFANICK in the same thread: “i know of several really organized, super shops that went south due to cash flow problems” (t1008.35)
“Cash flow” appears in 60 posts out of 187,100. “Working capital” appears in three. “Accounts receivable,” seven. “Line of credit,” eight. The thread titled “Cash is King!” turns out to be about credit card terminal leases.
The board treats cash flow as a maxim, not a lived problem with numbers. The closest thing to a concrete complaint is Nation03 in 2011 on rec-league customers: “they all take 6 months to pay” (t1080.18).
The thing that doesn’t transfer: cold calling
Ten to twenty doors a day is the most distinctive thing in the original profile. It is also the place where the archive most clearly disagrees.
The board preaches it. royster13, its loudest advocate, on why he gets work other shops miss: “They run with a “built it and they will come” motto” (t12210.25).
But the first-hand results are grim. Prosperi-Tees actually went out in 2011: “I went out cold calling yesterday and felt like an idiot just handing out a business card.” (t2033.4)
Two shops in that same thread ran measured campaigns and reported the numbers. Shawn (EIP) papered the area with flyers using a tracking email address: “The conclusion… 1 job from a comic book store 24 shirts lol. Maybe you’ll have better luck but it was a complete waste of time for me.” (t2033.7) sweetts mailed 200 businesses three times with phone follow-up: “We netted one job for 80 shirts” (t2033.8) and the customer already knew them.
Meanwhile the visibly fastest-growing shop in the archive built the opposite way. GraphicDisorder, 2014: “We don’t talk to customers on the phone or in person really. All internet/email.” (t13216.55)
That is a real divergence, and I’d read it as a market difference rather than a verdict. Doors work in a town where the buyer is behind the counter. They don’t in a niche served nationally.
YouTube University
The phrase appears exactly once in 187,100 posts. xcelr8hard, September 2017, seven years before the profile: “I am a one man shop out of my garage. Everything I know has come from forums and YouTube University.” (t21032.0)
The board has always been ambivalent about it. Frog, 2016: “there is also plenty of “the blind leading the blind” as the internet has no requirements of actual quality or fact.” (t17279.1)
im_mcguire in the same thread put a cost on it: “I had thrown a lot of money around with trial and error (more so on the error) because I was doing it all by myself, and learning from youtube videos.” (t17279.8)
Homer’s framing is the one I’d keep: “There isn’t any schooling for this industry. Cost of equipment and all the mistakes you’re about to make – consider that your tuition” (t22767.18).
Even merchmonster, who scaled fast, was blunt about his own printing: “I tried printing my first 10 jobs – my prints were mediocre, I was slow, and my error rate was 20%.” (t17279.21)
DTG, the department that doesn’t pay
The unprofitable DTG department in the profile has a long archive behind it.
Doug S, 2014, on his biggest equipment regret: “For us it was direct to garment before the bugs were completely worked out.” he ended up practically giving it away (t12749.20).
mk162, 2016: “Same thing happened with DTG machines too…”I can get one for $12k” and next thing you know they are sitting in the corner collecting dust.” (t17400.10)
The wider pattern is buying capacity before you have the work. ebscreen, 2012: “I feel for the people that start businesses and get so wrapped up in being the biggest and the best that they go out and buy the equipment to prove that point yet lack the actual business to support it.” (t5178.101)
And from a 25-year veteran, in a 2025 thread literally called “What are your whoops”: “Ever take out a loan for $85 K with zero ROI on equip?” (t27120.1)
Hiring, which never got easier
Sbrem, 2011: “Our biggest issue is help, reliable help.” (t1008.8)
alan802, 2015: “Out of the 15 or so guys I’ve hired the last 5 years I bet I’d have a hard time picking 3 that I’d like to have back” (t14412.33).
inkman996, 2021: “We have been offering $18 to start entry level no experience needed for almost a year now. Using FB and other job apps. No one applies no one.” (t25892.21) In the same thread, GraphicDisorder on what an experienced press op actually cost: “To get a great printer we had to pay $25 a hour and 10k bonus.” (t25892.14)
Every shop-closing story in fifteen years is told about somebody else. Screened Gear, 2012: “I came to work today to find 2 of the renters in my building are gone.” (t4203.0) Tagless Threads in the same thread, diagnosing other people’s shops: “What really gets me is when a printer carelessly doesn’t factor their entire overhead into their printing production and eventually go out of business.” (t4203.9)
tonypep, 2025, on the famous shops he worked for: “All of which went out of business. What happened? Extremely broad statement but they ran out of money to one extent or another.” (t27118.19)
Dottonedan, also 2025, watching the current cycle: “This most recent one we are seeing is apparently the phase of COVID people getting checks and using them to start a shop and now phasing out (selling their equipment). Still as always, a revolving door.” (t27120.2)
What’s changed since December 2024
The margin math got worse, and it got worse in a specific way.
The PRINTING United Alliance State of the Decorated Apparel Industry report, covered in April 2026, found decorator sales up 2.0% across the first three quarters of 2025 with operating costs up 8.1% and prices raised only 7.1%. Just 26.7% improved pre-tax profitability; 28.3% saw it decline. It’s a small sample, 68 decorators.
ASI’s July 2026 numbers sharpen it. Q2 2026 industry sales up 2.5%. Firms above $1 million grew about 4%. Firms under $1 million were essentially flat.
The Federal Reserve’s Small Business Credit Survey, published March 2026, found revenue and employment growth expectations at their lowest since 2020, and, for the second consecutive year, more firms reporting revenue declines than increases. Rising costs was the top financial challenge.
Two structural changes hit the blanks wall. S&S Activewear finalized its acquisition of alphabroder in October 2024, retiring the alphabroder brand in the US by July 2025, two of your suppliers became one. And SanMar raised private label and retail prices 3.5% effective June 1, 2025 and added a 3% credit card surcharge. That surcharge lands directly on the cash-flow problem in the original article.
Worth knowing: none of this is cotton. USDA had upland cotton at 60 to 73 cents a pound through this period, historically cheap. The increases are tariffs and freight, not the fiber.
Labor moved too. Nineteen states raised minimum wages on January 1, 2026, affecting 8.3 million workers. And printing industry employment fell 2.7% from December 2025 to January 2026, which reads more like shrinking demand than a labor shortage.
What to do with all this
The 2024 lessons hold. Here they are with the archive and the 2026 numbers behind them.
- Track profit per job, not sales.
- Know your real setup and per-piece labor before you price. That is the whole point of the setup times and time tracker work. You cannot fix a margin you have never measured.
- Sell the way your market buys. Doors work in some towns and not others. The archive’s two measured door campaigns netted 24 shirts and 80 shirts.
- Buy the equipment after the work, not before it. Fifteen years of DTG machines collecting dust say so.
- Raise prices before you chase volume. whitewater, July 2025: “April to present we are up over last year but prob because we raised prices.” (t27118.8) Command-Z said the rest in 2011: “Don’t race to the bottom, it’s a race you can’t win. Nobody does.” (t1414.10)
- Say no. merchmonster: “Learn to turn down shitty jobs and say no. When you’re starting out you think you need the money but not all money is good money.” (t17279.21)
Fast growth is not the achievement. Surviving it is.
Original: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Fast Growth in Screen Printing, Pam Ikegami, December 12, 2024. Forum quotes drawn from the theshirtboard.com archive — 20,820 threads, 187,100 posts — and matched character-for-character against their source posts.
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