The revenue lines
Sixteen ways this makes you money. Nine of them are not available anywhere else, because they did not exist until we built them.
Most software in this industry sells you a faster version of what you already do. Some of what is below is that. But the majority of it is revenue your company cannot book today at any price, on any platform, with any amount of effort, because the mechanism to do it has not existed. Fundraising that pays out at the swipe. A seasonal range on ten thousand customers’ logos in one action. Charging your own sellers for the stores you give them. Those are not features with a competitor equivalent. Read them as new lines on your profit and loss, because that is what they are.
Kind one
Money you have already earned and are not collecting.
Start here, because this is the fastest money in the building. Nothing below requires you to sell anything new. It is revenue that is yours today, leaking through a gap in reporting.
Volume that routes through an intermediary stops tracing to the account that earned it, so you miss tiers you already negotiated. Every purchase order here raises on the location’s own supplier account, so the volume lands where it belongs and the report writes itself. One franchise system described the threshold on a call: ten thousand dollars a store, and a percentage back.
Put your numbers inFees worked out from what a location says it sold are always smaller than fees worked out from what it actually sold. Every online sale in the network lands on one ledger and the fee is a column. Headquarters gets visibility of every sale and collects what it is owed, without an audit.
RoyaltiesProfit per order, after real freight and real decoration cost, rather than what the quote said at the point of sale. Today that number lives in two exports and a homemade tool, if anyone builds it at all, so nobody prices from it and reps argue about commission. Here it is a column.
Profit per orderWhen a supplier raises prices, every day a store sells at last quarter’s cost is margin you paid for. One edit at the master catalog moves cost and retail across every store in seconds, with margin floors holding, so the window closes immediately instead of over the weeks it takes to email everyone.
One price listKind two
Sales you are not making today, from the customers you already have.
Companies in every town your locations serve buy branded goods online after hours from whoever made it effortless. Your locations answer with a phone call the next morning and a PDF the day after. A store that transacts on its own catches the order that was never going to wait for you. Net new, not moved.
Most decorated goods customers reorder, and most reorders wait for a person to remember. Every receipt carries the buyer back into their own store, already wearing their logo. On one account, 82 percent clicked through. That is revenue that arrives while the team sleeps.
Post-purchase emailForty gift items across a thousand stores is forty thousand individually decorated products, each on that customer’s own logo. By hand that is three thousand hours inside a two week window, so it does not happen and most of the network sits the season out. Here it is one action, and the revenue you planned becomes the revenue that shows up.
Deploy a catalogA quote here is an editable cart with a store attached. The buyer changes a size, approves and pays, instead of printing it, thinking about it and going quiet. Same quotes, same customers, more of them closing, with no extra selling.
Quotes that check outWhen setting up a customer takes an afternoon, anything under a few thousand dollars is not worth opening, so your team declines work or does it grudgingly at bad margin. When it takes seconds, the floor disappears and the long tail of your market becomes servable. This quietly changes who your company can sell to.
The seller experienceWork that leaves your building today either gets declined or gets passed along at cost as a favor. Route it to print on demand or a partner from inside the same cart, with your margin on it, and the catalog you can sell stops being limited by what you can make.
Order routingKind three
Whole categories you cannot service today, at any margin.
These are not harder versions of your current business. They are markets your company structurally cannot enter right now, because the bookkeeping makes them lose money no matter how the deal is priced. The payment split is what opens all four.
| The category | Why it does not work today | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| 11. Fundraising and booster drives | Somebody runs a report, uploads it to the bank and types each payout by hand. At any real volume the administration eats the margin, so you take the big ones and decline the rest. | The organizer’s cut settles into their own connected account at the moment each card is charged. Nobody holds a balance and nobody cuts a check, so the hundredth drive costs the same to run as the first. |
| 12. Athlete, fighter and creator merchandise | Individual revenue shares are unadministrable by hand, so the deal only makes sense for names big enough to justify the paperwork. | The split is a rule on the store. The athlete keeps promoting because they can watch their own money land, and a roster of two hundred is as easy as one. |
| 13. Employee gift stores with company credits | Gifting platforms build one store for one large company. Nobody builds one for every client you have, because the setup cost per store is a person. | Every client gets a gift store with a credit balance per employee, built from their web address in seconds, wearing their own logo. A category your locations were losing to a website entirely. |
| 14. Dealers and resellers selling under your name | Recruiting people to sell for you means administering their margin and their orders, which is why most networks cap it at a handful of trusted partners. | Their commission is a rule that settles at the sale. You can hand a store to anyone who can sell, which is how a network with five reps starts behaving like one with fifty. |
Kind four
The one that changes what kind of company you are.
15. Charge your own sellers for the stores you give them. This is the line most people do not see coming, and it is the reason to read the marketplace page next.
Once every location, member, rep, dealer and athlete in your network is selling on stores that carry your name, you are no longer a company that sells decorated goods. You are the platform they sell on. And a platform can charge for access, set the terms, decide which suppliers appear, restrict which brands are available, and take a position on every transaction that runs through it.
One owner we work with worked this out on his own within two weeks of seeing the system, and said he was already planning to put a percentage on every store his sub-sellers ran, to cover his own costs. He was not told to. He looked at the structure and saw the business model inside it.
That is a revenue line with no equivalent in your current profit and loss. It does not come from selling more shirts. It comes from owning the rails that other people’s shirts move on, which is the difference between a good decorating company and a company somebody eventually buys.
| Kind | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Already earned | Attribution and one ledger |
| Not yet sold | Stores that transact on their own |
| Cannot service today | The split at the point of sale |
| Did not exist | Being the platform |
The one that multiplies the other fifteen
16. The months you would have spent getting to market.
Every line above assumes one thing: that the system is running. In this industry that assumption is where the money usually dies. A platform decision gets made in March, the integration program starts in May, and the first store goes live after the season it was bought for. The software was never the problem. The plumbing was.
We arrive connected. Suppliers over PromoStandards, the standard the industry already agreed on, so a supplier is a configuration rather than a build. Payments through your own account. Purchase orders on your own supplier account numbers. And the one that changes the timeline most: order ingestion pulls what your locations already sell on the tools they run today into one view, so you get the reporting in week one, before a single store has moved.
Which means you are selling on this in the season you bought it for, not the one after. For a company trying to scale, that is not a convenience. It is a whole selling window, and a window you do not get back.
| Stage | Usually | Here |
|---|---|---|
| First store live | After scoping | On the call |
| Group-wide reporting | After migration | Week one |
| Migration | Before you sell | Whenever you want |
| A supplier added | A project | A configuration |
The honest part
Which of these apply to you depends on what you already are.
Nobody books all fifteen. A contract decorator will find most of the money in the season, the small accounts and the fundraising split. A franchise system will find it in rebate attribution, fee capture and the seasons every location finally runs. A supplier will find it in attribution and demand data. A distributor with reps will find it in profit per order and commissions that stop being argued about. On a demo we will tell you which lines are real for your company and which ones are not, including the ones where the honest answer is that it will not move your number much.