Great Merch Starts With Better Questions And Better Process with Eliza Webster

0:02Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of the Epic Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we are all about helping business owners just like you achieve success. So we don't do fancy smancy. We don't do flashing lights. We don't do a lot of things that a lot of podcasts will do. These are just real stories about real people and their entrepreneurial and business experiences. as we go into their wins, their challenges, and their learnings. So we hope you enjoy it. All right, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs. I am Cliff McRae with Action Coach Business Growth Partners, where we work with local business owners to drive real big ideas into real scalable growth.

0:46Today, I'm excited to be joined by Eliza Webster with Cotton Street Apparel. Eliza, how are you doing today? I'm great, Cliff. How are you? Yeah, I'm doing wonderful. phone. Really excited to have you on. So let's go ahead and jump right into things. So for those of you who may not know it yet, who are you, Eliza? Who is Eliza Webster and what is Cotton Street Apparel? Cotton Street Apparel is a print shop, screen printing and embroidery, mostly located in downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We service our local community and several large entities with contract printing all over the US and we have a great time doing it and we help start merch lines we help people outfit their crew who are working for them various other things too so if you need a shirt it's like I always say help me help you not be naked so if you need clothes this is where you come to get your own custom clothing made yeah we definitely wouldn't want that so So, no.

1:50So, you know, who are you as a person? Personally, I am a unrepentant consumer of metal music, anime. I'm married. I have a no kids, but I have a cat who is as much problem as a human child would be. Yes. And that much attention. So it's like I'm a mom, but I do a lot of side outside things. I staff anime conventions. I'm on the board of directors for St. Glass Playhouse, which is a local community theater. So I do a lot of community theater outreach. And I spend a lot of time playing Magic the Gathering very badly with my husband and all of our friends. Nice, nice, nice. Now you threw out anime there.

2:38What's your favorite anime? Oh, of all time, it's probably a very little known anime from the 90s called Fushugi Yugi. not a lot of people know it it was very epic back in the day and so old school anime people may know it but if you started in the whole like naruto bleach era and into the newer stuff you probably don't probably don't know it okay okay you're saying that fashugi yugi was that fashugi yugi yeah yeah okay yeah no i haven't heard that one i'm gonna have to check that out so appreciate the recommendation yeah so go ahead and take us back to the very beginning you know what made you say, yep, I'm doing this.

3:14I'm starting that business. Well, I did not start this business. I have two great owners. Our owners are Kyle Woodall, and he started the business in his bedroom in Florida. Many, many, many years ago, he had a band and he couldn't find anybody to print shirts for them for a decent price. So he started printing and he bought himself a little hand press and he got really good at it. So other bands started coming and saying, hey, you want to help us out? So that all started in Florida and he moved up here to North Carolina and he met Nikki Bowen, who is our other owner. And I knew Nikki because she and I worked together back at Hot Topic in the early 2000s.

4:05So Nikki and I were together over there. Nikki and Kyle Kyle had started this business Nikki came into it and left Hot Topic and they became the driving force and the partnership that created originally what was called Machine Gun Graphics and has now changed names to Cotton Street Apparel back in 2021 I had helped out some in the past they had brought me in at intervals when they needed more press hands and people to help with big orders if kyle was on tour nikki was printing stuff by herself uh and she's like hey come catch and fold t-shirts with me one night and i was like sure girls night at t-shirt printing sure why not so 2021 uh i get a call one morning and she's like don't don't go back to retail because we had all like left for the pandemic and she's like don't go back to regular retail.

5:02She's like, come work here. And she's like, and I was like, okay, yeah, that sounds good. I'll go work in production, which is where I started. And then in November of 2024, Nikki came down and she looked at Kyle. She goes, I'm taking her. I'm stealing her. I need help upstairs in administrative and I know she can do it. So I went from the production side of things to the sales side of things. And now I am the sales director for Cotton Street. Nice, nice, nice. Now, and you know, it seems like, you know, Kyle and Nikki pretty well, the actual owner. So if you, you know, and let's say this is hypothetical, you know, let's say if they had to start again from absolute scratch, you know, they had no brand, no clients, no safety net.

