Marshall Atkinson And I’m from Florida, right? But not everybody might be familiar with where Okeechobee, Florida is. Can you give us the rundown on that? Scott Dawson Yeah, absolutely. Okay. If you look at a map of Florida, you see this large lake kind of south- central, that’s like Okeechobee, just to get your bearings. We’re about 90 miles south of Orlando, about 110, 120 miles north of Miami, dead center of the state, east to west, instead of a small town. I’ve lived here for 45 years. I can’t think of a better place to live and raise a child. Marshall Atkinson So how did you get into screen printing? Cause that, if you’re like a lot of people like me for example, I got in through the back door for another reason, and then it stuck. Scott Dawson All right. I’ll just give you the really condensed version of how I got into this because it can get long. I’ve had a commercial cleaning business for years, close to 30, I believe. And, I had built the business up and had people in place to where I only had to work about three hours a day. Yeah, kind of boring. Couldn’t find people to go do stuff with me all the time. When we had 28 employees at the time, we’re constantly buying work shirts. So I thought, you know what? I’ve got a lot of spare time. I’ll just make my own t-shirts. I didn’t know anything about making t-shirts. Marshall Atkinson How hard could it be? Scott Dawson Yeah right? So, naturally, like a newbie I got on eBay, started looking at some stuff there and I found these little gadgets and I was like, wow, here’s a little one color machine to make a t-shirt. And that’s all our work shirts are, even to this day it’s just the one color. That started down that rabbit hole; one-color, two-color. This was back when the economy was still doing pretty good. And, before 2008, stumbled across a trade show in Orlando that day, started on — this was a Thursday that started on Friday. So I told my wife, I said, “Well, I’ll just go up there and buy one of these little gadgets.” Didn’t understand how big the screen printing industry was. When I walked into the conference hall there in Orlando, I was literally back on my heels and all the equipment. And naturally, I couldn’t find a little one-color press. So my mind started going crazy. And by the weekend I had spent about $30,000 on equipment and, that’s how I got into t-shirt printing shirts. Marshall Atkinson Cha-Ching! Scott Dawson Yeah.
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