Culture Counts – Rob Levin, COO of Printfly

Rob Levin, COO of Printfly shares his perspectives on the role of brand and culture after joining a business that experienced explosive organic growth. His insight speaks to the importance of these elements in sustaining and supercharging the next stage of the business. If you like our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a rating!

Transcription:

Rob Levin:  Every company has a culture… like it or not, it develops. You either get to write that story or it’s going to write itself.

Bill Gullan:  Greetings one and all, this Real-World Branding. I’m Bill Gullan, president of Finch Brands, a premier boutique branding agency. Big pleasure this week, we have Rob Levin who’s the COO of Printfly Corporation best known, at least in the marketplace as rushordertees.com. We went to the headquarters of Printfly in northeast Philadelphia. You can feel by being there and walking through and just being in the middle of this high activity, high energy place, how much is happening at that company and Rob will certainly walk through his background as a finance person originally and an investor into this operating role and what he found and how he found it and what he’s doing with it and the rest of the leadership team, what they’re doing with it. High culture, high energy, definitely a company to watch. Enjoy Rob Levin.

Bill: Coming to you from the northeast Philadelphia headquarters of Printfly which encompasses Rush Order Tees and we’ll certainly hear more about that. We’re here with Rob Levin who’s the COO of the company. Thank you for your time good sir.

Rob:  Thank you.

Bill:  Way to start, we’ve been fortunate enough to know a little bit about the under the hood of this place. It’s an incredible tale. Let’s start with you and a bit of your own journey to this point and then we’ll get into the company and all that you’ve been working on since you joined up.

Rob:  Sure. I have an entrepreneurial background. I started in the financial services business working for a big insurance company called Principle Financial Group out in the Midwest at a time when they were demutualizing and going public. I had the opportunity to take that ride and watch a 110-year-old mutual insurance company take itself out into the capital market which was really interesting. Pretty quickly after that figured out that I wasn’t well suited for a 10,000 plus person organization and so I left shortly after the IPO and started my own consulting business which grew over a four or five-year period of time where we were doing some interesting things in the financial services space. I ended selling that to an insurance company and five years later I was right back to where I started. Employee number 12,000 at an insurance company.

True to form, that didn’t last very long either. The entrepreneurial bug bit again so about two years later I left there and started another business which was in the lending space. That’s was around 2007 and that was successful up until the financial crisis of 2008.

Bill:  Interesting timing on that.

Rob:  Yeah, it looked really good going in and if we knew then what what we know now, I would’ve taken a different course. Like anything else, was a great learning opportunity. I would never want to go through that again but having gone through it, lot of lessons learned out of that. We ended up selling off the assets of that business and I started another company with a couple of classmates of mine which was an international reinsurance business. Right back again into the entrepreneurial space and working in that. It was a lot of fun. That was a really good experience. Our clients were global so I spent a lot of time in southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, working on and getting a bird’s eye view of the health insurance markets all over the world. And did that for a while until the travel got to be a little bit too much.

That business, the first two companies, the first company was completely bootstrap so that was all paid for by client work and a little bit of money that I put in, very little bit. Then when we sold we had a little bit of war chest to start the second business with. Never had to go to any outside investors in the first two businesses and in our third business we did. We knew that we needed a much bigger balance sheet than we were capable of funding on our own. After we got over the first initial hump we did go out and raise a bunch of private equity capital and started that process which is also an interesting experience going out now having to pitch your wares to investors and doing that.

When I came back to the States I was living in London at the time and traveling all over the world, when I came back to the States I actually went onto the investment side working for, first for the private equity company that had invested in us as an advisor to them, helping them do a few deals and then subsequent to that as a portfolio manager, chief investment officer for a private equity fund. Based out of southeast Asia, looking to make investments in the US. That brought me full circle back to the US, working, now I had the full gamut. Starting business, sold a business, invest, raise money from investors and now invested in other businesses.