5:46What would you think they would do differently the second time around? Or would they do anything different, do you think? Oh, I think the second time around, because you always learn from, past mistakes. I think the second time around, I think when you start something and you start something with the people you know and care about and your friends and stuff, things at first can be kind of wild. Something we've learned as we bring new people on here especially is that we have very strong starting, like, very strong guidelines and POS and stuff that people have to follow and adhere to so that it's all across the board.

6:36We're servicing our customers all the same way. Everybody has the knowledge that they need to have to answer questions effectively because I think when you start, when you're just a group of, people and friends coming from different types of backgrounds because some of us have a very retail heavy background and some of us don't. When you're answering, when you ask one person one question, they may not have the same answer as the next. So I think that's one thing is starting strong and getting your entire crew on the same wavelength, but also to look at customers and really get to talk to them in a deeper area about, okay, this is great.

7:18You want to do this. Where are we going with this? Is this a once a year type thing so that you can plan for that financially versus, okay, we've got this t-shirt, this part of your business, but I see you do all this other stuff. You have promo, you have bags and stuff. What do I have to do to make sure that I'm your one-stop shop for all of these items. And I think that's something that doesn't get discussed when somebody's like testing the waters with a new client. And that was something that wasn't always discussed, you know, early on, I think into the business, especially when they were working mostly with like bands.

7:59But now it's something that, you know, we really, we really look at. And I think it's something that would have helped them grow faster back in the day, had that been a discussion of, okay, cool. Here's what you need to go forward. Here's where we can help you. Let's make this more than a one-time deal per year. Let's look at what we can do throughout the year so that it's a steady beat of income from the person so that you're not waiting for some sort of white, you know, the great Moby Dick, the white whale of a customer client. Because if you lose that customer client, you lose a huge amount of coming in.

8:40If you can get all your median clients and even some of your median to large clients to give you a steady stream of revenue, you continuously grow and continuously stay on pace month to month with what you need to do. Okay. Okay. So what would you say is one common myth people believe about running a business that makes you laugh now when you hear it? Oh, that, oh yeah, that we, that we make, especially off t-shirts. People think that the markups off t-shirts are for printing are ridiculous, that we're all millionaires and we have three boats and two, two mansions and stuff like that that i feel like yeah my bugatti my bugatti out back uh yeah all of that they i i think that's a common misconception with a lot of jobs but that everybody is uh affected the same way our markups and stuff are fair labor for you know it's very fair for what we do the creative side of what we do.

9:44I think a lot of artists get that a lot. Well, I could do that. No, if you could do that, you'd be doing it. So when we're asking you to pay us what we're worth to do it, it's not, you're not paying just for the ink, just for the shirt. You're paying for the ability that we can put it on, we can run the machines. We know how to do and fix little tweaks, colors will be correct. Everything will look exactly as you envision it. That's what you're paying for going into a business like this. Yeah. Yeah. So be honest, are you naturally more of an entrepreneur or an employee at heart? A bit of both because I have little side businesses that I do.

10:38I bake wedding cakes. My mother and I have a craft business, small things like that. I think that's how I get my entrepreneurship type abilities really fired up. And then I bring that back into here. So even though I am technically an employee of my owners, I have got just as much drive to get out there and make this business grow and to see it flourish just as they do, because I want to see us all succeed. So I feel like that spirit's very alive and well with everything that I try to put forth day to day to day to day to go out there and get that new business, pick up that phone, talk to people.

11:22Lots of people are afraid of cold calling and stuff like that you shouldn't you shouldn't be yeah yeah yeah no i mean that's kind of how i find you honestly just kind of picked up the phone and gave you a call yes you did and i was like i would be delighted sir yeah no don't be afraid of cold call out there guys it's you know you never know what you're gonna get i mean yeah you may get some people that you know maybe maybe be a little mean but then you can have great people like eliza here so definitely pick up the phone and give that person that call don't hesitate so you know and i kind of like to ask this question to kind of get a feel of how other people like to run things and how they kind of take care of things when they're away.

