No business is an island. But while we focus heavily on our customers and employees, we sometimes forget another key stakeholder: our vendors.
An unfortunate discovery yesterday reminded me that it is our job to communicate our expectations to our vendors clearly and unambiguously, and their job to execute crisply. If we are sloppy in our [...]

I just returned from attending Gaspedal’s Word of Mouth Supergenius in Chicago and my head is swimming with creative ideas for improving our viral marketing. The conference providing some simple, hand-on tips for developing and implementing a Word of Mouth marketing strategy in any organization. In the opening session, WOM marketing guru Andy Sernovitz broke [...]

At PrintingForLess.com we serve a variety of small business customers ranging from a one-person shop to companies with hundreds of employees.  Some print only a few jobs a year while some larger organizations may place many orders and may reprint the same type of pieces repeatedly with only slight changes to their art. We have [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

In today’s economy, you have either been directly affected by a Reduction in Force (RIF) or know someone who has been. Leaders of organizations, both large and small, who have had to make those tough decisions (because let’s face it, nobody goes into business in order lay people off) also have to deal with the [...]

As markets tumble out of control you may be wondering, what can I do to turn the tide? 
 If my experience in customer service here at PrintingForLess.com has taught me anything it is that referrals are the life-blood of small to medium businesses.  As much as 40% of our own new customers are a product of [...]

I’ve been focusing a lot on sales and sales training lately and sales in the 21st Century is full of old school techniques where face-to-face is back and a hand-shake-is-bond mentality is more than just a passing fad. 
In my research for upcoming sales training a quote jumped out at me, “In today’s economy, it’s getting harder [...]

Doug Fletcher found fly fishing, or more appropriately, fly fishing found him. And it changed his life’s direction.
In 1996 he and his wife left Atlanta, a high paying job, security and a safe career path for Montana, blue ribbon trout streams, mountains and a large measure of uncertainty. The momentum behind this big move was [...]

I am sure we have all heard that print marketing is going the way of the dinosaur and that email and web marketing is the wave of the future. I recently had an experience that led me to believe that this couldn’t be further from the truth. The impact of print marketing and advertising has [...]