UK Screen Printing - Small business struggle
Hi. I’m new here so please bear with me.
I run a small business with my friend, printing clothing. Mostly screen-printing, some DTF and vinyl also.
I’ve been in this business for over 10 years. Previously self employed and working from a shared studio. Never marketed myself, but still had a good amount of regular clients through word of mouth.
A year ago my friend and I decided to take the business more seriously and started a company, bringing both of our clienteles together. Since then, on the surface, things have been going great. We have lots of work, many happy clients, and we keep getting new ones every week.
Problem is that the running cost of the business is so high, we barely are able to pay ourselves each month. I’m working 3x more than I used to in the last decade, but making significantly less. We now have an entire 450sqft unit which we rent (which admittedly is expensive as we are in London). Then there’s VAT of course, accounting fees, corporation tax, business rates, cost of goods etc etc. the list goes on...
Our aim was always to cater to the small and quick orders of 20-200 units, which we can complete within a few days. But now I’m kind of wondering if maybe staying in this bracket is just unsustainable in today’s economy?
Is it either that you run the business from your garage with extremely low overheads or do you just have to scale up to a big operation in some warehouse and print thousands of units each week?
Are people making it work in that middle ground?
I’m starting to lose hope that we can survive, even though the business seems to be growing.
thanks for reading