We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful David Pitlyuk. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with David below.

David, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Is your team able to work remotely? If so, how have you made it work? What, if any, have been the pitfalls? What have been the non-obvious benefits?

The second business that I started back in 2001 was an aftermarket car parts manufacturer. I was still going to college in Maryland while my business partner at the time was in Wisconsin. We had met through a Nissan forum and literally had never met or even talked on the phone for the first year we were in business. We did everything through e-mail and AIM (remember AIM?). My point is, remote work is not new to me.

In my newest business, Pop Colors, we started with a semi-remote strategy at the forefront. That’s because I am in Maryland while my business partner, Tony, is in Charlotte, North Carolina. We were able to utilize Tony’s existing business infrastructure (The Map Shop) for our core operational requirements while figuring out my place in the business being 400 miles away.

So how do we make it work? A big part of making remote-work work for our company is through our tech stack. We use cloud software for everything so that it is all accessible anywhere.

We do the vast majority of our communication through Slack. This makes it easy to do things like ask a quick question, without going through email. We organize our Slack channels by the type of conversation, for example, we have an #order-issues channel.

All of our docs and spreadsheets live in Google Workspace. We use Dropbox and Google Workspace for file storage and sharing. We do all of our video calls through Google Meet. We are an e-commerce business at our core and are powered through Shopify, the cloud software that runs our online store. Accounting is done through Quickbooks Online. Our CRM is through Hubspot. We use cloud tools for project & task management. Almost every type of tool you need to run a business nowadays is on the cloud, accessible anywhere at any time. It’s a lot easier than it was back in 2001.

Outside of that, Tony and I will generally have a video call via Google Meet once a month to make sure we’re on the same page with what we’re working on. We try to do an in-person annual meeting at least once a year to work on a longer-term strategy.

We knew going into this business that Tony’s business strengths and experiences were a better fit for being on-site, whereas the areas I excel at were mostly able to be done remotely. I think that if our areas of expertise didn’t align as well, it would have been much more difficult to make remote-work work for our company.

David, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’ve been an internet entrepreneur since the ’90s, always utilizing my love of tech and design to run businesses. This path lead me into the e-commerce world back in 2001. Eventually, that lead me to a private community of e-commerce store owners called eCommerce Fuel. From there I joined a small group of 3 other entrepreneurs to start a mastermind group. While that group fizzled out after about a year, I continued to stay in touch with Tony, one of the members.

We both had similar backgrounds in that we were art majors in college, loved design and business, and have been in the “game” for a very long time.

In 2020 we decided to partner up and look for a business to acquire together that met our particular criteria. We looked at a lot of businesses looking for the right opportunity and ended up coming across a brand called Pop Colors.

Pop Colors manufacturers custom colored pencil sets with pop culture themes. The names of each colored pencil usually had some sort of pun related to the theme and were packaged in an on-brand box.

We loved the concept and thought that our business and art backgrounds could blend together perfectly to run this brand. We ended up acquiring Pop Colors in August of 2021 and have been running it since.

Since taking over, we’ve developed a lot of new themes for both colored pencil sets and coloring pages. We’ve expanded into new categories such as an artist series we’re still working on, and we’re excited to see where we take the business in the future.

Let’s talk M&A – we’d love to hear your about your experience with buying businesses

Yes, Pop Colors was a business we bought. It was a long process to find and acquire the business that was not for the faint of heart.

We decided early on to utilize a loan from the SBA called the 7a. The loan allows you to buy a business with great terms and low down payment, but the process is difficult and long, especially when it comes to an e-commerce business. The other downside is that it is a personally guaranteed loan, so it’s not for everybody.

We knew we wanted to buy an e-commerce business, so the first thing we did was get on the list of a bunch of brokers that specialized in e-commerce. Daily, we would go through businesses for sale and look for things that met our criteria.

At the same time, we were reaching out to banks trying to work through getting an SBA loan. We were finally connected to US Bank, who ended up handling our loan.

We went through a lot of businesses and ultimately found Pop Colors. The acquisition process was lengthy. From the time we started to do due diligence to actually closing on the business took about 6 months. Most of this was due to issues around the loan itself and the seller, things that were out of our control.

Funny story, when we went to move their warehouse in NJ to ours in NC, the bank accidentally wired the money for the business to our bank account instead of the seller’s. We had all of the inventory and machinery on a truck packed up and the seller essentially held us hostage until it was sorted out. Luckily, everything worked out at the end, but it was pretty worrisome for a bit!

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

We sell on both our site as well as other marketplaces such as Amazon, Etsy, and Faire. There are pros and cons to each.

On our site, we control the full narrative and the customer is our own. For example, if a customer signs up for our email list on our site, we can let them know when we release a new product. On other platforms, that’s not really an option and it’s almost impossible to build a real brand. The other marketplaces also take fees which makes it harder to have a profitable business.

The benefit of the other marketplaces is that they bring customers that may have not found you otherwise. For example on Amazon, people are there to shop and discover products to buy. They may be looking for a gift for a fan of Van Gogh and come across our Van Gogh Colors colored pencil set which they may never have found otherwise.

On a platform like Faire, it opens our business up to other retailers that are interested in carrying our product.

Ultimately, the other platforms bring you new customers, but at a fee.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://popcolors.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/popcolorsco/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PopColorsCo
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidpitlyuk
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/davepit
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@popcolorsco The Map Shop: https://mapshop.com Altered Commerce (parent company): https://www.alteredcommerce.com/