Sally Sign Lady
OUR STORY
OUR STORY
Who are we?
We are a small business consisting of a Father and Son team. Ozzie is 12 and Dad... Is getting on a bit.
We are just ordinary people with an entrepreneurial slant. As a Dad with 2 sons, Ozzie and Tom, I've realized that life is no longer about me, it's about what I can leave behind, how I can ensure that my family can survive, be strong, be ambitious and not be afraid to fail along the way in order to learn the valuable lessons on the path to success.Balancing a happy home and successful business isn’t easy. With work piling up, it’s easy to get sucked into the hustle and be tempted to work crazy hours to make ends meet. The trick is to work smarter, not harder.
I must confess that for me this is the hardest thing to achieve, the work / life balance.
Through the creation of our Old-Signs business I intend to use it as a vehicle to teach my sons how a business works end to end, how things can sometimes go wrong and how always doing the right thing is the only way forward and the best way too keep loyalty with customers over the long term. Read on to follow us on this journey in making a business work.
Dad.
Telephone: 01202 237 300 Email: sales@old-signs.co.uk
Unit C14 Admiralty Park, Holton Heath Trading Estate, Poole. BH16 6HX
How did we get here?
Here's our story.
A chance conversation with my Son Ozzie lead us to get talking about business. He was eleven years old at the time and very inquisitive about everything. He was aware that I've always had multiple work things going on in my life, some of them serious things (the day job) and some of them just small ideas that have grown along the years (the side job). Rather than just talk about how a business works I decided to demonstrate by example and have Oz be part of all the various aspects of building the business up.
A chance conversation with my Son Ozzie lead us to get talking about business. He was eleven years old at the time and very inquisitive about everything. He was aware that I've always had multiple work things going on in my life, some of them serious things (the day job) and some of them just small ideas that have grown along the years (the side job). Rather than just talk about how a business works I decided to demonstrate by example and have Oz be part of all the various aspects of building the business up.
This is how our "accidental" business started and how we got on this journey with Old-Signs, a metal sign business. Why signs? That was a random selection too, I'd been asking for vintage metal signs for Christmas and Birthdays over the years so it just sort of got picked as the example business. The idea was that it shouldn't matter what the business does, it was about learning all the aspects end to end of a business, the product or service was meant to be largly irrelevant.
We've ended up with a nice little business that has had it's ups and downs just like any business does. It's turned out to be very rewarding and people seem to quite like what we are doing and what we are supplying. You can check out our customer feedback here.
As time goes on and we learn something new everyday, behind the scenes we are documenting the whole process with the intention of sharing it with anyone who maybe interested in starting a small business. Covid has certainly been a factor in starting this but so much learning has gone on we feel compelled to share the experieince.
Speaking of learning... One of the things that Oz picked up on early on was where I kept getting the maths wrong and ended up selling several of the early signs at a loss. Two heads are always better than one! Always get someone to check your work and always check their work too. Seems obvious but sometimes things are so obvious (or you think they are) that you pass over them too quickly and miss fundamental mistakes.
Anyway, our story doesn't end here, please look at our "Where are we going?" section to find out some of the other things that are in mid throws so to speak.
Thank you for visiting Old-Signs and thank you for your time to read our
story that we suspect will be going on for quite some time yet.
Special thanks to our very own "Sally Sign Lady" for the automated and somewhat robotic videos too.
Ozzie & Steve.
July 2023
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- Performance: Over 3000 signs sold in our first year.
- eBay: Top-rated Seller Level.
- Custom: We can create Custom Signs with your designs, dates, photos etc. This has become very popular. As we have the equipment to do it in-house, turnaround times are very quick too.
Where are we going?
Over time we have learnt, largely by trial and error how best to do certain things and how to avoid certain pitfalls too. Below are some of the business areas we have touched and some of the areas that we intend to expand into. As time goes on we will document each step with complete transparency so as to share with anyone that maybe interested in starting a small business.
- The Core Idea: What product or service will we sell?
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Market Research: Will people want what we've got?
- Sourcing: Can we get what we want, where we want at a price that will allow us to make a little money?
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Logistics: Are we capable and ready to supply what we have in a professional manner and can we get the goods or services to the customers without trauma or delays?