I take that 360-degree view which led me actually to the Nemeroffs who are the family that started and still to this day, own the business. They were, I don’t know if you want to transition into the next piece. When I first met them, I had been working with a couple of other families on their investment strategy having come back to the US as a chief investment officer. Just consulting with a few families around their investment strategy, how to structure investments, how to make investments in private companies, I had a pretty unique perspective on that. I got introduced to Mike and his brother and his sister and they were at this inflection point with their business. They had started the company fully expecting it to be a weekend project then 13 years later they had built this real robust business and they weren’t really sure what to do with it.

My initial interaction with them was around exactly that. Do we go raise investor capital? Do we sell the business to somebody? Do we go acquire somebody? What do we do with this thing? I got to know them through that process and tried to understand what the motivations were and what do you want to do with the business? And the more that we got to working together the more that we figured out that there was a lot more value in the business that could be developed. It wasn’t the right time to bring in outside investors or sell the company or do anything else. Be careful what you wish for because they were like, well that’s great. You found all this value now come and help us go get it. Help us figure it out.

Bill:  That’s cool. Just as our most recent interview with Baked by Melissa, similar alignment. Company with assets deciding what to do next. Bringing in professional yet still passionate leader to be a galvanizer. Tell us, if you wouldn’t mind, about just the structure of the company. The Rush Order Tees brand is market facing and well known. The organization as a whole is under the Printfly brand umbrella. What is Printfly comprised of?

Rob:  That’s one of the things that came out of the early discussions that I had with Mike and the management team at the time was really looking at where the value was developed and where the value was brought to market. Printfly is where all the value is developed. Printfly is the production facility and the IT and the IP. All the intellectual property, all of the things that make the business what it is have been developed by and are part of Printfly. Rush Order Tees is really just an eCommerce platform to access a certain part of the market that can then benefit from the Printfly production facility. If you think about Rush Order Tees, Rush Order Tees appeals to a very specific part of the market. Initially a lot of the business that comes into Rush Order Tees is exactly that. Is last minute, I need it right away quickly. I’ve got a deadline, I need to know that it’s here. It’s really just a brand that accesses that part of the market.

In our last iteration of work that we’ve done with you, we’ve got another brand called College Inc. College Inc. accesses a totally different part of the market. It’s colleges and universities and clubs and fraternities and Greek organizations and they have a very different set of needs, they have a different set of products. But those two marketplaces are still powered by the Printfly production facility. That powered by Printfly is really the core of the business. Just a little bit, if we back up a bit, the business really grew out of, it’s one of those things, when you’re doing it, it doesn’t feel deliberate sometimes. It’s much easier to tell the story in hindsight.

What Mike and his brother and sister were seeing was that the screen printing, custom apparel process was very complicated, was very opaque and was very unreliable for the most part. And still today we see it where the customer was made to work on the deadline of the printer. You can have it when we get it to you kind of thing. That was just the expectation in the market. Is this is going to be a pain, this is going to be difficult and we’re just going to have to wait for the printer and oh, by the way, you have to order a 1,000 pieces in order to be meaningful. It’s one of those classic cases of not knowing any better, they went in there and goes, well this is a terrible experience, there’s got to be a better way to do this. If somebody needs their order in a week instead of three weeks, we should be able to do that. The business really started by taking all of the orders that nobody else wanted.

It was a really interesting dynamic because all the screen printers didn’t see them as competition, they saw them basically as fools. It’s like, sure, if you want to do that go ahead. And they would actually send business to these guys. Printfly really developed a culture, whether they knew it of not of doing all the hard jobs that nobody else wanted. They didn’t start with some legacy of what the screen printing or the custom apparel business was and when they got into it they realized very quickly that there was no off the shelf software that they could buy to run a business like that. So they developed everything for the order management side. Once something comes in house, all on their own.

Throughout the 15 years, the company just had its 15th anniversary last month in September. We always say, it’s a 15 year overnight success. It took a long time to get there and 13 of those years it was your classic entrepreneurial, are we going to be able to make it to the next month? Luckily that’s well in the rear view. Over 15 years they’ve had to pioneer a lot of what is now accepted practice in the industry. Being able to set your deadline, being able to rush ship stuff, being able to print on demand. These were, having an online design studio which again, is table stakes for the industry right now, a lot of that was pioneered here because they needed it and nobody else had it and there wasn’t some off the shelf software to buy like there is today.

