While we print and mail a ton of postcards for our customers, we typically don’t get to see the results our customers generate from their marketing efforts. So it was especially good to hear back from one of our local print customers – The Community Closet – about a campaign they recently ran.  But first, [...]

I am of the opinion that when it comes to highlighting what your company does and why someone should work with you, video often speaks louder than words. Here at PFL, we use multimedia in many different ways, but our favorite thing to do is showcase our remarkable small business customers by giving them a [...]

The Lesson List – What I’ve learned I’ve spent more than 20 years working in rapid growth small businesses and recently had a MBA student ask me one of the most interesting questions I’ve had in some time. What have been the 3 most important lessons I’ve learned? It is a great question and harder [...]

I remember a job from years ago where the training consisted of me filling out some paperwork, skimming a manual, a quick pep-talk from the boss and then getting thrown in, to “learn as I go.” That was not a great experience, and I learned things sporadically, got frustrated, and frustrated my employer. Many of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]