Episode 221: Making Strategic Investments for Growth with Imprint Engine's Caleb Gilbertson

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

We started the business just under 10 years ago. It'll be 10 years in July, and, you know, we've done almost $50 million in revenue. It's been a wild ride, to say the least. Getting through COVID was really interesting. You know, we maintained some growth through that. You know, we keep growing faster and faster. I think it's been interesting to see how The market changes. You know, we're very nimble. We try to move fast, try to iterate quickly. I would say that the things that, that help us maintain that are reminding ourselves to always keep learning, hire people smarter than you, make tiny decisions that you aren't going to make or break the company. It's been a wild ride for sure.

Imprint Engine opened their doors just under 10 years ago and have now surpassed $50 million in sales. Kaleb Gilbertson is the CEO and a founding partner of Imprint Engine. As an innovative entrepreneur, Kaleb's helped hundreds of businesses from startups to well-established companies become more efficient. His focus on technology helps to evolve all departments in an organization. His expertise ranges from e-commerce and software development to advertising and growth hacking, and he's fueled by creating this seamless user experience through strong, healthy organizations. Today on the SkewCast, we talk with Kaleb about their fast rise over 10 years, his advice on where to make strategic investments to ignite growth, and looking back where he would have invested his time, money, or energy more knowing the growth they would achieve. And we talk about their team's pod structure and a whole lot more. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Commonsku's Chief Content Officer. Before we get to the episode with Caleb, we have a very special webinar experience coming up. It's a conversation with David Luba, co-founder of TenTree, on how to build a high-impact brand on Wednesday, April 20th, from 12 to 1 PM ET. In 2011, David Luba, Derek Emsley, and Kailyn Emsley were inspired to start a clothing brand that gave back to the earth and formed the company Tin Tree with a simple mission: for every garment sold, they would plant 10 trees. Their revenue and their mission skyrocketed to over $65 million in sales, and by 2020, they surpassed 50 million trees planted. In 2021, PCNA's Trimark partnered with Tin Tree to make tin-free apparel available to the industry. And in our interview with co-founder David Luba, we will talk about the critical thresholds they crossed while building a high-impact brand and how to build both mission and profit into a unifying vision. Join us as we celebrate Earth Day in the month of April with our special guest, David Luba. You can register at commonscue.com/pcnawebinar. Today's episode is brought to you by Commonsku, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more or to begin your free trial now, visit commonscue.com. Now here's my chat with Imprint Engine's Caleb Gilbertson.

So Caleb, your business category split is somewhere around, what, 40% print, 30% promo, 30% apparel? How do you— how do these unique categories sort of create this one symbiotic ecosystem for your brand.

It's, it's been interesting to see how it evolves over the years, you know, and I think we really promote this end-to-end service model for our customers. The, the print, the promo, and apparel, while they're a focus, I think we've been really focusing on selling around providing an end-to-end service to— those are the byproducts of our service. The ecosystem is interesting because there's just, there's so many products out there. You know, how do you cut through the noise and come up with, you know, an experience out of that and a good service for our customers? So it's, yeah, it's been interesting to see how that evolves over the years. It's definitely more experience first, product second is like the thought always at this point with our conversations with customers.

Since you're working in so many different areas, like categories of brand expression, do you have a client story that sort of exemplifies the work that you guys have been doing there the best?

We focus a lot of energy on the unboxing experience and like overall, uh, how do you— how those products are being presented. So we work with a brand called GitHub and we do a lot of really fun projects with them. Good example of project we've done for them is their onboarding kits for HR. So coming up with a really cool box that when their employees are getting it, it's, it's wowing them. There's a lot of cool items in there. The box is branded really, really well. And then we push to try to distribute that in a very timely fashion. So kind of part of the whole onboarding experience, not just a box that shows up with a couple of random things from a print-on-demand printer somewhere out there.

It feels like when that strategy works for a customer, they tend to evolve that and it grows even more, right? They do one time and they're like, this was amazing. Let's do another one. That kind of helping your growth has been in that category?

