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

Josh, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard

Have you ever thought you could do something better than the rest simply by making an effort that is marginally more than flicking a grain of sand? Or really make a difference if you put your full energy into it? Well that’s how Seven Clay started.

In 2019 we moved our business www.orangemud.com to Texas. We were averaging about 250k a year in outsourcing of a few of our products for embroidery and screen print and assumed finding a local vendor would be easy. Turns out that was a very wrong assumption as most shops wouldn’t even return our call or if they did we got prices that were sky high. For the couple that we were actually able to pay the quality was terrible, so out of spite I went home one night and asked my wife if she’d mind us starting another business to crush the local competition…out of spite. So we started www.sevenclay.com and it’s been full speed ever since!

The premise of our business is to be the best in quality and service. This is something I’ve always been very passionate about and is at the heart of our other business too. Standing out for the service part is easy simply by answering phones and being nice human beings. Even if it’s a project that’s not a fit for us, we try to send people to the proper resource.

Providing a superior quality product ended up being a lot easier than we thought too! After outsourcing our embroidery for 8 years to multiple large shops, we were doing a better job by day 2 of owning our first embroidery machine. Are we simply smarter than the average Joe? No I don’t think that’s it at all. First we do have industry leading edge machines, that’s a big help. On top of that we have invested in all the best accessories to run those machines, and we also have been really lucky with building an amazing team to run them. But to back up, by day 2 our quality difference wasn’t because of our knowledge, it was because of our want to do better. Rather than accepting the quality the machine created, we went back and made programming adjustments, learned from that, made some more, and have continually repeated that same effort today.

Josh, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

“The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it.” This is a quote I read years ago that I just love! I grew up a country boy and part of that lifestyle is simply figuring things out. Throughout my business and personal side there have been countless scenarios that I’ve been told “it can’t be done” which fueled my fire to do whatever that was even more. From endurance running, cycling, triathlon, or pulling off the impossible work project I enjoy every challenge.

Our tag line for my first business, www.orangemud.com is “Innovation from Frustration”, which is pretty much on par for the start of Seven Clay and how I look at many challenges in life. When a road block is in your way, move it or build a bridge over it. That being said, as much as I love challenges I certainly appreciate things that come easy too! For those amazing customers that have the hardest projects and timelines to pull off, we love you, but for those that have easy projects and easy timelines, we love you too. Striking a balance between the two makes our shop and team happy!

On the personal side I like to take things to the extremes a bit on the whether on a bike or on foot. So if you run into me on a bike, there is a good chance I’m biking across a state or some distance that may take days to complete. If on foot it could be a huge hike or running for some long trail journey. Regardless of the sport, it’s guaranteed to be on dirt somewhere exploring our wonderful world!

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

The start of Seven Clay was much easier on the funding side since we had the experience, credit, and backbone of Orange Mud to leverage for the start of it. This allowed us to buy the best in class machines from the start, whereas a new start up would likely have much larger challenges of credit/cash to be able to buy expensive machinery. So to explain the challenges with cash, I’ll rewind a bit to our other biz.

Managing cash is a tremendous challenge. Our first business, Orange Mud, started in 2012. Both my wife and I kept our day jobs for the first two years which made a tremendous difference in being able to make mistakes and handle the money lost in doing so. It also allowed us to not have the stress of simply being financially driven, rather being quality and service focused until the financial side came in sync. I’d highly recommend to anyone starting out to keep your day job until your business is at a point that it’s either making a profit or it’s at a point that has a strong probability to do so in the very near future. When I quit my day job we had a net profit of only $20k or something like that in the previous year, but set aside 1 year of living expenses to make it a go. So I told my wife that we’ll run it until we either make enough to live, or we run out of 1 year of expenses, and thankfully we were able to turn things around with a 100% focus.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I’m a huge fan of audio books which I listen to driving, running and riding. My library is pretty vast but one of my favorites is about survival and enduring a journey that doesn’t seem can be won. It puts life and struggles that we have into context and tells a tale of endurance that few ever will be able to experience. In my opinion, every entrepreneur must be able to plan for hardships and struggles around many corners while keeping a head up and positive attitude.

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage

The second book is one of the most impactful that I’ve found. I listened to this one after about a year in business and my only regret is not finding it sooner as it would have saved me tens of thousands in mistakes! Traction covers a lot of startup tips and things to stay away from when building an ecomm business and to me is one of the greatest business books on the planet!

Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sevenclay.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sevenclay
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sevenclaycreative
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshsprague/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh_ut4mMvE1IhJgXBPfyXuA