If you own an embroidery shop, you wear many hats. From sweeping floors to writing thank-you cards and creating custom invoices, some days it feels like you only get to the actual embroidery when you can fit it in. Many embroiderers are so busy in their shops that they never take the time to work on their businesses.

Tom Rumbaugh, ColDesi

ColDesi’s Tom Rumbaugh, a veteran commercial decorator turned industry consultant, shares practical tips you can implement today to help eliminate the bottlenecks in production and supercharge your output.

1. Follow Written Procedures
If you don’t already have written processes for each type of job, now’s the time to implement them. Create a step-by-step list of tasks each employee must do before, during and after a job so they know exactly how to handle different situations.

“If you don’t have written procedures, each person will develop their own way of doing things, which can lead to communication errors,” Rumbaugh says. “Sit down with your employees, gather their input and develop a procedure they can all get behind.”

2. Keep a Job Sheet for Every Order
It’s a huge waste of time to track down details after an order has been placed or, even worse, while it’s in the middle of production. Keep a job sheet – either digital or on paper – that accounts for every detail of the order: thread sequence, brand and thread color for each section of the design, packaging and shipping notes, specific requests from the customer. Then refer to the sheet to set up your space and carry out the order without disrupting workflow.

“Get all the important information on the job sheet at the time you sell the job, and keep it with the customer’s information in case you have questions,” Rumbaugh says. “Every single time the job is touched, log it – and make notes along the way when you learn something specific to this job so you know for next time.”

Bonus Tip: Take pictures of your finished work and keep the completed job sheets filed in an organized fashion.

3. Invest in Shelving and Bins
How often do you waste time hunting around the shop for pieces of orders when it’s time to embroider? Buy extra shelving and bins to keep items separated by job, and don’t let them pile up in your receiving area. Ideally, each order has its own bin and job sheet, organized based on when garments are expected to arrive.

“Unless absolutely necessary, you shouldn’t start a job without all the items in the bin and a properly filled out job sheet,” Rumbaugh says. “The money you spend on shelving and bins will pay off very quickly when you realize how much time you’re saving with this structure.”

4. Buy Quality Supplies
Supplies aren’t often talked about in productivity discussions, but the reality is that the quality of your embroidery supplies has an enormous impact on efficiency. “I’ve often heard shop owners brag about how much money they saved on supplies,” Rumbaugh says. “You can save $5 per cone, but end up spending $100 or more in extra labor trying to make cheap thread sew properly.”

Reach out to suppliers with great reputations and buy the supplies that give you the least trouble, even if they cost more. Remember, you get what you pay for, and that fact ripples both ways on the production line: If you want to turn a profit and receive repeat business, you have to produce a finished product worth paying for.

Andy Vantrease is a contributing writer for Wearables.