All of those assets are really Printfly assets and part of what we are looking to do now is okay, how do we drive into more markets using those assets. How can we use the powered by Printfly platform to make the buying experience better in different places?

Bill:  What a cool story. The company has also had, in addition to becoming this overnight sensation after 15 years, a lot of, we were talking before we started, of headcount growth. What’s the role, as this growth has happened and as you’ve become part of obviously the leadership group, just from our relationship with you, we know that brand and culture matters a lot here. Could you talk a little bit about the role of culture and of internal communications in helping that growth can be well managed, can be sustainable that that Printfly power is found in every touchpoint and in every manifestation of the company?

Rob:  Having built businesses before and invested in businesses at different stage, I know every company has a culture. Like it or not it develops. You either get to write that story or it gets to write itself. When I look at it, culture is people caring about what they do. What does that mean? It can be expressed in lots of different ways and we with your help, have boiled it down into nine core values that we think are the underpinning of that culture. It’s really, it’s getting people to care about what they do. We have a little thing that we write, it’s culture equals people. People caring what they do and culture equals brand. because it really is to me, tied together.

Because every interaction you have with a customer is a reflection of your culture. If people here care what they do and the culture is one where we put customers first, where we start with yes, where we try and solve problems when 100% satisfaction is the minimum that we’ll accept, that then becomes the brand. I don’t think you can artificially create some, as much as we would all like to and just say, okay, this is our brand. If the culture doesn’t reflect than it’s not genuine. It just doesn’t become authentic. Here what’s very unique is every great product has 15 knockoffs that’s the case but the difference is you can’t knock off a brand. You can’t knock off a story. The story here is so unique. It really permeates the culture. Having been part of this process in helping us tease out and express what that culture is, a lot of it really just boils down to that story.

That story of Mike, Lex and Jordan who are the three Nemeroffs, two brothers and a sister who started the business were 15, 13 and 17 when this business started. They really were just trying to figure out where can we add some value? Where can we do something that isn’t being done right now? It was really just through perseverance and hard work that they got to where they got to. It wasn’t like, I had the benefit of coming in here 13 years after it started and building.

Bill:  Asset, asset challenge.

Rob:  Right, exactly. That’s a great place to come into. For these guys, they didn’t know what they were doing. They did not when I talked to them, outside of work, it’s like they had no idea that they would ever be sitting in a 63,000-square facility with 225 employees, running this big business when they were 16 years old, screen printing in their parents’ garage washing out the screens in their bathroom sink.

Bill:  Steve had a lemonade stand back then. He was 13.

Rob:  Exactly.

Bill:  He’s still figuring this out too.

Rob:  Yeah, right. You can’t knock off that story. It’s genuine, it’s real. It happened. The culture around here reflects that story. It reflects the fact that these kids struggled for 12 years to try and figure out, to try and get it to the point where it is today and then you have people come in today who just assume it’s always been this way. That’s a really interesting intersection. What we do very well and it was part of, I’ve been here now little more than one year, in this role. One of the first things I did was call you guys, to say, we need to put this thing together because if we’re going to go from where we are to where I think we can get, we have to start being able to articulate this better. You mentioned headcount growth, we doubled our headcount growth in the period of about 15 months.

Bill:  That’s amazing.

Rob:  But if you walk around here and you see, we’ve done so in a way that we’ve maintained culture. It would’ve been very, we could’ve gone in a totally different direction and we could’ve brought in some really smart, effective operators who would’ve clashed with the culture that we’re trying to build. Not milled well. Having this identity, this culture which then flows into what the brand stands for, now we actually can hire to that. We can bring in people, we know what to look for. It is part of hiring, it is part of our onboarding.

