We recently connected with James Luyben and have shared our conversation below.
James, appreciate you joining us today. Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?
When I first started the Vital Pack Label Lab back in 2022, it was both exciting and challenging. Being a packaging distributor for 20+ years I always relied on our vendor partners to manufacture the product that we were providing. By making the leap into manufacturing, we would be soley responsible for the product that landed in our customers hands.
From the onset, I knew that this daunting task could not be done myself nor was that the intention. We hired our first press operator a couple of months before our press and other equipment even landed. This enabled our operator to be there and get settled and aid with all of the countless details and tasks needed to set up a label plant. He was here for all of initial training as well as the big day of when the equipment landed. Although there was an investment on having personnel here early (and many days he was idle) he was the start of the team that would eventually build the foundation for the division. Early we adopted the principle of crawl, walk, run and working toward a string of small goals and once sellable product was being pushed out the door, we began looking for someone in sales to help fill the pipeline for our newfound capacity.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Vital Pack is a packaging distributor who provide industrial and retail packaging and Vital Pack Label Lab is a label printer/manufacturer.
The Vital Pack Label Lab (VPLL) specializes in small to mediums size label runs right here in Signal Hill, CA. We can accommodate quick turns and have designers here on staff to help customers design the perfect label for their product.
We currently manufacture labels for everyone from mom-and-pop shops all the way to the largest brand names that you see every day.
We deal in food & beverage, health &personal care, manufacturing & industrial products, logistics & distribution, household and cleaning products, pet products and more.
I think the common thread is we help our clients with an appealing label that helps their product move quickly off the shelves.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
We do manufacture our products in the Vital Pack Label Lab! When we decided to make the leap into manufacturing, it initially sounded easy. In our scenario, you think you just go out and buy a press and start printing sellable products on the first day. That is not the case!! Manufacturing is difficult and a lot goes into it behind the scenes.
There is a ton of steps from taking material to a quality finished product. When we started, we methodically went step by step though the process and worked towards building systems so that we could repeatedly put out quality products.
Where do you think you get most of your clients from?
For us the best source of new clients is referral. We really care about our customers and the product we make for them and I think our customers can tell and it shows.
Vital Pack has only been around for 6 years and in those short 6 years we have tremendous growth. Many times, our customers want to be a part of our growth story, and in the exact same thread, we want to be a part of their success as well. It is the best when this synergistic relationship galvanizes us to both perform at a higher level for a greater good for all involved. That is when magic happens….
Contact Info:
- Website: https://vitalpack.com
- Instagram: vitalpackinc
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vitalpackinc
