I was cleaning our windows the other day and decided to do the garage door as well. It is one of those chain driven up and over doors, with the radio control. It is a white door and there is now a line of little pits and discoloration which has been caused by dirt and oil from the chain.

Which tells me this is a design issue and that all white doors must surely have this issue. But maybe not. Maybe the installer used the wrong chain lubricant. Or left something off.

The installer was a sub contractor and has moved away. So cant check with him. I could check with the manufacturers but the label is pretty worn away. It was while looking at this that it occurred to me.

While this door was being made it would have undergone some form of QA check. Make sure the paint was right, no dents etc. Hopefully the next check would be that the installer received some training. But then what. Act on a complaint? hope to luck?
Basically the QA system falls over when the door leaves the factory. Bear in mind this is a $2 or $3000 door.
This manufacturer has left its reputation, it’s brand, in the hands of a third party. And done nothing to follow up. That I am aware of.

I received no card to send off for my Guarantee as with electrical goods. Nor any letter or call to ask if I was happy with my door. Maybe they assume you only buy one garage door in your lifetime?

What could they do to take control and protect their brand? For a start they could ensure that installers are registered with them. They could then get the installers to send back details of the addresses where they instal the doors, with some details of the end user (or the end user could send it in).

They could then follow up after a month to check that everything was okay, do the owners need a spare key fob, would they like the door serviced next year?

This is not hard yards, but it is care of the end customer. The people who actually pay the bill and who recommend or rubbish your product.

Basically should I ever buy a second garage door (this is my second) I will not automatically source it from the same company. Which may through a lack of simple customer care, be a lost repeat order.

The moral of this tale? Follow up care of customers is true customer care. It shows that actually you do care.

• Whats the objective of your business? To make money? I expect so, which means sales.
• To get sales you need to do marketing, attract the customer.
• Accounts is the tidy up, without the first two there is very little to do.
• Support is actually part of good marketing, see it as such and use it as such. Every support call is an opportunity to get it right and increase the love.

Break it down

Marketing:  always the priority but it does not need to consume your time.

Sales: should consume your time but not stop you marketing. You want new and repeat sales right?

Accounts: find half to an hour a day to do the admin, but stay on top.

Support: its part of marketing see it as such not as a cost. It helps the repeat sales.

Marketing is mostly a creative activity, its about ideas and communicating them. Often these ideas are inspired by the sales and support activities. And often they amble around in your brain working themselves out in your subconscious. Then ping they pop up fully formed. And get forgotten because you are busy doing the sales or accounts. So in order to grab those moments of creativity lets take a note from writers.

This is going to be hard as it means forming a new habit (maybe). What is your morning ritual? Could you change it to have some quiet time to think about the last day and the new day?  Sit and just note down what ever comes to the surface. Then use your blog as the sounding board. Discuss the issue and the possible resolutions. When it is written re read it to proof. Then decide if you will post that or will you keep it as private.

One thing people forget about blogging, it is a journal, be honest, you do not have to share everything. But by using your company blog as a journal you use it as a creative tool to solve problems and to create your marketing and support to your clients. Thats a lot easier that making time for marketing and making time for blogging. Its also a lot more refreshing for your readers than just reading your sales copy. And because you are not (you may be) good at sales copy and know it you keep putting the blog off. After all you dont have anything to write about!

When actually you do and the real you may just be far more entertaining than you realise.

If you enjoyed this post, great, if not, okay. But I enjoyed writing it and I got something out of it, I just hope you do too.

Take it easy, watch the sun come up sometimes and take time to sit and think. Advice I need to listen to more.

I see a glitch, user names and email addresses are often very different. My twitter name is not the same as my Google account name and my business email is not @gmail.com. As a freelancer I work under other email addresses as well, reflecting the branding of the client.

So the picture which Google social search is going to create is not going to have me at its true center. It is more likely going to look like a Venn_diagram . Now this may turn out to be very valuable in the long run as the connections who reside within the overlap are possibly identified as the most meaningful. But how will they get their if you are not logged in to a specific Google account at the time?

It will be interesting to see if it works in practice and proves to be more than a gimick to get us all building our Google profiles. Which is the only way it is really going to work, with Google as the center of our online lives.

So if you want to know how to choose a CMS follow the link and read on.

Well yes and no. Like every tool and resource a small business uses its web site needs to be engaged with after a few careful questions. For Point Concept a web site is a part of an over all strategy and not the most important part. What is more important is a web presence.

In the “old” days this meant a site. Now it means your web activity in a a whole raft of communication methods and locations. Its no longer about the billboard its about the hand shake. So at present the priority for Point Concept is creating an online persona. That means going to meet people not waiting for them to come and meet us. So at the moment I am busy working on the social CRM principal having conversations.

A blog is a conversation so I decided to follow the example of a lot of developers and start with this rather than a site. A blog is organic, its like a relationship which grows over time. You do not have to give it your all and fill it with content at the outset.

Add to that use of microblogging tools such as twitter and friend feed and actually there is a lot more content spread around than there would possibly be in one site.

Do you have a Web site?

Does it work for you?

How often do you update?

Depending on your answers it may be time to relook at your web strategy. At the end of the day it is one medium and may not be the right one for you.

Will Point Concept have a site? Yes.

But when it is truly developed as a concept and not before.

In the mean time I will continue to have some intersting conversations.

Recently, I started redoing my home office; changing it from somewhere I worked from home for my employer on occasion, to my main place of work for my business. The two are I have found, very different.