11:59So how do you personally handle stepping away from the business? Are you a 7 p.m. I'm not taking any more calls. I'm not doing anything else. Or are you working around the clock? How do you handle that? I'm working around the clock. So I cut off and I don't take any calls or anything past five unless it's them calling me. Like if it's Nikki or Kyle or somebody from the business calling me, I try to have a very good work-life balance, but there's always stuff at night strategizing and thinking, oh, I've got to jump on this first thing tomorrow morning. Because I don't think any of us ever actually completely, as much as we would like to 100 % disconnect from a job when we're not sitting at it.

12:52but I like to, when I'm away, I make sure at the end of the day, I do my own little wrap up and I go through and I have, I'm very color coded person. So I put all my checks and balances next to all the people that I talk to. If I know there's somebody I need to talk to first thing in the morning, I'll jot a note so that when I come back in and sit down, it's right here next to my computer. If I didn't take it home with me and say, okay, that's the first person I've got the contactor. That's the first thing that needs to get out. This is the first thing on my agenda day to get done before anything else.

13:27And then everything slots back in. But when I'm off the clock, there's still, the brain is still computing going, oh yeah, I better make a note of that because I got to do that tomorrow too. So I never really clock out. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the biggest thing, right? You don't want anything to fall through the cracks. So yeah. I mean, And that's the biggest thing. You don't want to not reach out to that person. Could be a big, it'd be a big rule. You never know, right? Oh, yeah. And I, if somebody like, that's to say, if somebody gets me right at five, when I'm getting, when we're locking up and getting ready to go home and I see it come through on my phone, I'm like, oh, that's fine.

14:06I'll sit in the car and I'll go back and forth with the person. I'll let them know, hey, you know, if it's something that can wait till the next day or something I need to think about, I'll be like, that's great. We are actually winding up for the day. I've got this. Let me do a little research tonight and I will get back with you tomorrow. So looking back, what would you attribute most of the growth of the business to so far? I would say the two things mostly for us would be the quality of our product and our ability to get out and do outreach with different people. We don't limit ourselves to like one type of client, which I feel like, you know, some businesses can't really help but do that.

14:54I think we're in a unique position where, you know, I'm doing that, you know, 5k charity run. And for one person, I'm doing, you know, Peter Millar, Perry Ellis, you know, Polos for a golf tournament is another thing I'm working on. And then we're printing metal shirts for a band. So we have this unique ability to reach out to all walks of life and to all different types of clientele. And we don't shy away from any one section. And we're able to cover a lot of ground that way. And then the quality of our product. we've been in the game for a long long time and our production team both our embroidery team and our screen printing team are top notch with what they do and then I devote personally a lot of time into research and making friends and colleagues out of a lot of overseas production people I've met and talked to a lot of reps and stuff.

16:05So I have a lot of friends for the promotional side of things that we do. So I can talk to people, get stuff in here fast with fast turnarounds so that we can print things for people. I've harbored a lot of great friendships that have really started to set us forward. And I think just putting out a quality product every time and for us to get out and be willing to talk to people like you too. We've got a couple of things. Nikki is part of the Women in Print Alliance, which has been a great, big, helpful thing for us. That's a major group within our industry. And just going out and reaching out to other people in your industry too, making friends with other printers, not seeing it all as straight competition day after day after day after day and being able to reach out and get knowledge and give knowledge to help other people because it's the whole giver's gain.

17:0899 % of the time you give and then you'll get back. There are some people who will stiff you from it, but the majority of people are good at heart. If you give them a lot, they'll give it back to you. Nice, nice. Have you ever had to hire anybody before? I not well I semi helped with our newest tire here uh since I knew I knew of her we have opened a showroom and uh we we have a partnership with a local business called camel city goods which is all winston-salem based apparel that we've done the printing for for years now we house their um their brick and mortar shop in our front showroom. And we just brought on a shop manager for up there who looks after the shop and is also our intake person for people who are coming to meet with us.