Everybody here goes through the exact same first four days which is interesting for a lot of people because those first four days, the first hour of the first four days is mission, vision, values. It doesn’t matter if you are working in our receiving department, opening up boxes of apparel and putting them on shelves to the head of marketing or one of our developers. You’re sitting in that room all together, throughout that first four days you’re going to screen print a shirt, you’re going to embroider some garments, you’re going to take a sales call, you’re going to listen to our customer care calls. We just think that people coming in and experiencing that for four days, one of things that I’ve seen happen before and I’m sure you have too and it probably drives you crazy, these culture books that you build and these vision statements that you build, they just become plaques on the wall.

Bill:  Part of the furniture.

Rob:  They just become part of the furniture and here we’ve tried really, really hard not to make that happen.

Bill:  Using this as strongly as you do in onboarding and reinforcing and rewarding and everything else as a way of making vision, mission, values referenceable, these fundamental elements of how the company operates and grows and trains, that’s part of it but there is very little that is more frustrating than what really is a missed opportunity for an organization to discover and disseminate its purpose in a way that makes everybody, we spend work, life balance whatever, we spend however many hours here that we all have to. We want ideally this to align with our values and we want to know what expected of us. Everyone has a right to that. What’s happened here is amazing and impressive. You mentioned coming in some of the challenges and opportunities that you saw related to fast growth and the assets and the new way of doing this in a market that hadn’t been as customer friendly, other things that you either knew about or discovered in the early days here that were going to be areas of focus as you thought through how to put this all together.

Rob:  I can tell you the biggest thing for me coming in here was I come from a background of being an entrepreneur, working in the investment world, working in the financial services space, in healthcare and I definitely took for granted that this is, I was like, oh, we’re printing t-shirts, how hard can that be? This is custom, this is an easy business. How hard can this be to work? It’s really complicated. It’s very hard and it’s very hard to get it right. If you think about it, no two orders are the same. You think about it, it’s very different than if we’re selling chairs. We have these chairs, you can buy these chairs or you can buy these chairs or this. There’s a limited number of things but imagine if I said, pick any combination of legs, height, width, do you want leather? Do you want cloth? Do you want wood? And every person coming on would have some different combination and then you had to go make that?

It’s quite an orchestra to try and conduct that. One of the things that was super important in looking at that was making sure that when somebody’s coming to you for custom apparel, it’s really important to them. It’s much more significant and it’s very easy to lose sight of that when you’re just looking at it from 30,000 feet and looking at we have this asset, we have this asset, to very quickly lose touch from that customer.

Bill:  It’s also very easy to be jaded by it because everyone buys on price and they need it now and they’re very particular as we expect them to be because it’s a big deal.

Rob:  Sure. That’s part of the challenge that I’ve had to work with with the company on in terms of strategy is you can’t be everything to everyone. That is one of the things that will very quickly, didn’t work for Sears, didn’t work for Chevrolet, didn’t work for Radio Shack, it definitely doesn’t work for us. There’s an eagerness to want to say yes and we have a core value that says start with yes. Have an open mind. But it’s very particularly worded that way because we not going to always end with yes. We’ll start with yes, we want to have an open mind, we want to be able to if we can do it we’re going to do it but we can’t always end with yes.

Bill:  Could be a yes but, perhaps.

Rob:  Right. Or we’re going to try. We’re going to start with how can we get it done and if we can’t get it done at least we’ve tried. That also opens you up to a tendency to try and do too much for everyone and you try and please everyone then you’ll end up pleasing no one. We’ve had to figure out what our niche is, what our core customer really wants from us and then leverage that. We have stopped doing certain things since I got here that were not valuable to the business. And as any business, that’s a little scary. Change is always scary to anybody coming in but looking back at it, it was the right thing to do. We did, we shut down two brands that we were running that were, they were just not core to what we were doing. They didn’t serve the right audience and it was just a bad experience all around for everybody. We were able to take the energy there and refocus it on things that we thought did add a lot of value.

Right now it’s a very interesting time in this space because it’s never been easier to say you’re in the custom apparel business. Never. With websites like Shopify and Etsy and some of these places, it’s really simple for you to just throw up a website and say, “Hey, we’re in the custom apparel business.” It’s really hard to execute on that.

Bill:  Sure, I can imagine.

