Blog Archives




 

  • Reduce Pricing and Improve Profits with Contribution Pricing
    - Tuesday November 15, 2011
    By Deborah Snider, e-LYNXX Corporation No work versus reduced pricing to get work. That conundrum faces printers as no brighter days appear to be on the horizon for the economy, at least not in the foreseeable future. A printer, however, can price a job at a discount and still increase profitability, according to Deborah Snider, senior vice president of e-LYNXX Corporation. “That may sound too good to be true, but it actually is achievable when a concept called contribution pricing is applied”, she added. The name contribution pricing is derived from the fact that any income – above out-of-pocket costs – contributes to overhead and the excess contributes to the bottom line. The concept of contribution pricing was introduced...

  • New Chart of Accounts Video
    - Tuesday October 18, 2011
    By John Stewart I am excited about my new, second video titled, "Chart of Accounts." I just viewed a rough cut and, with only minor changes, it is ready to post. I am hoping that it will be available before the end of this week. If you haven't had a chance to view my first video on "Sales Per Employee", I encourage you to visit my website or watch it on MyPrintResource.com. I have another video in the works that deals with "Key Financial Ratios", and a fourth video titled simply "Cash." This video takes a somewhat light-hearted, humorous approach at how a stack of $1,000 dollar bills is distributed to pay all the bills in a "profit leader" firm versus how these bills are paid by a "profit laggard" firm.

  • Something Isn't Adding Up at GPO
    - Tuesday October 4, 2011
    by William Gindlesperger, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, e-LYNXX Corporation The United States Government Printing Office (GPO) Strategic Plan for 2011 through 2015 has been published, and it is an eye opener for what it only tangentially acknowledges. And that is: the contribution of private sector printers that have traditionally printed the bulk of the federal government's printing. In his February 2011 posting on Facebook, Public Printer William Boarman did give credit where credit is due: "The majority of the firms we deal with are small businesses, many with 20 employees or fewer. We annually award contracts to more than 2,500 vendors nationwide, representing potentially 50,000 jobs. The total number of contractors registered...

  • The Print Industry Is Pretty Damn Cool
    - Wednesday September 28, 2011
    By Brandon Campbell (a “young” guy who just turned 30) Until I started working for MyPrintResource.com as an editorial intern, I didn’t realize it. Before my summer internship, I had no idea what something like an offset digital press does--or that one even existed.  Turns out digital offset presses are great at printing high-volume, high-quality images from a plate to a rubber blanket, and then onto just about any surface you can think of. But now I understand that some of my favorite things, from the book I used to teach myself how to play bass guitar to the large, textured Van Goh self-portrait Scodix gave me during GRAPH EXPO earlier this month, can be traced back to a print shop. September’s gathering of the print industry’s...

  • #1 Take-away from Graph Expo 2011: Call to all Printers "Migrate to Marketing Solutions!"
    - Tuesday September 20, 2011
    Gale Grimmenga - Principal/Creative Impulse - www.creativeimpulseinc.com   Today, I not only need to create my marketing strategies and design them into print and websites, but also three to seven other mediums. I used to hire programmers; now I'm needing to become one. Studies say a person can become proficient at only three to four software programs in a lifetime, let alone the programming languages that create them, aaarrggg! As a designer who works with marketing VPs and the data that market researchers produce, I heard more about marketing at Graph Expo than ever before, which shows how much things are changing and our roles are blending. We used to have very defined roles "you were a printer, I was a designer. We had a...

  • Government Should Learn From Private Sector
    - Friday September 9, 2011
    William Gindlesperger, Chief Executive Officer, e-LYNXX Corporation Federal agencies (they spend more than $500 billion annually of your tax dollars) have been instructed to reduce their budgets by 10% in 2013 per a directive from the Office of Management and Budget, the largest office within the Executive Office of the President of the United States. This certainly comes as no surprise as a stubborn economy persists, minimal jobs are being created and very little is being invested in businesses. Even though the Great Recession was supposed to have ended in June 2009, we have seen the largest two-year drop in labor compensation "wages and benefits" since the early 1960s. The foreclosure crisis continues, and for the first time, the...

  • 21st Century Customer Service, Part 2 — Customer Satisfaction
    - Wednesday August 3, 2011
    By Gale Grimmenga, principal, Creative Impulse  |   www.creativeimpulseinc.com Customer service: a series of actions that enhance customer satisfaction before, during, and after the purchase. Face the fact: Customer service has become depersonalized. Even when we are connected to a human being, satisfaction becomes the purview of an insightfully written script. Or, it’s an automated experience, the satisfaction coming from the ease and speed of navigating a website and its e-commerce program—thus morphing customer service into self-service. And satisfaction once derived by receiving an answer from a knowledgeable person has segued into a virtual interchange via online avatars—the satisfaction provided by good programming and voice...

  • Customer service—an overlooked advantage for 21st century marketing
    - Wednesday July 13, 2011
    By Gale Grimmenga, Principal Creative Impulse  (www.creativeimpulseinc.com) There are so many pros to our digital information technology age—endless information at our fingertips, speed-of-light communicating, services/products available with a click, and fly-on-the-wall perspective of our daily life. But as a customer, I find myself wondering, am I being served? Customer service. We hear the words often enough, but many times frustration and not feeling served are the norm. We often don’t get the pleasure of a real person and, if we do, the person’s response is like a corporate robot reading from a prepared and tested script. We get voice-automated systems saying ‘in order to serve you better, blah, blah, blah.’ then 10...

  • Digital Industry Eco-Facts: Not the Magic Pill We Hoped For
    - Wednesday July 6, 2011
    by Gale Grimmenga, principal, Creative Impulse (www.creativeimpulseinc.com) I don’t fault the electronics industry for marketing well—it’s what business is all about, promising a cure or at least an improvement of a problem. Marketing promotes the bright side, the strengths, the good stuff. It implies delivery of something better than the other guy. Every industry turns the conversation to its favor and, at best, educates us about the new innovation’s benefits. At worst, we jump onboard the trend, help promote the promise, and stay ignorant of the truth. As a citizen of Earth, I want an eco-magic pill for our polluting woes. I want to believe the positive claims of the e-industry: Paperless is nirvana...

  • Navigating the Offline and Online Marketing Landscape
    - Thursday June 9, 2011
    By Gale Grimmenga Principal/Creative Impulse (www.creativeimpulseinc.com) We use two charts to help our clients plan a course for their marketing communications. The first is an overview—it starts with a company’s strategic and creative positioning then divides into creative key message and target audience and then branches into the communication vehicles. The communication vehicles are divided into four broad categories of media: traditional (broadcast & print), interpersonal, new, and environmental—from magazine ads to websites to SEO to outdoor to direct mail to banner ads, bringing us to about 60 vehicles. Adding in all the specific spots for placement, as in thousands of magazine titles or links on websites, makes this list...

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