18:02So I got to help hire her. Her name is Scarlett. She's very nice girl. I found out that she had left her former employer and I was like, we were looking for somebody and I was like, Nikki, I think this would be a good fit. I think she'll need to be trained more on fashion retail side of things, but she has good customer service skills. And that was enabling to bring her in. But we've also talked about later on, as we continue to grow, I will grow out. I will be my current sales director position. There will be another salesperson who comes up under me and I will end up training them and everything that we do so that they are.

18:48So that's, that's coming. That's in the future. So I'm going to be working on that hopefully soon. Yeah, no, that's exciting. So, all right, perfect. Yeah. So appreciate that. So let's go ahead and head into what's called the quick fire round. So basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to say one word and then I want you to give me one word. The first thing that comes to your mind when you hear each word regards to running the business and then expand upon it a little bit as a why you chose that. You know what you chose, what you said. All right. So first word is education. Education. You have to the first word that comes into my mind is it's a need.

19:26You have to be educated on the product that you sell or else you're not going to be able to sell it to anyone. You need to know what goes into making it. You need to know how to effectively make it and to market it to the people who want it. Planning. I'm sorry, I missed that. Planning. Planning. Planning. My CRM. I have a new CRM. I'm getting to learn and I'm working with, it's called Sales Inc. It's wonderful. uh shout out to kevin who has put this together specifically for um us in the printing business um and it has helped me become a better planner planning my meetings planning my steps to keep me in touch with all of my uh people so yeah planning i now equate right now to crm nice nice inspiration oh inspiration art is the first thing that comes to my mind art music that's what inspired this entire business to start was music so it's something that is very much a part of this and because you know printing's artistry so yeah that it would have to be art commitment Drive.

20:51Because you have to have the drive and the commitment to keep the business growing. You have to be here and put in 110 % every time you're here. Even if there are days you want to be lazy, you got to get in here. You got to contact everybody back. You got to go out there and talk to the new people. You got to find the new business. You can't ever stop. Discipline. structure i have and have been a long part of my life with undiagnosed adhd so stuff like the crm structures notes a part of that planning all has to uh go into that to keep me in line to do what i'm uh doing every day to keep me focused risk assessment i feel like i do a lot of that you have to take risks some you have to take risks on sometimes you take risk on clients not knowing how stuff's going to pan out most of the time whether or not they're bringing you something that's genuinely going to be a good fit i take a little more time i think than probably some of your average salespeople to really talk and get to know somebody to find out pretty early on whether or not we are a good fit for what they're looking to do.

22:21And 99 % of the time we are. But the parts of the time that we aren't, I have no problem helping them find somebody else who would be a better fit for them where they are currently. Because people remember that and they'll come back to you when they're ready for what you have to offer. and the last one is execution execution 100 and 100 don't do anything half-assed if you're going to do it commit to it the product you put out has to be great your customer service needs to be on par even if the person that that you're doing it for is running you to death or giving you snark or whatever. You have to be like, that's just, you don't know what's going on with other people.

23:09Just breathe, walk through it. Don't let it take your joy, do your job and make sure that you, you know, you're giving them your hundred percent because they can never accuse you of not bringing your A game to the table. Yes. No, I love that. I love that. So, all right. Yeah. Appreciate you getting through that quick fire around there. So yeah, Yeah, a couple of questions here. So, you know, and I want you to be as candid as you can on the next answer to this next question. But let's say if, let's say a smaller business owner or maybe even a smaller time executive or so would listening to the podcast episode today with Eliza, and let's say they're feeling stuck or overwhelmed.

23:49Let's say they're not having a great week or even a great month, or let's say they're not even having a great start to 2026. I mean, we're already in the second quarter here. This year is already flying by. But what would you what piece of advice would you give to that person today to keep them from going over the edge? Basically, I would say. Take 10, 15 minutes, 30 minutes of that morning. Go do something that puts you in your happy place. Don't doom scroll or do anything like that. Pick up your favorite book. go to YouTube, find your favorite YouTuber, find your favorite music video, listen to some music on Spotify, something that puts you in a mental state that will just bring you up.