Rob:  Finding that balance and that’s really one of the things that makes the company unique is we can do both. We can do the front end, we can serve the customer really well because we’ve invested a lot of time in a customer service team that’s a luxury to have. It’s very expensive but we think it’s really, really important. At the same time we feel like it’s critical for us to own the fulfillment. We don’t just take orders and then send them to some print shop in Canada or Mexico or California.

Bill:  Find somebody with capacity.

Rob:  And keep our fingers crossed and hope it comes out right because our customers, we have this on our website and people don’t believe us, some people test us all the time. We have 100% money back guarantee. If you are not satisfied with what you get, for any reason, even if it was your fault, then we’re going to take care of that. We’ll reprint it, we’ll refund it, we’ll take care of it. In order to do that, we have to have a pretty high standard and we have to control everything. Getting into the business is really easy, executing is really hard. That’s been the biggest challenge here is to make sure that we’re really focused on that customer experience and getting them a high quality good.

We are not the cheapest, lowest cost provider in the marketplace but we think that we have the right balance of customer service, high quality and we’re going to make sure everything is perfect. We’re going to get to you when you need it and it’s dependable. because the worst thing to happen, if you think about custom apparel, you open up that box and it’s not right. Or you need it for your event and it’s not there. That’s really what happens over and over and over again in the industry. We’re very, very focused on that.

Bill:  We talked about brand architecture a little bit earlier and how Printfly is designated as the holder of the production capability both in terms of the actual structure as well as presumably the values and the culture that extends into all the different cracks here. Then there’s market facing brands, Rush Order Tees and College Inc. and other things. What are other ingredients in the overall brand strategic approach that you think enable this level of achievement and potential in terms of how the company goes to market?

Rob:  At the brand level it’s really again, just understanding who our target audience is. Understanding what that buyer wants and being able to deliver that and nothing else. We do spend a lot of time really trying to understand our customer. Why are they buying from us? What is it that’s important to them? What’s extraneous? What can get rid of? How can we make it easier? We’re constantly, constantly trying to do that. We do that on the website, we do that with our customer services reps, we do that through the use of technology. We’ve just introduced, it’ll be coming out this week, an ability for us, when you’re on the website and you’re designing that shirt and you’re not sure if it’s going to look right, we can just hold your hand literally and figuratively on the website now to help make that experience better. That is a direct result of talking to our customers and them saying, “Hey, as easy as you think your design studio, it’s a little bit tough for us. Can you help us here?”

Then on the Rush Order side, specifically, why are customers coming to us? We have this tagline which we think has really does capture that brand pretty well. It’s your design, your deadline. We know it’s your design, it’s really important to you and we know it’s your deadline and we got to get it there on that. From a brand architecture perspective, it’s knowing who the buyers are that are coming to those different brands and why because the 35-year-old professional who’s buying shirts for their kid’s soccer team and they need them on an event date for something, is coming to Rush Order Tees, is very different than the 23-year-old fraternity kid who need his shirts for beer pong on Saturday.

Bill:  Both equally important, mind you.

Rob:  Both equally important, absolutely. That 35 year was a 23-year-old at one time.

Bill:  They would grow up with the brand.

Rob:  But they definitely, they’d have a different experience with the brand. They want different things out of the brand. Understanding what people want from the brands and as we look at going forward and things that we may be doing in the future that’s also, we don’t want to just spin up a brand just because we think it’s cool. We want to spin up a brand or we want to enhance what we’re doing because there’s real value to somebody out there who can use what we do. We either solve some problem for them or create some value that they otherwise aren’t getting.

Bill:  Good segue into what next. There’s probably things that we’re not quite ready to share but anything that you can disclose about things that are happening that are new? Whether they be ultimately visible to the market or not. We talked a bit about another shift. There’s a lot that’s happening, lot of growth happening now. What’s next? What should we look for?

