Tom Crouser - publishes regular reports on pricing issues as well as recommends specific pricing for traditional and non-traditional printing functions. His Price Advisory Service is available at www.crouser.com.
-
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...
