Paint Me Vintage

The situation.

Paint Me Vintage is a specialist retail business in Pyes Pa, Bay of Plenty. Carla Lowe launched it in April 2016 when she realised that the chalk paint and vintage decor she wanted to use on her own 1950s villa took weeks to arrive from overseas. The market need was obvious. She built the business around it.

The structural exposure for any sole-operator retail business is the same: the owner is the operations team, the sales team, the marketing team, the finance team, and the customer service team. Each role gets the time that is left over after the previous role has consumed it. Finance and admin tend to lose.

For Paint Me Vintage, the symptoms were textbook. Bookkeeping, GST, and payroll were eating Carla's time and energy. The work she wanted to do – growing the business, planning social content, sourcing product – was being deferred to whatever hours were left at the end of the day. The business was stagnating.

What we changed.

The engagement covered the back-office operational layer of a small retail business:

• Bookkeeping and GST
• Payroll
• Supporting digital admin work to keep the customer-facing channels active

The structural change was that the parts of the business Carla was best at – buying, selling, creating content, growing the brand – got the founder's full attention. The parts she was not best at, and that were dragging the business sideways, moved across to a function that handled them properly.

The outcome.

Sales doubled compared to the previous 12 months. The doubling correlated with Carla's ability to spend time on the social media and digital marketing the business runs on – once those activities had her attention, they produced.

The business has confidence in its GST, bookkeeping, and payroll year-round. Year-end accounts are clean and ready to present, not built in a panic in July.

In Carla’s words.

"The pricing structure, availability to get tasks done, and being able to communicate with the team directly made the decision to bring Admin Army on board easy."

"I rely on being able to easily and quickly add in more tasks as we require. You do what you say you will, and we can talk it through to totally customise it for my business, which is pretty unique."