Okay, I’m coming clean. I have a problem – I am a dyed-in-the-wool procrastinator.  While I’m not yet ready to join Procrastinators Anonymous, I am publicly attesting to the extra stress, late fees, embarrassment and remorse it has caused me over the years.  Fortunately, though, there are some areas of my life where this insidious habit has been easier to control. Personal procrastination is indeed painful, but I’ve learned that putting things off in marketing your business is a sure-fire way to go out of business.

Years back, I was at a weekend exhibition that a friend had organized in the health and wellness arena. He was so confident about the event that he borrowed more than $30,000 from credit cards and friends to put it on.  He did manage to recruit a decent amount of exhibitors and arrange a packed schedule of speakers and workshops.  What he didn’t get were attendees. About 200 hundred people showed up all weekend, for a type of event that normally draws thousands. What went wrong? He waited way too long to get his print and media advertising out.  I remember seeing his printed brochures show up the day before first day of the show. Ouch!!

He’s not alone. Nearly every day we squeeze in super-rush print jobs to help our customers out in a time pinch. Yes, I know there are a lot of factors involved in putting a printed piece together, from going back and forth with designers to getting all the content and details worked out. But more often than not, that pesky procrastination game is to blame.

Is it just poor time management or something deeper that underlies our procrastinator’s dilemma? Most of the pundits and researchers will point to psychological causes such as anxiety or fear of making mistakes, or the physiological roots of low activation in the brain’s prefrontal cortex.

In defense, not all procrastination is counterproductive, like when you put off the small stuff to work on the important stuff – such an innovation, building relationships and planning for the future. That’s one of my defenses, along with my attention-deficit tendencies. The problem is, a successful life and business demand timely execution on the small stuff.

What are you putting off? Can that next print project really wait?

Working for a print company, I get to see a ton of different postcards come through our presses.  And from a direct marketer’s perspective, many of these make me cringe.  There are some critical ‘postcard marketing elements’ that need to be included to optimize your results and get a better return on your printing and postage investment.

Our service reps frequently ask for feedback on their customers’ creative – to see if I might be able to provide any suggestions to improve performance. Most of my feedback centered on three core elements that should be incorporated in most any postcard.  They are:

1. Offer
2. Call to Action
3. Response/contact information

I recently collected a random sample of 50 different postcards from our production floor.  I went through them to see how many cards had the different elements listed above.  I was shocked to find out that 74% did NOT have an Offer. Additionally, 64% did NOT have a Call to Action.  These are incredible numbers – I was amazed to see the majority of our customers are missing such critical elements to their success. 

With the next postcard your or your designer create, give a sample to an unbiased friend and have them look at it for 5 seconds (and only 5 seconds), then put it down and ask them these two questions:

1. What is the product or service being offered?
2. What is the recipient supposed to do after receiving this postcard?

Postcards are like billboards on the freeway, you have a very short window of time to communicate your message. Keep your postcards simple and uncluttered. Use the headline to effectively answer the two questions above. Be sure to include a compelling offer – and call it out graphically so it grabs attention. And tell your customers or prospects exactly what to do (call us, go online, come to our open house, etc…). And don’t hide your contact information!

If you incorporate some of these ideas in your next postcard marketing campaign, I’m confident you’ll see better results and achieve a better ROI on your marketing dollars.

Lately, this phrase has been getting tossed around more and more. A quick search gave me this definition, minus the word remarkable: “Customer experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship …”
Hmmm. While I think this is pretty close to right, it misses one point: loyalty. Meaning, if your “sum” is pretty good, or even really good as a company, then as a customer, you are totally loyal to that company, right? Probably not.
I go to a lot of places for more or less the same thing, but there are a few select stores or sites that I go to exclusively. No where else. Ever. Why? Take the test.
The best test for all of us to really answer the question of what is a remarkable  customer experience is to look at our own day-to-day experiences.
Right now, jot down your absolute best experience at a restaurant, visit with your accountant, picking up groceries, buying new skis or a pair of shoes–anything. What was it that made it so damn remarkable? Were there any similarities between the experiences? Probably. What are they? Keep these points top of mind.
So, what is the point of this exercise? First, it is so we don’t forget that we are all customers. Secondly, is that when we experience something remarkable, when our day is made, and we leave a store or website or phone call with a sigh of relief and something really of value, that we owe it to try every chance we get in our own businesses to do the same thing.
Why? Because it is one of the few things every one of us can control. It is something we can choose to do. It is never the easiest, but it is something that can give us the most gains.
So who knows, you might just show up on someone’s “Most Remarkable Experience” list someday soon. Try to get there.