24:42And then think about how you feel in that moment and apply that to the first thing you do that morning. So if the first thing you've got to do is enter something in your crm Or the first thing you have to do is call a client you don't really like or someone who's being difficult carry the joy That you had from that moment of solitude or that moment of Enjoying something you really like and apply it to that person Just hold that energy that you gave yourself apply it to that person And when that's over, stop, breathe. If you have to refresh, do it again. Do it again. Listen to that song again. Like I get songs stuck in my head all the time.

25:26Listen to that song again. Let it get you back to where you need to be. Then do the next hard thing on your list. And then plan out at the end of the day after you've done that, write down everything you get done so that you can look at it at the end of the day and be like, you know, today sucked, but I did all of this. I got all of this done. And if I did it all today, I can do it all tomorrow. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So what's next for Cotton Street Apparel? You know, what should people be excited for in the near future? Oh, well, the one thing we're super excited about right now, like I said, we have partnered with Camel City Goods here in Winston.

26:10We have, there's new stuff coming. I've seen several new ideas, new shirts, new merch for that. And we're having a block party with a couple of our other local businesses. I believe it's Saturday, May 2nd. And we're closing down Brookstown Avenue here in Winston. And we are going to have a great party and a fun time. We're going to do some live print with our original pull screen printer. So our original press will be outside. We're pressing by hand. So that's going to be super exciting. And then some of our people that we do merch for are going to be here as well. So people will be able to see some of the other local Winston businesses we've been helping and getting all their cool merch and stuff out.

27:09So people get a chance to see that, to sample their wares. And it's going to be a good community fun time. So we're super excited for that. We're super excited to grow and bring more people in. I'm super excited to have another salesperson here in the future, hopefully the near future, so that we can expand and just keep going and reaching for the stars. I love it. I love it. I love it. So, yeah. And what's the best way for someone to connect with you or learn what you all do? So we have a website, cottonstreetapparel.com You can pop over there And if you look at the top, we've got a bunch of cool stuff You can get in contact with us by needing We've got buttons, need more information Do you need a straight quote?

27:56Do you need some more information? You can click that out, fill out our forms, it comes straight to me And I'll be able to get with you and get you the information that you need We've also got some fun blogs and stuff on there as well. One of our favorites is It's Not Just a T-shirt, where we talk about how T-shirts are more than just something you wear. A lot of people keep T-shirts for years and years and years because it's a core memory. So that's a really fun blog. And I encourage people to read it because it's a really good read about the stuff that we keep and how important screen printing can be to everybody.

28:39Any social media? We are on Facebook. We are also on Instagram. We don't have a TikTok yet, but maybe. We'll see. It's coming. Maybe. We'll see. We're more active on Instagram than anything, but Instagram's a great way to see new stuff, both ours and Camel City Goods. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. TikTok is the way to go on 2026. Yeah. Yeah. We're looking at it. We got to have a little more free time with social media to be able to do it. No, definitely understand. Yeah. And Eliza, yeah. Thank you again for coming on. This has been fantastic. So, yeah, thank you so much for sharing your story, your perspective, and your real behind the scenes of building the business.

29:24You know, it was great. Yeah. And anything, any last words or anything like that you would want to give our audience here today? Just keep doing what you're doing. Keep giving 110 % and look for the things that you really love to do. And it'll make your job a whole lot easier if you're doing what you love. Yeah, no, agreed, agreed. All right. We appreciate everything you're doing for the community and wish you continued success. Thank you. Thank you, Cliff. Hey, thanks for listening to the Epic Entrepreneurs podcast. Here's three things that you can do. Number one, remember to subscribe to the podcast.

30:01It takes very little effort on your part. It's going to help you and your fellow entrepreneurs. Plus, you guys know how it works. the more subscribers we get, the more cool things we can offer to you. Second, to learn more about growing your business, just download my book, The Coach Approach. It's free for you at giftfrombill.com. That's giftfrombill.com. Hey, and if you'd like more info about growing your business and what we can do to help you grow your business, send me an email directly just send it to williamgilliland at actioncoach.com that's my personal email that i read no one else reads it first there's it's not screened it's my real email just send it to me i can't wait to talk to you hey and until then all the best