Rob:  From our perspective we’re constantly looking at where the market is going. What do people want? In terms of our internal growth we really do want to continue to own our production capacity. We want to own the quote, full stack. Everything from the time you place the order to the time it hits your door. As soon as we hand it off to UPS and FedEx we lose a little bit of control but all the way up to that point we want to make sure that we look at it. We’re investing more in things like QA and in new technology and in new machines and Mike and I, Mike who’s the CEO, and I spend a lot of time looking at where’s the technology going? What’s next? Where should be focused? What should we not be doing?

because our focus on customer service and quality, those are the two things. That helps now are our focus into what technology are we going to invest in, not just from the technology, the ones and zero side of things, but in terms of what equipment are we going to buy? What printers are we going to buy? Where are we going to invest in training? Just to constantly raise the bar on that side of things. Then again, just see what market needs aren’t being filled or are not filled well. We don’t need to be the first mover in every market. A lot of times it’s good to sit back and see where other people are stumbling.

I believe in this law of adjacent profits which is when a market gets very, very efficient, it creates an opportunity for a profit somewhere else. When everybody’s going into into discount retailing, it creates an opportunity for a Nordstrom’s to pop up out of there because people still want high quality, high service and are willing to pay for it. We can wait to see the Targets and the Walmarts and Costcos fight it out for a while and let’s see what adjacent profit will come up there. There we’re obviously always looking at what we could be improving on and we’ll continue to do that.

Bill:  Your journey, your own journey’s been a fascinating one from large organizations but always with an entrepreneurial spirit, for those who’ve been inspired by your story and your path are there a couple learnings from the road or word that you live by or things that you remind yourself and are fundamental that you are as a guy and as a business that you’d want to share?

Rob:  Sure. There’s two things that I always repeat and people around here get tired of hearing me say it and some of it’s come in through our words. They don’t forget it for sure. It’s two things. One is, people always overestimate what they can do in a month and underestimate what they can do in a year. It doesn’t always have to be big, big, big gains. If you make small gains every day and you look back a year, two years out, you’ll be amazing at what you can accomplish. If you think you’ve got to get it all done in the next month, it’s never going to happen. I always remind people just you don’t have to do it all at once, just make a little bit of progress every single day. That to me, I wish somebody would’ve told me that 20 years ago.

Bill:  If you win the day.

Rob:  That’s it. You don’t have to do everything today. You do some stuff tomorrow. Have a little bit of a longer-term view. Having worked in my own, having built my own businesses and having worked in startups and fast growth industries we have this term of being in startup years. Every month here is like a year somewhere else and you expect so much to get done and things are moving so fast but even then you have to pull back and just say, just make small improvements every day, you don’t have to do it all at once. That’s a big thing and that comes with perspective and time. It’s hard to express to some people, especially when you’re 23 and you’re full of yourself and you think you can do everything. That’s great. That would be one. Small progress every day and you’ll accomplish a lot.

Two is there three fundamental things. Do what you say you’re going to do. Show up on time. Say please and thank you. That will get you pretty far in this world. Those are very simplified things that have taken a long time to winnow down into those three things. There’s a lot of deep meaning behind that. If you’re dependable, if you do what you say you’re going to do, that’s huge. If you show up on time, it’s respectful of other people and you say please and thank you. That’s basically, you said it before, and I say this to everybody who starts here, it’s not quite as far as Tony Hsieh would go with Zappos but we tell everybody on their first day, I get to kick off their onboarding and them through mission, vision, values and I say this, “If anybody who’s here for the paycheck should leave right now.”

Everybody in that room, everybody that we hire, if we hire you here, then you’re pretty smart accomplished person. You can work anywhere. You don’t have to work here. Work here because you want to work here. Given where I’ve been and the companies I’ve operated and things that I’ve done, I want to come a place, to your point earlier, I’m here 10 hours a day, five, six days a week during some periods, I don’t want to go to a place where I’m like, oh, I gotta go to work today. It’s just not fun. Say please and thank you, just be respectful and it is one of our core values is have fun. There’s that question that people ask, if you would give advice to your 20-year self. It’s like, don’t take yourself so seriously. Have a little bit of fun. It doesn’t have to be a grind every single day.

