Prepress
Surviving 2009
Monday 30. March 2009 - Shift gears to enhance your business ..
First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, my loyal customers, for helping us make this digitizing business a success. This month, after only 3 years in business, we have passed the 1,000 customer mark, and, still growing. Most of our business has solely been word-of-mouth; and, I personally thank each and every one of you. This means you thought enough of us to pass our name around, and the success has been wonderful. Here’s to next 1,000 !!
Due to our growth, we have seen gains each of the years we have been solely digitizing. But, I hear from some of my customers that business has definitely slowed, and, in certain areas of the country, almost to a dead stop. While, our politicians keep pointing fingers across the aisle, the only people that are getting help is those that don’t really seem to need it (AIG, etc.).
When we started to see business slow down a bit, we made a concerted effort to get in front of our customers and potential customers. In House Digitizing (IHD) is visible at trade shows, seminars for the commercial and home markets and on embroidery trade lists. Even newsletters like this reach our frequent customers and our not-so frequent customers. Many of you know we were thinking about starting a corporate logo site, but the time and money it would have taken get it going, we decided on another avenue. So, to celebrate our 1,000th customer, we sent out a mass email to 1/2 of our customer base that doesn’t use us often. These were typically home sewers who use us for special needs and more decorative embroidery. We asked them WHAT they really needed and from their answers, we are converting the corporate logo site to a fully functional stock design site. We are incorporating designs from great digitizers and embroidery experts as Ken Parsons, past editor of Stitches magazine, and Scott Panich, a talented Cleveland, OH digitizer that taught me how to digitize 21 years ago!! Add in the vast stock library we have here from our talented staff, and we will have exactly what the market is asking for. There are great plans for the new business site, so keep tuned in. SUMMARY: Get in touch with your customers needs, send out surveys for your customers diagnosis of your performance and attempt to implement their suggestions.
Business 101 and Guerilla Marketing tells us that farming more customers will increase sales better than nurturing your current customer list. I never believed that. But, we have found that to be true. We thought by keeping our customer count low and trying to give excellent performance would produce a winner. Over time, we would lose customers due to early poor customer support and less expensive digitizers .. now that cozy customer list was dwindling. So, we made customer total goals and created a “Get-Back” list for 2008 .. as the customer list rose, we were afforded the ability to work on lost business. It is easier to call someone that already knows you, than it is to cold call a customer. In some cases we diagnosed customer problems and remedied them, in other cases, we hashed out issues that had arisen and never got resolved. And, it worked. Annual sales for 2008 was over $100,000. SUMMARY: Spend time on your customers needs.
In order to make it through the tough times, don’t be the bank. Collect the money people owe you and watch your cash flow.
While the news stations tell you about the bad economy, we increased our space by almost 4x, started a retail store and literally saved money on our lease negotiation .. a real monthly saver.
Lastly, and we know we are not the best at this, but we do try our best, stress customer service. We do it every day here, we are not perfect, but we try to make the customer look good.