Yep, absolutely. Yeah. You start to see, you know, even like recruiting kits or kits for recruiters, if they don't hire somebody, but they want to maintain a good brand experience for the employer brand, they'll send a follow-up kit to somebody just to let them know, hey, sorry, we didn't hire you, but we valued your time. There's little touch points like that, that we're starting to see more brands use. There's a cost to that, but there's there's a lot of value, especially as talent is hard to acquire. People have a lot of respect for brands that care about the whole process.

Yeah. Speaking of HR, or even of the different product categories like kitting or kits for, for clients, are there categories that you are really doubling down on in the near future that you hadn't in the past, or maybe just that you're doing more of?

Apparel and high-end products are, you know, it's really shifted away from kind of promotional items. Yeah, items, you know, um, and also like sustainability is such an important piece of our culture and our clients' culture. Um, we don't want to send stuff out that people aren't going to want to keep. And it's also how we brand that product. You could give somebody a really nice water bottle, but if you put the logo on there in a way that's not creative, that just kind of doesn't look well, the chances that they're going to throw it away when they don't work there are higher. Designing products in a way that branded, but also they'll keep the product for a long time. They're not just going to throw it away because it has the logo on it. A big piece of, you know, our process is design.

There's a lot of viewers and listeners that really might not know Imprint Engine. Can you— and the thing that I'm fascinated by is your growth. You guys have grown an insane amount. Can you give us a thumbnail sketch of what I mean when I say growth, like where you guys were and where you're at now?

We started the business just under 10 years ago. It'll be 10 years in July. And, you know, we've done almost $50 million in revenue. It's been a wild ride to say the least. Getting through COVID was really interesting. You know, we maintained some growth through that. You know, we keep growing faster and faster. I think it's been interesting to see how the market changes. You know, we're very nimble. We try to move fast, try to iterate quickly. I would say that the things that help us maintain that are reminding ourselves to always keep learning, hire people smarter than you, make tiny decisions that aren't going to make or break the company. It's been a wild ride for sure.

With growth that fast, what have you learned about balancing client demand with bandwidth?

That's always a tough one to balance. As a business owner, you're always the chicken and the egg thing. Hire ahead and hope for the best. That was really tough to navigate during COVID because we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. If hiring ahead at this point was, at that point, was going to benefit us or not, or if business was going to tank or grow. I think the investments we've made that I know have been paying off are investing in in-house production and warehouse infrastructure. Those were risky investments because it was diving into an area of expertise that we weren't super well-versed in, but those have started to pay dividends now that we have that stuff in-house and in place.

Making those investments at critical times in your growth journey is a big part of it. I mean, if you had to talk to a 5-year-younger Caleb, I mean, what would you say to him in regard— and Caleb and his partners, I should say— what would you say to him in regards to future investments or future growth? Would it be, be more bold, more conservative, invest here? Where would you say, all right, man, you're going to need to invest here?

Definitely would have invested heavier on the technology side up front. You know, I think we focused so much on just keeping up with demand we had great ideas early on that we slowly invested in that I would have gone back now and I would have said, okay, let's, let's invest way heavier in that now. I know where we are today. And it would have— we'd be a few years ahead of where we're going.

You work with so many great tech companies. And just to name a few, GitHub and Uber is a big client. So how did landing a client like Uber really shape who you are today in business? You know, some— once I asked an entrepreneur, I said, did you design your business where it was going to grow? Or did your clients design it for you, and she said it was a little bit of both. How did Uber or clients like Uber shape your business?

We were very fortunate to get in with Uber super early on. I think they had like 500 employees or something.

Wow.

All right. Started working with them, and they, they really did shape the first 5 years of our business. It was Travis and myself, my partner that founded the company with me. We've— we were doing everything we possibly could to keep up, like every day, you know, and it was, you know, a lot of If they could tell you, you can make it solutions to get things done for them because they were growing so quickly. And we really built our infrastructure around supporting a brand growing that quickly, which now is amazing because we have all these systems and processes in place that when we do get an opportunity like that for a brand that's growing really quickly, we're very well versed in moving really quick. We also have a lot of great experience and knowledge, things we can implement from a process perspective on their side that they aren't thinking about, you know, so we can, we can add a lot more value to a brand that is growing rapidly, just based on that experience with Uber.

