Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Why does your customer do business with you?

If you could adopt your customer's viewpoint of your business, would you be able to understand why that customer does business with you?

If you learned the truth behind your success or lack of it, could you use that information to change your future? Here are some ideas to consider. Your mileage and reality may differ.

Suppose you have a small business. Do you feel that your customers patronize you because of your low prices? A more likely scenario is that your prices are somewhat competitive but your location is far more convenient and you provide a level of personal customer service that a larger business does not.

If that is the case, dropping prices might bring in a few more customers, but it would certainly cut your margins and your profitability.

Increasing your level of customer service, on the other hand, might generate more business from the same customers and also increase referrals.

Let me use an example that all can possibly relate to. There are restaurants, snack shops and markets where one is greeted warmly by the owner or manager and made to feel extremely welcome. These are usually places that are owned and operated by a family.

Some of these places have employees who have not grasped the importance of personal customer contact and they do their jobs while chatting with other employees or with friends. When the owner is absent, the customer is treated as a minor inconvenience or as an anonymous business transaction.

When I go into one of these establishments, I try to deal with those who recognize me and make me feel welcome. If they are not available, I often take my business elsewhere for that day. If I am in a hurry, and there is no easy alternative, I will spend money there, but it is not a pleasure.

The bottom line is that few people need to do business with you, they are usually patronizing your business because the experience makes them feel good! There are so many stresses in life today that most of us treasure the times when we are enjoying ourselves.

Can your business make your customers feel good about their experiences dealing with you? If you can answer that, you may find that your business activity is more rewarding both personally and financially.

New HP Wireless Printer is a winner

 The HP Officejet Pro 8000 Wireless printer handles one of the biggest problems of our home office. It prints high quality images from any computer in the house or shop and was available on Amazon.com last week for only $127.99. This is something that almost any home office can use.

With our multiple computers and laptops, it has always been a struggle to connect to a printer when we needed one in a hurry. With this new wireless printer we can print from anywhere in the house or workshop or even from the back deck.

This printer is fast (up to 35 pages per minute black and up to 34 pages per minute color) and the four ink cartridges give it a range of colors that our other printers could not achieve.

Installation was a bit unnerving at first because I am not used to peripherals that turn themselves on and perform a 20 minute setup procedure with no human intervention.

When I plugged in the power cord, the OfficeJet Pro 8000 went into a busy self-test cycle that produced lots of chirps and other noises, but no printouts at all.

I looked at the instructions but there was only a cryptic instruction to turn on the unit and wait for the alignment page to print.

After another five minutes of clicking and whirring and no printout, I was ready to turn the printer off and check for a paper jam.

At this exact moment, the printer spat out a brief instruction sheet in nine languages:

Do not turn off the printer; the printer is initializing.
During this process, you might hear some tapping sounds.
While waiting, install the printer software.

(It did not mention the whirring, machine muttering, and chirps)

I am not used to getting scolded by my printers, but I took its advice and installed the software on all computers within reach. By the time the computer software installation was complete, the printer had stopped muttering to itself and was ready for action.

We fired off print commands from one computer after another and the printer smoothly executed them at high speed. The wireless capability makes all the difference in the world. We have used printer sharing systems in the past, but the cabling makes for a time-consuming installation.

The designers at HP got this design right. For more information on this beauty, read on after the jump.

I am test marketing a new product by giving it away

Free product, no strings attached, one week only

I will be giving away free custom sign stencils this week because I recently discovered that I can generate huge stencils with letter sizes from 3 inches to 24 inches high using the CMC equipment I use to cut mats for pictures. I made up some 24" by 36" sign stencils and they are easily read from 250 feet away.

I can make these stencils up overnight or while someone waits if they want to drive out to my workshop. Otherwise, I will deliver to downtown Floyd when I pick up and deliver custom framing orders.

I think these are a potential boon to anyone who is running a yard sale, a high school car wash, an open house, anything where sign visibility is important. These stencils are durable and reusable and should make many stenciled signs using spray paints or paint rollers. I want to find how much need there is for this product in this area.

Here is my offer - Pass it on to your friends in this area.

I will make a free custom sign stencil for anyone who wants one for the rest of this week.

Maximum stencil size is 32 inches by 40 inches. One free stencil to a family or company. Choice of a dozen fonts. For more information, call 540-745-6230

This offer ends on May 31,2008 or until I have made 25 free sign stencils, whatever comes first.

Stencils can be picked up at Floyd Custom Framing or may be picked up in downtown Floyd by prior arrangement.

How large are these stencils?

See for yourself. What could you do with stencils like these?