Bill:  Steve had, was it 12 or 16 beers on the way here actually? He’s ready to … Steve’s our executive producer, as long time listeners will know. As we close Rob, this has been great. People are knocking on your door. I know there’s a lot to do here. Couple greatest hits you want to brag about? We know the Sixers’ relationship’s been awesome and we were talking as we were plugging things in about the home opener that maybe did not end well. Everyone got an awesome t-shirt. What’s in the brag book for Rush Order Tees or Printfly that you can tell us about?

Rob:  There’s so many thing we’re just going through a greatest hits the other day. Looking at our year end. A lot of it’s little things that add up over time. It’s a big insurance company calling us up on the eve or Hurricane Irma and saying, “We need 10,000 shirts by Monday to give our adjusters who are heading down to Florida after this hurricane hits.”

Bill:  because they know it’s coming.

Rob:  “And we’ve called everyone.” The best stories are the ones that start out with, “I know you guys can do this but we figured.” We see that all the time. Some of them, to the people on the other side of that, that’s huge. That insurance company who we can’t, we won’t tell you who it is but they had called everybody and they finally called us. We got them 10,000 screen printed polo shirts. They called us on Thursday afternoon, they were delivered full stop, Sunday afternoon to them and they were putting them in kits and sending them with adjusters to Florida on Monday. We see things like that all the time. We have a couple of cool projects that are coming up that we can’t tell you the names are but they’re product launches but they need 30,000 shirts to be ready on a specific day that are going to handed out with this big announcement. They’re counting on us.

Bill:  You can’t mess that up.

Rob:  They are millions of dollars of other things going on around it and TV and video and everything else. Those are cool. Equally as cool as around Hurricane Harvey, we donated hundreds of shirts to people who just needed them and a lot of them who wanted specific messages put on there for some commemoration or outreach. There’s a lot of that goes on here. That unspoken we reach out, there was people who have tragedies or people have things that go and they come on and they order 100 shirts and we’ll ship them for free. Those kinds of things. Sure, the Sixers in great, it’s been a fun ride with them and hopefully this year we can get a playoff game.

Bill:  Yeah, right. I can’t imagine the shirts that will be.

Rob:  We told them already just put our order in now. We’re in for that. We’ve had some good partnerships. We work the Philadelphia Union now so that’s been a great opportunity to learn MLS and get to know some of those guys. That’s just kicking off. We work with Red Bull. We do Red Bull racing, that’s been a fun journey to look with those guys. Honestly, we have this really cool new partnership that started with the pro break dancing tour, called UDEF. I don’t know if you guys or anybody who listens has followed that but they just had their big, they call it the Silverback Open which is their pro championship out here in King of Prussia. The winner, his video went viral and Chris Brown shared it, Joe Rogan shared it. It’s got millions of views, these guys are unbelievable athletes. It’s a great fun demographic. We’ve got our toe in a lot of waters and we’re trying to talk to a lot of different people.

Bill:  Sounds like interesting waters too. All of which are, it’s probably fun to see something like that go viral and say we did that. That’s great. That’s great. Rob, thank you. COO Rob Levin of Printfly, appreciate your time.

Rob:  Thank you.

Bill:  Thanks Rob for your time and insight. Getting to know this company has been a pleasure and certainly getting to know this leader has been a pleasure for us and I’m sure for all of you. As always, three ways to support us here, Real World Branding. We love the dialogue so let’s keep it going on Twitter, on Facebook, other social media. Either @billgullan if you want to reach out to me directory or @finchbrands or other media too. We always like to compete for ratings and hopefully earn five stars and love seeing new ones pop into the app store, it helps us be visible for those are seeking content like this so we’re grateful for those who have found some joy and insight through this work if you could reward us not monetarily but just with a quick click and maybe a kind word or two. Again, if we’ve earned it.

And then the third way is we’re grooved back up here to keep the schedule going and keep the interesting content going and thus you won’t miss a thing if you just get into that app store of your choice, podcast store of your choice and you click subscribe. Anytime we have something new it’ll download automatically and you’ll be sitting there on the train or in the car or on the plane or just on a walk pondering the mysteries of life and business and goodness gracious there we. Anyway, laying it on thick in the spirit of a wonderful autumn. We’ll sign off from the cradle of liberty.