I could see that you work with a lot of clients in a fast growth mode. And you work with clients with a minimum spend threshold of $100,000, and almost exclusively enterprise clients. So how have you seen the needs of these enterprise clients change? I kind of have two questions. How have you seen their needs change over the years? And then how do you balance taking on a new client when they're still in those early stages and you're not yet sure whether that's going to prove out?

The needs of the enterprise clients are— they vary a lot from organization to organization. You know, some organizations have an in-house design team that is very capable. Sometimes they don't. The enterprise customers, they're definitely more and more looking for an organization that can do end-to-end service model or perform an end-to-end service model, because it's so much more work for them logistically to manage a different 3PL and a different e-commerce company, printer, and swag provider. The needs that we've seen are they really want us to do it all, you know, more of an agency type model than, you know, just a swag distributor.

When do you know, how do you know to say yes to someone when you're in those early stages of dating and you're like, this client is going to be amazing, or we're just going to gamble? Have you, have you guys codified a process, or is it just more of a gut decision?

I'd say right now it is, it's very much a gut decision. Not a lot of these, especially the ones that are not well established, you know, we've, we've learned some hard lessons by taking on some fast-growing startup tech companies that look really good. And, you know, we invested more than we should have and little paper cuts from that. But we've got a really good process internally now of at least identifying the needs upfront, and also charging for our time. We used to do a lot of, you know, agency type, you know, strategy design services for free. And we're now pretty strict about charging for those services. There's definitely value in bringing ideas and experience to organizations outside of just selling them the swag they're using. So I think that's something I would encourage other distributors to do.

Yeah. Do you bill for that strategy and creative now?

Yeah. So it's always a business decision. Like, we'll, my partners and I, if we see an opportunity, we know we'll collectively make a decision if like, hey, we're willing to put some skin in the game because we see this. Yeah. Okay. It's an easier thing for us to do as partners. It's harder for our, you know, our account managers and sales, but we always look at those opportunities and there's, you can get through some doors sometimes by discounting that stuff. Or if we see an opportunity that's coming really fast and we know like, okay, this is a big opportunity, We'll invest our own time and energy into it. That's paid off several times now. Not, it doesn't happen every time, but we're getting pretty good at identifying what clients will be a time suck and which ones will be fun to work with.

Knowing some of the strategy prices and creative prices upfront though, helps at least communicate to the client the value they're getting so that if you do end up putting skin in the game, as you say, then you're at least all on the same page in terms of we're not just doing work for free for you. Like, this is going to be an incredible output for both of us if we work toward the same goal.

Absolutely. Yeah. Even if we give them a discount on those services upfront, later on when we do charge for them, they, they, they understand the value of them because now they've had a little taste.

You mentioned your team a little bit. Talk a little bit about your sales team infrastructure. Do you have people focused on lead gen and account management, or like most of your leads of the new business, you get referrals? How do they come to you?

We're fortunate to have a great brand in, especially in the tech community. We've grown a lot of really strong relationships with people from Uber and other organizations over the years. We do no marketing. It's all referral-based right now. We really can't wait for that day when we're not reactive because we—

It's a good problem, man.

It's a good problem. It's a great problem. So we get a lot of referrals. Most of our customers stick with us for life. As long as we're doing a really good job, they stick around. So, and, but, you know, our sales team, it really, it's the partners. And we have a few other longtime account managers that have been with us that are handling inbound sales that come to us. And then we build these pod structures around our clients with project management and account management and design. We have such a wide array of services. Sometimes these clients can be demanding, so it can turn into a pretty heavy burnout situation for the people servicing those clients. So we, we use this pod structure, really helps people work together to service especially big clients. So it's easy to pull people and pull new people in and add bandwidth, and also for people to take time off and not have things fall off with the client. So that's been working really well for us. And I, you know, I definitely think, uh, other organizations could benefit from that. It's always difficult to balance burnout, big clients that are demanding.

Yeah, right. So you have these pods, they're, they're sort of organized then by teams. And so you could have account manager and a creative person in the same pod. Does that depend on the client mix that they're working with?

