What should I check before buying a screen-printing or t-shirt business?

Apparel decoration is a trade of busy stretches and quiet ones. Teams order before a season, schools before term, companies before an event. A buyer who looks at a single month can badly misread the business, so most of the questions below are about timing and about who the shop depends on.

Reading earnings across a season

Ask for monthly sales and expenses across at least a full cycle of seasons, and for the order book at the time you look. Find out which months carry the year and what the shop does in the slow ones. Ask your accountant to help separate one-off event surges from orders that come back each year, and to explain how any owner pay was handled.

Customers and event-driven orders

List the teams, schools, clubs and corporate accounts and ask how long each has ordered. Ask whether a uniform program returns each year or the work is a one-off event. Ask who deals with each customer, whether deposits are held for orders not yet delivered, and whether any large account has talked about moving to another printer.

Garments, screens and machines

Ask which suppliers provide blank garments, what terms they give, and what happens when a favourite style is discontinued. Look at the presses, dryers, embroidery heads and heat presses, and ask how old they are and how often they are serviced. A shop’s screens, digitized embroidery files and artwork library are items to list; ask who owns them and whether they are stored safely.

Staff, premises and ink

Ask who sets up jobs and who runs the machines, and whether seasonal help comes back each year. Chemicals, inks and waste from washing screens may need special handling, so ask for any records and confirm the applicable provincial environmental rules and see what environmental checks you may need. Your lawyer can say what belongs in the agreement.