We just rolled out a major software infrastructure change here at PFL. It’s been months in the making and it allows for more competitive pricing, smoother price breaks, and easier concept-to-market implementation of new products. Aside from all the cool opportunities this initiative will provide for our frontline employees and our customers, I think the coolest thing is that the structures, programming, testing and roll-out were all done in-house!

As employees we take a lot for granted. We expect things to work and when they don’t we come down on IT and programmers like a ton of bricks without knowing one iota about how these systems work. As for the interfaces, the people who design what it should look like and how it should work are called Business Analysts her at PFL and they catch their share of grief from us as well. “What if we do this?” Why didn’t you think of that?” blah, blah, blah! Again, without one inkling of what it takes to create the systems we work with in the first place!

I’m the training manager, but when I don’t have a training class running I sit with the BAs in our Strategy Execution department and see first hand the work that goes into something like this. At times it’s creative and inspiring. More often than not, it’s tedious and frustrating work with a finish line that, at the same time, looms ever closer and never seems to come into view.

Programmers, well, they’re puzzle masters, aren’t they? These modern-day witch doctors take the storyboards, images, and concepts of BAs and turn them into number, letter, and character combinations that, like some kind of evil-ly good magic, boggle this blogger’s mind as if discovering fire for the first time. I do not question it, I just believe.

So, I’m declaring this “Thank an IT Specialist, Programmer, and Business Analyst Day.” They deserve their own holiday given the amount of grief we give them. And, I’m not sure about BAs and IT folk, but I know programmers REALLY love hugs so throw some of those in as well.

Last Friday PrintingForLess.com completed our annual highway clean-up.  As is the custom, we diligently trudged down the highway in front of our building picking up every piece of garbage that passers by chose to toss from their car windows and every plastic bag that the wind blows our way. 

Among the usual debris however, we found a few interesting items.  Some are out of the ordinary and others are just plain lucky.  Below is a list of the top 10  things found at this year’s cleanup.  Enjoy!

Top 10 Things Found at the 2009 PFL Highway Cleanup

1.  A Fedora

2. A Web Cam

3. A Pull Tab Can (That is at least 30 years old)

4. A Nest of Snakes (They were harmless)

5. 8 Golf Balls ( Someone’s been practicing their drive)

6. 4 Baby Mice

7. Boxer Shorts

8. A One Dollar Bill ( Lucky!)

9. A Five Dollar Bill ( Luckier!)

10. A Ten Dollar Bill ( Luckiest!)

Springtime in Montana does not serve up “normal” spring weather. A day can start with blue sky, sun and temperatures in the 60’s. By afternoon, that mellow spring day has morphed into time-lapse stormclouds racing across the horizon, and snow on their heels.
More times than I can count I have seen robins flying by, trees budding out with new growth, and fresh snow carpeting the green grass. It is just one thing that makes living here interesting, and a part that a lot of my out of state friends cannot understand. But, as they say, if you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes….

So, what is the point of this? Easy. Right now, the weather is great. 70°, sunny, a slight breeze and you can almost get too hot if you hang out in the sun just long enough. I can almost feel summer, just around the corner. And one of the best ways to shake off winter’s funk is to get outside, and HIKE. Go find a great trail, and log a few miles. Put on shorts (remember shorts?) grab a bottle of water, and get out there. Because, you never know when the weather will go sideways, and you find yourself scraping snow from the windshield, just one more time, in May.
Ah, springtime in Montana….

I’m a teamwork kind of guy. I’ll readily admit that I really have to work hard to stay focused and on task if I have to work completely alone on a project. Having a group I can trust and seek out to bounce ideas off of keeps my energy up, allows for greater creativity and, it just makes work more fun.

Today, we’re expected to do so much more with less and although technology allows for greater speed and efficiency, there’s nothing like the motivation you get when you have to deliver for your teammates.

Truly interdependent teams take advantage of the strengths, while downplaying the weaknesses, of its members. And, when there is trust among members, asking for help or feedback is never perceived as weakness. Trust allows team members to stay focused on results.