I've been backsliding - but I can still get up

It has been so long since I blogged, I knew I was slipping back into "corporate mode" where it is all work and no time for reflection.

Starting a business has that seductive quality about it where it seems that with just a little more effort, something worthwhile will be gained and a rest point will be reached.

That is not the case at all, you know, because there is always another challenge around the bend that can be surmounted with just a few more hours effort... Days go by and there has been no time for savoring life.

What brought me up short was listening to some visitors from northern Virginia discussing their lives and careers.

Their work and commuting takes 13 hours a day and they are dedicated executives who are all striving to achieve worthwhile goals in an increasingly unstable working environment. Listening to them was like opening old wounds and I experienced a sudden rush of empathy and personal weariness.

I thought, "I've been there and I've done that and I thought I'd gotten it out of my system. But here I am working 15-16 hours a day in a beautiful country environment and I'm not taking time to enjoy the sunshine and the beauty of country life."

Damn! I've fallen into the clutches of a seductive career opportunity again!

Encountering a career situation that allows you to create almost without limit is incredibly addictive. Days pass with your attention fixed on situations and designs that test you to the limit. The outside world becomes a blur of flickering images and tiny voices that attempt to distract your attention from the designs that challenge you.

Our visitors jolted me to my senses and my absence of blog posts galvanized me into a semblance of action. I'm back in action and I will try to share some of the beauty that I have been observing.

I'll leave you with two images to enjoy. This one is titled, "Elves in my Garden" and it is a new work from local artist Liz Stucki that I had the pleasure to frame.

The earlier image is a photo of the artist's storm-shattered window showing the delicate tracery of the broken safety glass after a recent storm. Liz is currently figuring out how to capture this image in another pen and ink drawing.

I am looking forward to seeing what she does with it.

(click on images to enlarge)

A time to mend and fix up...

The cycle of life becomes more apparent as one experiences it over and over again.

There were times in recent years when it seemed easier to discard the old and buy new. That was when our personal economy created plenty of money but consumed our time. It was easier to eat out and buy stuff instead of mending what we had and cooking leftovers. It was not so much conspicuous consumption, as it seemed to be the best use of very scarce time.

Now that we march to the beat of a different drummer, we have time to plan and freedom to choose what we will or will not do. Our income is less than in the frantic years of 60 hour weeks and interminable conference calls, but the freedom to choose more than makes up for the apparent loss of income.

The wonderful thing about mass production and the industry that creates it is the amount of money that flows through the enterprise. If you are in the right spot, you can scoop up enough of it to almost make up for the fact that you are an interchangeable unit in a very large machine. You are a cog in the machinery, but a very well paid one at times.

You ponder the wisdom of your choices every day during your long commutes to and from work...

Once you enter the post corporate world, either through choice or through being laid off, your lifestyle undergoes many changes. You have more time than money and you can still make things go right if you cast off your old wasteful ways.

You can learn to shop more wisely and you will find bargains that you never encountered when you were madly running in place to keep your position and your sanity while living the corporate life.

You also learn to use the wisdom of others who have learned the lessons of surviving on a "less than average" income. You may find to your surprise that you discover some great recipies and some highly satisfying learning experiences that can be enjoyed on your new income level.

You will also come up with innovative ways of improving your situation in life and making a living in a depressed economy. It is all a matter of adjusting your viewpoint and confronting the situation you are facing rather than bemoaning the situation you used to enjoy.

There is always money to be made if you bother to find out what people need and want that you can provide.

As a contractor friend once told me, "We'll always survive. In good times, we build houses. In bad times, we repair them."

This philosophy is applicable to the housing-related field of custom picture framing. I am finding unexpected opportunities in what is generally considered to be a down market.

The economy will recover again and businesses that can survive in a tough economy will be in a better position to move out smartly when business improves. A lot of small business owners are sharpening their skills in these hard times.

It will be most interesting to see how business models evolve during these next few years.

Starting a small town business - part 2 in the series

One of the most positive things about starting a business in a small town is that word-of-mouth advertising is like "being on Oprah" anywhere else in the world.

Within days of making my first move to create a custom framing business, I had people coming to me with news of equipment and supplies I could pick up and businesses I could buy. Even more would come and tell me that they had framing they needed to get done as soon as I had my shop set up.

This small town network helped in other ways too. Someone told me about a local merchants special being run this week in the local paper where I could get a full color ad for the price of a black and white ad. I scrambled around this morning and managed to create this ad just in time to make the ad deadline.

