TLCH Productions (self) · Founder and Operator, TLCH Productions
Replacing a salary with skills I didn't have yet
In 2014 I left a stable financial-crimes career to run my own brands. The problem with doing that is simple and unforgiving: no salary, no team, no marketing budget, and a dozen jobs that all have to be done by one person who has not done most of them before. Here is how that became a working company instead of a cautionary tale.
TLCH Productions is the honest answer to the question what did you do for the ten years after the bank. It was a multi-brand portfolio company of one: Broadway Bazaar, Tied Up By Cody, the Newsies on Tour Charity Shop, a long-running Etsy storefront, and freelance design and production work, all sharing one back office and one operator.
The problem
Leaving a salaried job to build your own thing sounds like a confidence story. In practice it is a capacity problem. On day one I was, at the same time, the CEO, the CFO, the marketer, the web developer, the designer, the photographer, the customer service line, and the person taping boxes shut. Most of those were jobs I had never held. There was no budget to hire any of them out, and no one to ask.
The trap in that situation is to do only the parts you already know and avoid the rest. That feels productive and quietly kills the business, because the parts you are avoiding are usually the ones that bring in money.
How I worked it
I treated every function I could not yet do as a thing to be learned by owning its outcome, not by reading about it forever. If sales were flat, I learned enough paid search and analytics to fix it, not enough to pass a test. I stood up the shared infrastructure that a real company runs on and pointed it at several brands at once: Google Merchant Center and Cloud Storage under one account, SFTP product feeds pushing catalogs into Shopping campaigns, keyword-research spreadsheets driving the ad copy, and plain spreadsheet bookkeeping with clean tax exports on file.
The leverage came from measuring everything and letting the numbers, not my mood, decide what to do next. I tracked social reach by hand, month over month, in a sheet I built myself: more than 572,000 combined Twitter and Pinterest impressions across 2015 and 2016. I watched which campaigns moved sales and cut the ones that did not. The year that discipline compounded, sales grew 179 percent over the prior year.
None of the individual brands was a rocket ship. That was not the point. The point was that one person, willing to learn each role by being accountable for it, could run a small portfolio of them and keep it in the black.
What it came down to
The bank taught me how to investigate a system. Running TLCH taught me how to build one from nothing and keep it alive with no safety net. That is where the range came from: brand identity, storefront engineering, ad operations, analytics, customer service, and fulfillment stopped being separate skills and became one habit of picking up whatever the business needed next.
Everything I build for clients now runs on that habit. When I ship a website or a tool, I am not handing over a deliverable, I am handing over the whole back office and the ability to run it, because for ten years I was the person who had to run it.