Refined business model and scaled apparel business by 150% in six months

Our client hired us while making around $150,000 per year to help coach her to understand the numbers side of the business and build out a formalized pricing model.

The Situation

Our apparel client operated on the supply chain in between the designer and the manufacturer which left little room for adding value that can really be scaled. She felt overwhelmed by the numbers even though she knew she had a profitable business on her hands and thus needed help optimizing pricing, decisions, and reports in an efficient way. She was barely making enough for herself, so starting out she was also strapped for disposable cash.

Our Process

This empowered her to hold more quality brainstorming sessions with us and allowed for detailed discussions around pricing, discounts, payment terms, budgeting, and ultimately business expansion.

After spending two meetings of getting a sense of how the business operations are being tracked from both a product level and a financial level, we set up procedures to clean the data and make the process more automated as well as relevant to be able to allow for better and more timeously decisions. Once this was done, time was spent teaching the owner what each number means and represents and what should be tracked.

The Results

Within a two-month period, the operations were more streamlined which allowed for a smoother sales process and a more optimized pricing approach. This increased revenue significantly on its own. However, the real increase came from an expansion into the e-commerce industry with a separate line of clothing which we saw as an opportunity now that it was easier to manage the rest of the business and because we wanted to diversify the sources of revenue. Overall, revenue thus increased substantially by 150% in 6 months, and focus then shifted again to optimizing profit based on the data over the period. We continue to touch base at an advisory level ever since the initial engagement.

Overall Timeline

Six months hands-on and then more ad-hoc/hands-off since middle 2017.