People have been asking me about this "conservation framing" I have been talking about so I roused myself to finish a brochure last night which explains what conservation framing is and why it is a good investment for your original art and keepsakes. Basically it is a framing process that protects your art against deterioration and environmental damage.

One of the first people who picked up the brochure today went home and looked at her framed artwork and discovered dead mosquitoes inside the glass of the picture frame!

She will be one of my first repair customers. Educational advertising works.

Since custom framing with archival materials is not a commodity product or service, I need to spend more time explaining what it is and why it is needed in my ads and in my literature than in selling.

I also need to use the word-of-mouth channel to spread the idea that a few dollars spent preserving art and keepsakes will pay huge dividends in terms of peace of mind. There is nothing so disappointing as to see a valued diploma or keepsake piece of art turning yellow around the edges. We resist personal aging as best we can and it is a shock to see our possessions aging unnecessarily before our eyes.

Those of you who are running a company singlehandedly, can appreciate that I had to put the framing on hold temporarily while I caught up on the promotional activity of the past two days. This weekend will give me some time to catch up with orders.

UPDATE: I finally got my act together and put up a website for Floyd Custom Framing.

Starting another small business from scratch - part 1

As some of you have suspected, I've been launching a small business in the last few weeks and have been so busy that I haven't had time to blog about it.

I thought I would write about the experience so that some might make use of the discoveries I've made in the process and others might have ideas that I've missed.

I am not writing this from the viewpoint of how one should do this sort of thing. It is being written because I took an approach that seemed to be so far off the beaten path that it just might work for someone else who is trying to come up with a way to start a company with very little seed money.

I've created Floyd Custom Framing,  a custom picture framing business, which sounds like an unlikely prospect for a guy who used to design computers, but I needed to use every bit of business and technical knowledge I have to make it happen. The startup costs, including insurance, equipment and supplies was covered with an ordinary credit card.

The timing may seem odd because America's picture framing business is in a long-term downtrend because of changing demographics. New Gen X and Gen Y home buyers do not seem to have the disposable income of the previous generations. Plus, every big box retailer is selling ready-made frames at what seems like pennies on the dollar.

So, you might ask, why this business? And why me?

The basic answer is that there has been no custom picture framer within 25 miles for several years and there is a growing number of artists who are turning out amazing work at an ever-increasing rate. They need custom picture framing at an attractive price to expand their business. I have seen this at a personal level because I was spending more time every month obtaining frames and mats for the pastels that Gretchen was turning out. It was getting to be a chore and the choices were limited.

I decided to teach myself conservation framing techniques and to convert my wood shop into a professional framing shop. The rest just seemed to follow naturally.

What I created is not your conventional retail store business. I don't have a storefront, but I have a display window in a prime location. I don't keep regular hours, but I have a backlog that is growing so fast that I have to scramble to handle it.

I have written my own software to create POS estimates and it also generates orders for framing supplies. I have a trusted supplier, Roanoke Moulding Designs where one of the owners has mentored me on the finer points of running a custom framing operation. I have had great feedback on my services so far and I am  finally getting around to writing a tri-fold brochure that describes what services I provide.

It amuses me that this venture violates every sensible startup procedure except one and that was discovering a market niche that was woefully under-supplied.

I was essentially coaxed into the business by my artist wife who needed a service that wasn't readily available. Once I discovered that the rest of the artists in the Art Under the Sun Gallery were in need of the same services, it all started to make sense.

It also aligns with my long-term purpose to help artists create viable businesses and contribute to sustainable economic development for this region.

I will try to cover more interesting bits about this startup in the next few posts. Feel free to ask questions and suggest alternatives I may have missed.

Stay tuned...

Are you ready for self-employment?

One of the first things you discover when you shift from being an employee to being self-employed, is that your time is no longer structured. All of the reminders and nudges you used to get from your boss and co-workers now come from your own mind as it races to keep track of the obligations you have inadvertently stacked up for yourself.

Your 45 hour week has somehow become 60-plus hour a week. You even find yourself waking up at 3 am, dragging yourself out of bed to write down lists of things to do and then sitting in front of the computer handling email until the sun comes up. Yes, you are in control of your time, but you must be careful what you wish for. As a self-employed person, you always live in interesting times.

In many work situations, your independent activity mainly consists of getting yourself up and into your car in time to make the commute to work. From the time you hit the highway until you are headed home, your time is often other-directed and you move in concert with many others in the same endless dance.

When you first leave corporate life, there is a giddy euphoria that can last for weeks as you experience the new  freedom you have gained. This dies down as you realize the new obligations you have assumed for supporting yourself and your family.