The main thing that is different is the hardware I need. Working in the IT sector I have most things I need but there were a few omissions; a large monitor with high resolution (actually two) and a printer. Yes, I had a printer; one of those little HP all in one inkjet printers. Great for the home and okay for an office, printing once in a while and nothing too flash.

What does a business need in a printer?

Speed, silence, cheap, and one heck of a good finish. I think that should cover it. Now to find one. I have an all in one inkjet and there is no reason to replace it. So, I thought about getting a decent color laser printer. Then I thought about all the laser printers I have used over my career, and what I have used them for: running off email, proposals, policy documents, reports and marketing material. For the first two examples on this list and some of the third they were fine; for the fourth and fifth: forget it.
So, what do I need to print in my business? Well very little, invoices go via the web; policy documents go via email or straight to a server; proposals may be printed and presented; reports no; marketing material yes. My experience of business laser printers costing from $1000 to $5000(or more) was not that good for marketing material. Pages tended to curl, and the resolution was never that great. Especially, if you threw some images in. I had once spent hours putting a training package together for a large client, then lost a discussion with my director over printing it. At his insistence, we did it on the company printer. It looked cheap and was noticed by the client. It also took me a lot of time nursing the printer. Next time I won the argument (feed back from the client helped). I took the file to a print shop, gave them the specs, got a price and went back to doing my work. A day later, I collected all the training manuals, boarded and bound. Very professional. Thumbs up from the client and we got the deal.

Selecting a printer

For a small or medium size business your choice will be based on how much you can afford to spend on the purchase but this can actually cost you more in the long run. Your printer could escalate your running costs e.g. time taken fixing jams, cleaning cartridges, wasted paper, refilling ink etc.
Unfortunately, spending more money the printer purchase is no guarantee that these costs will be avoided. I know this from experience.

Have a look at these comparisons from the nice people at tekserve.com

As you can see, the actual running costs are very much the same for comparable priced laser and inkjet printers. These figures are however, only rough as there are many factors which make it hard to judge true running costs. The most important being: what you are actually printing on the pages. How much ink is used? How much is wasted?

The cheapest thing to print is black text (we will revisit that fact later).

So, if the running costs are the same the other differential is the purchase price. The printers listed here are in US dollars but are generally of similar price in New Zealand. So, it may well be worth looking at a low end laser instead of a mid to high end inkjet. In this range they are not very different in price.

But, with lasers you can pay a lot more, up to $1500 for a home office machine and up to $8000 for a SMB/ corporate machine. But, do the running costs reduce if you spend that extra money? Not really, not unless you are buying in bulk and reducing cost on purchase of ink. It still takes the same amount of ink to produce the same results.

So which is the best value for a small business (not just a home one)? A laser, get a colour one but use mostly black.

As for silence and speed

No contest, lasers are faster and quieter. Plus they dont tend to shake you desk when it has a coffee on it.

Quality of output

While, at the end of the day, business owners may make decisions on price, decisions  should also be based on quality and on the effect our printed material has on our customers. That is our return on the investment.

Even if you are not creating image- heavy brochures or photos, your letterhead and your invoices should be clear and noticeable. One should help attract customers and the other should help them pay.

This brings me to the other part of our printing needs as a business, that being the quality of our branding and the quality of our documentation and marketing material. A common mistake is to think that marketing material is the flash stuff we give out to potential customers at Field Days. Sorry, but that would be forgetting one major rule of business: “return business is more valuable than new”. So, each time you supply an existing customer with a piece of your company stationary or a document, you are reinforcing your brand, in effect, you are marketing.

So, when you go to see a designer about your site or your brochures, get them to do your letterheads and cards etc too. Keep it uniformed and branded. Unless you are a designer, make use of one. I know that I for one, need help with colors, but that is only the tip of the iceberg of what a good designer can provide for you.

Here is an example. The other day I sat down to thrash out my new business cards, opened up Adobe Indesign and got to work. An hour later, I was annoyed and frustrated. I am not an Indesign user normally and it showed. But worse, while I thought I knew what I wanted, I had broken one of my own rules that being I wasted an hour of my time which could have been much more productive. Well to be honest, two hours because I had to calm down and have a cuppa. When you charge people for your skills, its because you do something better and faster than they can. Faster, because you know the short cuts and what works. I have now taken my brief to a local designer and will get them to set it up for me.

One last word on quality from PCWorld.co.nz

Quality Comparison

Take a look at the print quality and the price difference. Do you really think you will get a good ROI on those figures?

Conclusion

After quite a bit of research I decided on my perfect setup. Something to remember, I print very little, most of what I produce is passed electronically. But should I start to print more this conclusion will be just as (if not more so) valid.

In the near future, as my printing increases I will purchase a black ink laser printer. I will keep my inkjet for its great scanner and for the occasional document in color.

I will have good quality letterhead paper in color. I then only need add the text. Should I need proposals or reports which require color, I will email them to my local printer to run off and then collect them or get them to drop them off.

This way I know I am not wasting my valuable time doing things which are not cost effective such as cleaning or fixing the printer.

I won’t have an expensive printer which is not reaching its potential but is depreciating.

I can check with the people who know printing for ways to improve my presentation.

I ensure I don’t run out of ink at the wrong time (or toner).

I know my marketing material will always look right.

And I save money on electricity. Bonus.

As someone once told me ” Do what you do best, then get someone to do the rest” very wise words.

Take care and happy printing.