Entrepreneurial Tools Behind YYC’s Local Laundry
Last month I had the opportunity to interview Dustin Paisley from Local Laundry. Local Laundry is a Calgary bases social enterprise that creates unique made-in-Canada apparel. Founded in 2015, Local Laundry makes different clothing products with a focus on promoting the City of Calgary and Canada, as well as partnering with other local businesses. Additionally, Local Laundry gives 10% of its profits away to local charities in order to give back to the community. Amazingly, this company has grown by staff working part time on the company from using multiple different technologies to get things done effectively and efficiently.
Sitting down with Dustin, I was able to ask him a lot of questions about the tools that the company founders have used to run the company. The first thing I asked him was, what was the first tool the company purchased? The first tech that Local Laundry used was building a website. For this they used GoDaddy. This is a great online tool that allows you to get domain names as well as build websites. GoDaddy has multiple packages available, from website creation to hosting full e-commerce sites. Local Laundry used GoDaddy to help get the domain for the website. For the actual building of the site, Local Laundry used Shopify. Shopify being the first major tool purchased by Local Laundry. Dustin is a huge fan of Shopify. Shopify is a site builder website that specializes on building online stores. With over 1,000,000 active users and having generated over $180 billion in sales (Singleton, 2020), it was an obvious choice for creating an e-commerce website. Local Laundry used Shopify to launch their website and online store. Shopify allowed them to create a full functioning e-commerce website even though neither founder had a computer science background.
Another reason Dustin likes Shopify is because of all the features that could be added to complement the site built with Shopify. Dustin says that he and his co-founder, Connor Curran, were heavily influenced by a book called “The 4-hour Workweek” by Tim Ferris. When the two of them were starting Local Laundry, both had full time jobs, so they didn’t have lots of time to devote to the company. Because of this, they looked for ways they could maximize efficiency and get as much done as possible with as little time commitment as possible. They had to be strategic in how they spent their time. This led to Dustin putting immense value on the different tools that connect with Shopify that allowed him to save time. Dustin then gave me a list of tools that he used and still uses that allow him to maximize the impact he can have with his time.
The first major time saving tool Dustin discussed is a tool called Zapier. Zapier is an online tool that was made to automate an entrepreneur’s life, saving them hours of work a week. Created to work with over 2,000 existing and popular apps, it’s impressive all that Zapier allows an entrepreneur to automate (Zapier, 2020). One example is Zapier’s ability to automate email responses of any kind. This includes emailing customers when surveys are filled out, but also auto filling google sheets with survey information, allowing information to be ready to be used and analysed by the entrepreneur. Additionally, Zapier can automate popular social media apps like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This includes automating responses to messages but can also be used to schedule posting and automatic re-posting of specific content. Local Laundry made great use of Zapier to save the founders time. They made sure to automate all applicable email responses and ensure Zapier auto filled any spreadsheets that it could. This allowed the founders to save precious time by not needing to organize their information but allowing Zapier to do that for them. This meant they could use their time making strategic decisions and not wasting time filling out spreadsheets. Additionally, Local Laundry connected Zapier to their inventory management site and QuickBooks (another tool to be discussed later) which saved about an hour per order by having Zapier automate sending invoices and updating the inventory site.
Additionally, with managing emails, Local Laundry was able to use Mailchimp to send out mass emails to customers. However, Mailchimp was also able to help with a lot more than just sending emails. Mailchimp allows companies like Local Laundry to manage their entire marketing site from one place. This includes emailing customers, but also includes managing social media posts and ads, creating and managing pop up forms and using Mailchimp’s amazing market analytic tool to find and contact new potential customers (Mailchimp, 2020). Mailchimp is now even expanding to be a place where entrepreneurs can host and build a website. Local Laundry was able to use Mailchimp tools to do marketing efficiently and save lots of time in the process. By using the marketing tools, Local Laundry was able to have their early marketing be hyper effective and focus on social cause focused consumers. Not only that, both Zapier, Spotify and Mailchimp can all integrate to have one effective and efficient system working to automate the majority of the business process.