A lot has been said about teamwork. My favorite thought leader on teams and teamwork to date, however, is Patrick Lencioni. His book and subsequent workshop called The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team provide a clear model and attainable set of principles that can work at any level of your organization.

Developing real teams and teamwork is tough and takes a significant ongoing investment of time.  However, the pay off in company results, individual effectiveness, and employee satisfaction is well worth it.

A lot has been said about being good to the earth and going green, especially in the last week. It’s nice, however, to work for a company that actually puts its money where its mouth is. 

I’ve posted on PFL’s green practices in the past and linked to a page on our website explaining what we do on a daily basis. After doing some checking around with our competition, however, I realized that printers that force you into buying at specific amounts espouse savings, but aren’t really doing you any favors when it comes to greening up your business. 

If you have a mailing list with 2047 names on it wouldn’t you like to order and pay for 2047 postcards? Instead, many printers will force you up to the next price break level, say to 2500 or 5000. Aside from making you pay for paper and ink you don’t need, they’re doing what’s easy for them and in many cases will charge you more if you want a specific amount. 

Think about the ramifications of forced quantities… The printer has to use more electricity to print, cut, and package your project. They have to use more paper than needed. They use more packaging and the shipper has to burn more fuel than needed. And, in the end, you’re going to have to recycle or toss the overs. 

 It’s not easy being green (thank you, Kermit!). It takes work. It wouldn’t take printers much to improve their carbon footprint, and in turn help yours, with just a little forethought and investment in better systems. Forcing customers to purchase at specific quantities is a sign of laziness on the part of the printer. Or, it’s a sign of a company who can’t see the forest and doesn’t care for the trees.

I knew I was in trouble when Janell, a member of PFL’s fun team (more on this later), approached me to ask a favor. I quickly and foolishly agreed to be one of five judges in PFL’s soup cookoff last Thursday.

You must understand that I don’t have a very refined sense of taste. In fact, a coworker told me last week that my palette hadn’t evolved since I was 17. Nevertheless, I had no qualms about being a soup judge. I take pride not in nuanced tasting, but in the volume and efficiency in which I can sample food.

Fast forward to the end of the judging: I’m using my napkin to wipe sweat from my forehead and clutching my cramped stomach after eating 17 soups in 30 minutes flat. Everything from clams and crab to meatballs and spicy chili was mixing in my belly with unknown consequences.

So, what does a stomach ache have to do with fun culture? That’s easy: silly events like a soup cook off are an inexpensive way to get employees engaged with your company’s culture and engaged with each other. Just be wary of taking on a judging role if you don’t have an iron stomach!

Tomorrow is Earth Day, a day designed to create awareness for the Earth’s natural environment. So, what are you going to do to “celebrate” it, and do something good for the place you call home? Being in Montana, the environment, nature and wilderness are important parts of my life, as well as many of my co-workers–we hike, ski, fish, hunt, bike, paddle and live outdoors when we can. So, here are a few easy things we can all do (and that I will attempt to do) tomorrow, as well as next week, month and year.

• It is Spring time. The weather is nice. Park your car! Walk to the store, or just walk because it is good for you, and save some gas and wear and tear on your vehicle. Don’t forget about the bike, either.
• Pay your bills, but do it paperless. Go online. Save time, too, and never worry about something getting lost in the mail. Just remember to shut off your computer and monitor when you are done!
• Recycle. We have all heard this before, but just do it. Cut out the majority of your trash by separating the recyclable stuff. Five minutes a week doing this goes a long ways.
• Go local. Find out where your farmer’s market are located, and use them. No really, buy some veggies with a little dirt on them, maybe a big grass fed steak, and get to know the people who are helping you eat better. A few just might be your neighbors.
• Listen to your parents. Growing up, my dad reminded me countless times to “turn off the lights!”. OK, we are all grown-up now. Let’s actually listen to our parents. When you leave a room, or the house, turn off all the lights. ALL OF THEM.
• The Green Wallet. Support eco-friendly companies, products made from minimal or recycled packaging, and make your dollars support the green that does some good.

While there are countless ways to “do some good” on Earth Day, don’t just think about doing them tomorrow, then go right back to the rut of how you always do it. Try to adopt one or two ways you can make a difference, and as my wise father always reminds me, leave it a little better than you found it.