SUCCESS STORIES IN THEIR OWN WORDS

2009, things started taking off for us. We moved locations that year, I'll always remember kind of the base of our business. There were five weeks, we worked a hundred or more hours in that year. We worked all the time and our take-home that year was just over $9,000. Which I think we figured out one time and with overtime and all that stuff, it would have paid us probably right around $3, or just under $3 an hour. 2011, we bought Sports Junction. The company actually was the company Adam worked at when he was in high school. Took us from three of us, to nine people. 2014, bought a local company. 2015, we got kind of in the real estate business and bought our production building we're in now on Universal Drive in Saginaw, Michigan, 2018, we bought, one of our retail locations in Bay City, Michigan. And today we sit at three locations, two retail, one production, 22 staff members, two autos, two manuals, 17 heads of embroidery, a DTG machine, and a Versacamm to do banners and stickers and all that. So, the second part of that, what's our business market focused? We actually have our target market as K-12 schools, businesses with 50 or more employees, teams and organizations, and event coordinators in Michigan who expect quality, ease of experience and are not price-focused. We do not want to be the least expensive place in the world. And for the part about who are your customers? Our current customers are schools, clubs, and travel teams -- that's still a focus of our business. We've switched that a little bit with the pandemic, everything else. We do have great clientele, corporate customers -- the top five of our largest customers are all businesses. Adam McCauley You know, I had worked in high school at Sports Junction, and then I worked through college every once in a while and learned that they did online events and, you know, everything I learned, I learned from them. And then when Ryan and I kind of started, we learned that they were not the most efficient way that you were doing screen printing. So we just wanted, we knew this was going to be a professionl. So we jumped into doing trade shows and I mean, we were on top of learning everything we could possibly learn. That's I mean, part of that's how we met you guys, Marshall, and some other people in the industry and we just begged and bothered people enough to let them know like, “Hey, we want to learn how to do this and do this and do this.” And, we'd have this constant knowledge or this idea that we want to just keep growing, growing, growing. So we're always in the mood to learn, learn, learn, learn. It's been a weird experience. I mean, we started with really absolutely nothing in kind of coming to where we're at 12 years later. It's a significant jump, and, I'm glad we're where we're at. But I don't think either one of us would have expected us to be doing as well as we have. Marshall Atkinson And weren't you named Small Business of the Year for Michigan?

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