Marketing, which once seemed a distant and esoteric activity practiced by others in the corporate hierarchy, now becomes a major focus of your life. If you are to be successfully self-employed, you need to find out what you can do that others are willing to pay for. That is marketing and you will become good at it or you will have to go back to being an employees again.

As you take root in your new and self-directed existence, you start developing new connections for business and pleasure. Networking, which may have been an awkward and difficult activity while you were part of the corporate machine, becomes as natural as breathing once you are on your own and dependent on new contacts for advice, for work, and for income opportunities.

So you start making yourself known and you establish opportunities for income and a trickle of work starts coming in. This encourages you to keep on marketing yourself in different ways as you find out what people are willing to pay for, as opposed to what they say they want.

Eventually, you establish a workable business proposition and the workload picks up and you are off working 60 hours a week just trying to keep up with demands.

Of course, just about now some of the other opportunities you were working on catch fire and you go into overdrive trying to keep up.

While you are juggling your workload, some of your projects end or the client runs out of money and you need to start networking and marketing yourself again.

If you keep at this for a while, you will develop a rhythm which works for you where you do some marketing every day and your promotional activities become second nature and you reserve time to get your work done and keep backlogs from occurring. You are taking on some of the major functions of a successful corporation.

You may still lack mastery of financial planning, accounting and tax procedures, but you may be able to outsource some of this so you can concentrate on what you do well.

If this all sounds too scary for you, keep your day job and use it to develop the skills you will need for self-employment.

You will probably find that most people who become self-employed would never consider returning to corporate life even though they may make less money on their own. The increased freedom and the ability to make their own decisions give them far more satisfaction than they enjoyed as employees.

Great suppliers can be a major factor in micro-business success

When you are a one or two person organization, your choice of suppliers can be one of the biggest factors in getting you off to a good start. Every organization depends on their suppliers, but micro-businesses need suppliers who are willing to provide information as well as products and services.

It is the quality of communication that makes the difference between an good supplier and a great supplier, in my book.

I have always managed to find good suppliers who provided high quality goods and services, but recently I discovered Roanoke Moulding Design, a great supplier of mouldings and framing supplies in Roanoke Virginia.

Fred Liady and Dorsey Taylor have been partners for 31 years and they were willing to give me the benefit of their experience when I visited them for the first time yesterday with a major project to complete and some gaps to fill in terms of materials to use and processes required for archival quality framing.

I am a woodworker and I have been doing picture framing for my wife Gretchen and others, but I now find myself doing custom framing for artists on a larger scale now and it is vital that I have connections to a heads-up company like Roanoke Moulding Design if I am going to deliver a range of framing services for original art, memorabilia, and for high quality reproductions.

Fred and Dorsey went out of their way to ensure that I had the information and supplies I needed for this rush job and that I had the catalogs and samples I needed to handle my growing backlog of work.

Their website is hard to digest and use, but their catalog is very helpful and they offer a full range of services as well as supplies to support retail frame shops. In order to get a catalog you will have to call 800-336-9623 because it isn't listed on their website.

In a business environment that is changing constantly, staying in business is a continual learning experience and suppliers like Roanoke Moulding Design can help provide vital information that is not easily found elsewhere. The key factor for me is that they were helpful as well as competent.

No matter what business you are in, your suppliers should be helping you stay informed. It is a two-way street though. You should be giving them feedback on how well they are meeting your needs and whether their website works for you. It is these tight-knit "communities" of inter-dependent businesses that can anticipate and adapt to handle changing business conditions and buying patterns.

21st Century Sweatshop

In the 21st century, you can easily put in a grueling 10 hour work day without ever leaving your home. Sometimes the biggest problem is pacing yourself. You can get involved in solving a knotty design problem and work non-stop for hours on end. Interruptions are few and they come mostly from four-footed members of the family who are checking if its time to be fed again.

The availability of fresh air and sunshine does wonders for my peace of mind and my morale. Under these conditions I am able to produce more work for my clients now than I ever could in a cubicle farm or even in my own private corporate office.

At the same time, I can find time to have coffee with friends or clients on a moments notice, if I want to.

I make sure that I spend at least 20% of my time marketing my services or thinking up new services to exchange for income. The absence of forced commuting gives me two to three hours of extra time every day for work, study or relaxation.

As a self-employed entrepreneur, I have no corporate safety net, no corporate insurance, but I don't have layers of inert or timid management to placate either.

When I was employed, even though I considered myself a top performer in my particular area, I worried constantly about corporate changes that would result in loss of income. The biggest discovery on leaving the corporate world was realizing how illusory the corporate safety actually was.