Owner to Owner: Tracking the Year of Potential Part 1

Editor’s Note: Highlight Printing Owner Lisa Bickford set a goal to build her company’s sales by 35% this year. In this series of articles, which will run every other month, concluding in January 2010, she will share her strategies, setbacks, and successes.

A couple months ago when I met Karen Hall, managing editor of Quick Printing, the most popular question to kick off a conversation was a guarded and worried, “So, how’s business?” My optimism and energy filled answer was so completely against grain that she asked me if I would be willing to share our efforts and progress through 2009. Long story short…contract signed…and here I am: An amateur writer and professional printer, writing an honest account of our sales and marketing journey in our quest for 35% sales growth in 2009.

A Little Background

My husband and I were both veteran printers when we bought 11-year-old Highlight Printing in July of 1996. For the next four or five years all was good—interest rates kept dropping, the economy kept getting better, and sales kept going up. Very cool way to start a business.

We grew from about $550,000 in 1996 to $1.15 million in 2001. Then the bottom fell out. Some would say it was the economy, but we are more pull-ourselves-up-by-our-own-bootstraps folks, so we took more of the blame on ourselves. We had had some significant employee turnover that year, we gave birth to twin baby girls in March of 2002 (a happy time, but since we were both critical to day-to-day operations, it created quite a gap in the office when I was gone), and we had been battling a “bad” offset printing press for two years. Needless to say, we were not prepared to aggressively fight back.

Fast forward to 2008: Both the business and our management style had matured greatly in our first 12 years. We were poised for growth: We had great equipment, an ever expanding range of capabilities, and staff and processes in place that allowed us to be more forward thinking. We had also purchased our own building, were almost debt free, and—primarily through word of mouth—our sales had well exceeded 2001 numbers.

So after a record breaking first five months of 2008, we decided to promote a promising customer service professional to become our very first outside sales representative and invest the time and energy into formulating our first ever sales and marketing plan. Little did we know when we decided on this course of action how perfect our timing was. We were not only preparing ourselves to grow—we were preparing ourselves to fight back!

Our 35% Growth Goal

Having spent the last six or seven months of 2008 coordinating our sales and marketing plan, we came into 2009 with guns blazing. We have never lost our energy and love for this crazy business and, after careful evaluation, decided to simply ignore the fact that we were right smack in the middle of the economic meltdown of all meltdowns. We have a very collaborative, can do, goal oriented group here, and in a planning meeting it was our plant manager who suggested the overall goal of doubling our sales in three years (big enough to be a “player” and small enough to stay personal). The foundation was built, the sales and marketing plan was in place, and the energy to win was in the air.

We decided there was no time like the present to put our collective noses to the grindstone and get a good jump on the three year plan. That’s how the 35% goal came about.

Sales and Marketing Journey

Like many small business owners, we decided to tackle this on our own rather than hiring a marketing firm. Although a marketing firm probably would have helped us launch faster and with more precision, for us, I think this has been the correct path so far. We may hire a marketing firm at some point to review and refine our plan.

At first our list of tools in our sales and marketing toolbox included:

• Direct Sales
  
• Targeted Mailings
• Client Events
• Community Service

With a little bit of: