Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Robert Hamm. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Robert, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Dreams, visions, determination and an unwavering ability to continue to press forward under pressure.

Robert, 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?

I started my custom hat company hatlaunch.com in March of 2017 after using a website to sell custom t-shirts on social media. I realized I could be selling hats with the similar designs I was already seeing success selling as a t-shirt. After coding the website and getting it up and running for a year I realized it was easier to sell 100 hats to 1 person than 100 different hats to 100 different people. I then shifted the business to focus on selling hats to America’s small businesses.

I started my journey getting my associates in technology and landing my first job as a software engineer for the Department of Defense. Then moving to many other private sector companies. The 10 years I spent writing code exposed me to the mass potential of technology and how any industry can be revolutionized with just software alone.

This experience has allowed me to build an entirely custom solution for running and operating our business. From the time and customer places and order on our website to the time the shipping label gets printed – the order goes through many custom developed and proprietary processes that we have put in place to either automate or drastically simplify the traditional custom headwear creation process.

I have done everything I can to build the business with technology first. This has allowed for extremely rapid growth and has made scaling at the rate we have possible. Without this backbone we would not be were we are today.

If you would have asked me 5 years ago if I would ever see myself quitting my job as a programmer and running a hat company with 20+ employees.. I’d probably look at you like you were crazy – but here we are.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In November of 2020 all of our staff was out from either positive Covid-19 cases or to quarantine. I was left alone to get through the massive backlog of orders that were already behind. This was one of the darkest and toughest times I went through in growing this business. At this point we were in an explosion point after scaling paid advertising and hitting 6 figure months in sales with brand new staff. I looked at the shelves of orders hearing the voices of angry customers waiting for their orders that were behind.

My mom started coming in after hours after leaving the family restaurant she ran. This was a huge help. We eventually pulled through and were able to get orders out at most a couple days late.

I was still working my day job and would stay until 4AM stitching as many orders as I could before I had to be back to work at 9 AM next day. I didn’t pay myself until June of 2021 – so I had to make sure I did a good job at my day job while trying to keep the business afloat.

I wasn’t sure if I would make it through this moment.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Our business is customer funded without any outside investors. As you start taking on orders the revenue coming in fuels the operation. As you start to bring in healthier numbers in revenue you can get working capital loans for around a 7-10% fixed fee. The repayments are extremely high so they are repaid very quickly.

We have done several working capital loans to afford inventory, equipment and growth.

It is crucial to know your numbers and margins to ensure you aren’t going to redline from the amount of repayments from working capital.

At one point we had 3 working capital loans at one time drawing over 30% of our revenue towards repayment.

Contact Info:

• Website: hatlaunch.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/launchdude/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-hamm-835a5a22/