- Sales/Marketing: Do we have a budget in place for advertising, do we have a sales strategy and if we do is it the normal approach of advertise / hope for sales or can we be more creative and make a big splash in a more creative way?
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Trade Customers: An ambitious thought but it happened to us.
We needed to react quickly to ensure good supply, the right terms and to show our trade customers that they have made the right descision by using Old-Signs. We built a trade platform to help with this. -
Accounting: We have to acknowledge that we are not accountants.
There are professionals that have spent many years evolving their skills in this department so we encourage everyone to employ an accountant for this aspect of the business. It's too easy to think that you can do it yourself on the cheap, that is of course until the Tax Man turns up and demands lots of money from you that you didn't plan for. At Old-Signs we employed an accountant at a very early stage.
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Innovation: OK, so by now you'll have seen our somewhat robotic videos on our web site explaining what Old-Signs does and what it supplies as a company. This is currently just an experiment and the lady in the video, we call her "Sally Sign Lady" is in actual fact and Artificial Intelligence driven robot of sorts. We're still not sure about this but the idea does have some clever implications that we can potentially use as we progress the business. We are using a product called Synthesia.
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Community Sharing: We've already learnt a lot with this business, some of the ideas will translate to any other business so what better than to be transparent about what we've done and share the real life stories of how we evolve. We are currently building some training modules to help with this.
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Product Development: Initially you could say that we were merely a distributor of goods. Having learnt about the Verified Rights Owner Program in late 2021 we realised that we needed to re-assess our general approach and how we would proceed in 2022. This is a work in progress that has taken us down a track which involves making our own products with our own designs which includes designs in the style of - Vintage, 40's, 50's, 60's etc, custom products and an extended range of products that go hand in hand with the original core ideas for the company. Again, watch this space. CUSTOM SIGNS
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T-Shirts: As we have the equipment to do sublimation with Metal Signs, it seems logical to use the existing equipment to do T-Shirts too.We'll start small and learn as we go along of course so please watch for updates. Initial feedback has been good with regards to transposing Motoring signs onto T-Shirts. Who knew?
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Marketing Tools: We use ClickFunnels. It's been enlightening and extremely succssful. The guys at ClickFunnels supply A LOT of free training on their products We found this to be a great way to understand the funnel aproach to marketing they have. It makes sense, though initially we were somewhat sceptical. Some of the American hype was a bit over the top but when we boiled things down and took a UK approach to it, the sales success we've had so far spoke volumes.
We started with one of their FREE books, Traffic Secrets and ended up getting all of their FREE books. Then we did their 5 Day Lead Challenge which was extremely informative and actually worked in practise for us. Beyond that we invested time into their 30 Day One Funnel Away Challenge, sheer awesomeness! Our sales have gone from hundreds of pounds a month to thousands of pounds a month as a direct result. We cannot recommend this approach highly enough, it's a game changer. Try any of the links above, get past the American over the top approach and you will be on the way to making a lot of sales, we know, we've done it. The main ClickFunnels link is HERE.
Please note: Any trade marks or names used are purely for descriptive purposes only and do not imply any connection with the companies concerned.
Copyright © 2020
Old-Signs | UKActiveWeb | 2Comma Sales
Unit C14 Admiralty Park,
Holton Heath Trading Estate, Poole BH16 6HX
Note: VeRO - Verified Rights Owner Program. In late 2021 we became aware of this program and are currently re-assessing what we stock and our general approach for 2022.
We use eBay a lot and want to comply with their policies wherever possible, some things tend to be shades of grey as opposed to black and white so it isn't an instant event to become fully compliant. We just wanted to let our customers know that we are mindful of such things and are actively changing our approach on an ongoing basis.
Copyright © 2021 UKActiveWeb | Old-Signs
We use eBay a lot and want to comply with their policies wherever possible, some things tend to be shades of grey as opposed to black and white so it isn't an instant event to become fully compliant. We just wanted to let our customers know that we are mindful of such things and are actively changing our approach on an ongoing basis.
Copyright © 2021 UKActiveWeb | Old-Signs
Unit C14 Admiralty Park, Holton Heath Trading Estate, Poole BH16 6HX.
CUSTOM JAVASCRIPT / HTML