Yep, definitely. Yeah, we kind of have like specialty pods. There could be a client that is so big, like they're going to have a big pod, you know, they could have 5 to 10 people collectively working on those pods. And then we kind of have subject matter experts that are pulled in for different services and things like that. But ultimately, you know, providing a really good effortless client experience is a heavy focus of ours. And that requires a lot of the people talking to the client to be on the same page. And I think so that's, you know, something we're continuing to evolve and even as we invest into technology and things like that, trying to provide a good experience and a consistent experience too. If someone moves from one pod to another, it's the same process and little nuances on what the client needs.

Speaking of technology, I mean, I know technology is a personal passion of yours. And so if you were to talk to like a younger entrepreneur in business, how would you encourage them to invest in their tech future? Or, and another way of asking this is kind of what tech investments have you made along the way that helped you grow and how would you advise them?

We've always been pretty nimble on the tech side. You know, we use a lot of software that integrates well with other softwares and we do a lot of e-commerce stuff. You know, this industry is moving super fast. You know, I think Commsku has actually done a great job at building a technology platform that works well for distributors that need to get some structure in place. We first ran the business off a Google spreadsheet a little while, And it's great because it's super flexible, but at some point you have— you need reporting and project management tasks that are measurable. Investing in a good ERP solution that is holistic early on is important. It will save you time in the long run. The bigger you get, the more work it is to change in the future. So I think it's important that it might be scarier, more costly. Upfront, but it will pay off in the long run.

For some reason, there's a reluctance to spend on technology. And I say this not as someone who is just now in the seat of selling technology, but, you know, I ran a business similar to yours in that we did print promotions and we did digital, and it was all fulfillment and kitting and warehousing distribution. And so we learned really early on that the tech investments are vitally important because we were investing numbers in e-commerce that folks were not even touching, and just because it helped with that client experience. So that would be my advice too, is to just that's going to be your, that's going to be your most exponential growth category is when you make those investments in that part of the business.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, talk a little about Caleb. We've got a few minutes left here, so tell us about some of your biggest influences, brands or people you follow. Who do you keep up with? Like, what inspires you?

When I think about, uh, influencer that made an impact on my life, I think about Tim Ferriss. He— The 4-Hour Workweek, I think, was one of the first books, uh, I read when I was early on, and, and kind of the story He told of having a business overwhelm him to the point he was miserable. I think about that all the time and I'm constantly trying to struggle with work-life balance and also question everything. If you feel like, and I encourage my employees to do that too, do you ever feel like you're doing something that doesn't make sense? You're following a process and you feel like it's broken. You should always question. Our culture is very much built around like question everything, be respectful. If you see something that's not working, let's fix it and don't be afraid to talk about it.

Speak to that a little bit more. I mean, the culture I know is a really big important part of Imprint Engine. We didn't cover that earlier. What is it unique about your culture there you think different than other companies? Is that part of it, just that openness?

Yeah, it's super open culture. I mean, employee-first mentality, you know, I think If you build a culture where your employees are your priority, that experience is going to ripple through to your customers. Like everyone always says, your customers first, which at the end of the day, yes, paying your bills, they're writing your checks. But as your company grows, providing an experience that is valuable to your customers is going to be a direct reflection of how your employees' health is. We really preach like open culture. Be innovative, respect yourself and others. Our core values are focused around respect and innovation and integrity, and we live it. We actually truly live it. We hire, we fire around those core values. It's extremely important and it ripples through across everything.

What do you enjoy most about the business? Maybe I should ask it this way. What do you enjoy now as opposed to the past? What is it you really love?

Honestly, like, my favorite part about growing the business, especially to this point, is seeing the team grow and work together. Probably the most rewarding aspect of it. You know, it's, it's, it's really hard, especially, you know, we're 70+ employees, right? And seeing everybody like each other and get along and validation that we're hiring the right people and building a culture that people enjoy coming to work every day. I really feel that, and I think that's probably the most rewarding aspect about the business at this point. I love to make money and grow fast, and that's fun and exciting, but actually seeing an impact on people's lives is definitely something I love to see.

That's great. It's a great point to end on, Caleb. Thanks for your time today, man. Really appreciate it. I mean, you guys are growing at such a rapid pace. I'm sure by the time we turn around, they'll be at $10 million and another 20, 30, 40 employees, who knows. But it's been a joy. You guys are a great customer of Common Skews and, and we appreciate you guys so much. Thanks for joining us on Skewcast.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of Skewcast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.