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  • Don't Panic Over New Competitor
    By Tom Crouser - Wednesday April 24, 2013
    When Kaufmann’s department store opened in the Town Center Mall in my hometown, the Diamond department store closed its doors. The Diamond’s management (Federated Department Stores) had fought the mall and other changes to retail (they fought for the blue laws keeping stores closed on Sunday, for instance). But practically to the day that Kaufmann’s (now Macy’s) opened, they closed. I was reminded of that when a printer friend in Boston panicked at the threat of competition and felt compelled to sell. I said, “Not so fast.” Here’s what Barney wrote: “A 20-year-old promotional products company is moving their location to about three miles away from me and wants to buy me out so they can go into printing. They don’t have...

  • How to Price New Services
    By Tom Crouser - Monday February 18, 2013
    How do we price something that we’ve never done before? It appears to me that many business owners worry more about how to price a new product/service than they do learning about how to do it in the first place. Web sites, social media, QR codes, email broadcasts, shopping carts as well as Twitter, Facebook Business Pages and LinkedIn pages all come to mind. How do you price such a service for customers? First, understand you can never accurately price something you haven’t done before. Second, you need to know how to do it before you worry about pricing. And third, it’s hard to learn on the customer’s nickel but that’s been the tradition in the printing industry. Going far afield however requires a better approach and I have a...

  • How to Say What You Don’t Want to Say
    By Tom Crouser - Wednesday December 26, 2012
    None of us like confrontations, least not business owners regardless of how ruff and gruff they appear. So how do you deliver a message that you really don’t want to deliver? I don’t have all the answers, but I do have one and here it is: write a script. No, not a lengthy melodramatic script. Write a script like I had my friend in Connecticut write. Here’s the background. Marty is a great guy. So great that some workers found it easy to get what they wanted. Don was such a guy. He was a CSR who worked from 5:00 am to 2:00 pm every day. That’s right, 5:00 am. Why? It wasn’t because Marty needed him to work those hours; rather it was an accommodation to Don. He was a single parent and his daughter got off from school at 3:00 and...

  • Small Business Saturday: Bah, Humbug
    By Tom Crouser - Monday November 26, 2012
    At the risk of sounding anti-American, please allow me to react to the concept of Small Business Saturday: bah, humbug! Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against small business. I’m not against picking up a few extra bucks in sales or potentially a new customer. I’m against the concept that we small business owners have to be given special protection in order to survive, like the snail darter. “Pick a small business in your community to shop at on Small Business Saturday,” the ad on television says. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski do a stand-up patronization spot in which they implore good Americans to patronize small businesses. Hey, it’s about competition. And if a small business can’t compete alongside Wal-Mart, Target...

  • Taxing Questions about End of Year Equipment Purchases
    By Tom Crouser - Tuesday October 23, 2012
    Is your accountant telling you that the upcoming end of the tax year (for calendar year filers) is time to buy equipment to save money? It’s not as cut and dried as that, so I again this year issue my annual warning about the downside of this practice. I say it’s time to review any upcoming purchases, but don’t be panicked into spending now because you may regret it later. According to http://www.section179.org/section_179_deduction.html ( www.Section179.org ) the 2012 deduction limit is $139,000. This is the amount of new or used equipment (or software) you may purchase, put into service, and write off as a direct deduction to your income this year. What’s bad about that? Nothing is bad, specifically. What’s bad is the...

  • Auto Response Gone Wild
    By Tom Crouser - Monday September 24, 2012
    Based on my experience, a small but significant number of printers (I estimate 8%) use an auto responder improperly, in my opinion. Specifically they set up a response to go out EVERY time an email is received. This might have been appropriate in the days when email was in its infancy (1996 or so), but doesn’t get it today. Why? Everyone gets too much email and a response saying “I haven’t read your email but wanted you to know we got it and will get back to you when we can,” is irritating to customers who expect us to actually read and respond to our email rather stack them in a pile. This reminds me of voice mail which says “We’re too busy to answer the phone right now but if you leave a message, we’ll get back to you when...

  • Why Net Income Doesn't Mean Cash
    - Monday June 18, 2012
    Just because you made a profit doesn’t mean you created that much cash. Many of us find that out at tax time. Now some know why this is, but many don’t. So disregard if you know. However, if you’ve wondered about it, then let me share a few “whys” with you. If we buy something for $100 and sell it for $400, we have $300 in gross income. Take away $100 for wages and $100 for overhead like rent and utilities; then we are left with $100 of net income (commonly called profit). Now why isn’t the $100 net income the same as $100 in cash in the bank? Depreciation is the most common difference. Ignore Section 179, bonus deprecation and the IRS mandated MACRS (Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System) for a moment, and consider...

  • What is the Owner's Job?, Part 4
    By Tom Crouser - Monday June 11, 2012
    What is the job of a business owner? In this fourth and final edition I add performance to the tasks listed in our previous three issues. Management types who work for someone always have to perform and they have to report to someone in order to keep their job. A branch manager or a store manager reports to a division director or vice president somewhere. A vice president reports to a president or CEO. Presidents or CEO’s then report to a board of directors representing stockholders. Even the board reports to the stockholders. And each and everyone can be thrown out on their ear if they don’t perform – even if it’s not their fault. So, they have one thing in common – perform or else. Only in these businesses that we create can...

  • What is the Owner's Job?, Part 3
    By Tom Crouser - Monday June 4, 2012
    What is the job of the business owner? In this installment three of four, we add to the tasks of the job described previously – especially in the areas of sales and finance. In the last two installments we said that ownership is a passive verb. An owner has a right to a return on investment in both time and money. We found owning a business was much like owning a car – that it is limited in usefulness until someone drives the car. And we found that ownership is broader than the founder – that it extends to the entire business family who are stakeholders in these businesses regardless of whether they are stockholders. Most people confuse the title of owner with the function of the one person who runs the business – the function...

  • What is the Owner's Job?, Part 2
    By Tom Crouser - Monday May 28, 2012
    The question is, “What’s the job of the person running the business?” In our last installment, we focused on the primary duty – to make and meet all budgets. In addition, we said they also are responsible for reporting on their progress of meeting the budgets to the stakeholders. Okay, you may ask, but how does that relate to print shop tasks such as writing up jobs, waiting on customers and ordering supplies? Well, it doesn’t because that’s not the job of the general manager. Huh? We must organize around functions – not people. In our size shops, the job of the general manager is not a full time job – even after you read all the things I am going to list. Rather, the job is a part-time effort even at the two and three...

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