But not only was online marketing and the e-commerce website able to be made easy by new tech, so was the accounting process. QuickBooks is an amazing online tool that allows businesses to do their accounting and project management with an easy to use interface (QuickBooks, 2020). On the accounting side of things, QuickBooks allows companies to easily track revenue, expenses and receipts. Along with this, QuickBooks then uses this information to make tax season dramatically easier with their tax filing software. For Local Laundry, QuickBooks made organizing company receipts and expenses an easy process. Additionally, QuickBooks was able to handle invoices for both orders and purchases. This simple automation saved Local Laundry founders hours per week, as invoices were always being auto completed and managed. All the founders needed to do once orders started coming in was do the actual shipping and inventory management, QuickBooks took care of the paperwork and invoices. Additional to accounting services, QuickBooks also has project management software that allowed Local Laundry founders to track and stay on pace for various different projects for the company. Overall, QuickBooks made tasks that would have taken days to complete, only take up a couple hours for the Local Laundry founders. Add in Zapier integration, and Dustin recommended QuickBooks as a must have tool for entrepreneurs.
I then asked Dustin what tools he used personally to make his professional life easier. Dustin is a big fan of google products, especially Gmail. In his opinion, having a good email provider is essential, and Gmail has several tools that interact with it. One tool that Dustin likes is Boomerang. Boomerang is a Gmail attachment that brings old emails back to the forefront if they go unanswered. This is an awesome tool as Dustin said it helped him ensure no sales emails went unanswered because they were missed. Additionally, to Gmail, Dustin really likes a tool called Slack. This is a great workplace communication tool. Unlike email, Slack allows conversations to be put into different channels. This allows for more organized messages instead of one confusing inbox (Slack, 2020). Dustin recommended Slack as it does make internal company communication dramatically easier.
I asked Dustin if there was any part of his business that he wishes he had a better tool for. The major business area that he wishes he had a better tool for is inventory management. Dustin wishes he could get more exact data analytics. This would include being able to know more about what was selling and when. Being able to get more information on when customers were buying product could allow Local Laundry to be even more specific with their ads.
Concluding the interview with Dustin he asked me about what I wanted to do after I graduated. I told him about my personal love of social enterprises. Because of this, I want to be involved in telling more people about the amazing social enterprises I know about, including Local Laundry. However, I’m still debating between a brick-and-mortar store or an online store. To this Dustin gave me some interesting advice. He told me that the best thing I can do for any project is to just start now with a website. He explained that it has never been so easy or cheap to get a website up and running. For creating a simple website, he recommended using either Wordpress or SquareSpace (I chose SquareSpace as it is more friendly to those without any coding background). Dustin explained that since it is so easy to do, it’s always worth just starting now. He testified about how he and his co-founder have been learning countless lessons along the way, and the only way to learn is to just start. Fortunately, with the technology and tools that exist today, starting has literally never been easier. From website building to automating work, the steps that used to take entrepreneurs days and sometimes weeks, can now be done in hours or sometimes minutes. For these reasons, Dustin’s advice to me and anyone is to embrace these amazing tools and use them to get started. I took this advice to heart and am now in the process of starting up an online blog where I hope to write about the amazing social enterprises I have found. Thankfully, due to many of the tools Dustin shared with me, this should be a very manageable task. It’s truly amazing what people are able to do with an increasing number of tools at their disposal.
Sources:
Mailchimp.com. (2020, February 29). Retrieved from https://mailchimp.com/
Quickbooks.com. (2020, February 29). Retrieved from https://quickbooks.intuit.com/ca/accountants/apps/
Singleton, C. (2020, January 8). SHOPIFY REVIEWS (2020) — ALL THE PROS AND CONS OF A LEADING ONLINE STORE BUILDER. Style factory. Retrieved from https://www.stylefactoryproductions.com/blog/shopify-review
Slack.com. (2020, February 29). Retrieved from https://slack.com/intl/en-ca/
Zapier.com. (2020, February 29). Retrieved from https://zapier.com/home
