The Recurring Full Moon Phenomena

It’s been a while. I’ve been out of sorts with nothing good to say, so I’ve ignored the blog altogether. After a couple of good months at the end of 2009, Poor Richard fell back into panic mode as business disintegrated at the printshop behind the red awnings on Poplar Street. January 2010 was bleak. I had just begun a serious study of biblical eschatology when the last day of February rolled around and all of our customers woke up at the same time.

I’m thinking it’s the moon. I’ve written about this before (see Poor Richard’s post The Full Moon). Last time, I discussed the deleterious effects of  minute changes in the force of gravity on machines and those who operate them. This time, I’d like to consider the tidal effect on the minds of the folks who visit our Gralpharaphics “business center.” (The franchise, who shall nevermore be named in this blog, became disenchanted with printshops a year or two ago and decided that we would henceforth become “business centers.”)

The moon was full on February 28th and the orders came rolling in. All of the work that our customers had decided they didn’t need in January and the first 27 days of February, they now needed immediately on March 1st.  It’s not that the tight deadlines are all that unusual, but there were small oddities about several of the orders. Just for entertainment, Poor Richard is pleased to provide you with a few snippets from the past couple of days:

“I gave you my business card as a .jpg. What do you mean you can’t blow it up into a 24 x 36 poster?”

“My last printer closed down. I had been doing this business with him for a while and he wasn’t charging me much. I was hoping that you’d be less expensive.”

“No, the order for 10,000 rack cards went to another shop; but we need you to donate 1,000 posters. Is that a problem?”

“All of their salespeople quit. They decided not to do the mailout because there wouldn’t be anyone to respond to the leads.”

It’s not quite the Twilight Zone, but things are a little bizarre. I answered the phone at lunchtime on Friday. “Do you do raffle tickets?” queried the voice on the line.

“Yes, ma’am, we’ve been known to,” I responded.

“Well, how much do they cost?” said the voice. Even with the sure knowledge that I could not be seen through the telephone, Poor Richard made a conscious effort not to roll my eyes and began to launch into his memorized series of questions regarding quantity, size, paper, numbering, perforations, etc.; only to be interrupted in mid sentence:

“My baby’s in a pageant, and I just need some raffle tickets.”

What kind of person raffles off their baby in a pageant?

We delivered 5000 sets of a stapled document to a customer on Friday – 4 sheets, 2 sides, stapled. This morning they called and said that they had counted the order and were 25 sets short. Poor Richard found it peculiar that anyone would actually take the time to count 5000 sets of copies and also a little dubious that they were short. The job is simple and familiar. We send the file to the big black and white machine manufactured by the nearly palindromatic company that begins and ends with X. The quantity is specified in the print job. The machine prints and staples, the documents are boxed and delivered. The machine log indicates that 5005 copies were produced. Poor Richard is certain that the missing 30 copies were transported into a parallel universe.

About the poster sized business card . . .  we printed it. When we explained that it would not print clearly at 24 x 36, we were instructed to repeat it as many times as possible on a 24 x 36 board. We printed it 90 times with a pretty blue background on a nice piece of foamcore for the customer to put on an easel.

It may be the full moon, or  perhaps terrorists have injected hallucinogenic drugs into the water supply in Macon. Poor Richard isn’t sure, but he’s happy to be busy even if the orders are a little odd.

Isn’t life grand?

Re-inventeration

Square-wheeled trike. Thanks to Jeff Atwood at http://www.codinghorror.com.

If one happens to be a small business owner, especially if one happens to be the owner of a local printing company, the idea of re-inventing one’s business is probably pretty far up on the agenda these days. This is primarily because much of the business we all once enjoyed has suddenly just disappeared, as if by magic; or possibly due to the re-inventing of a much less cooperative economy.

Re-inventeration, a new word which Poor Richard thinks he has just coined, is the process of re-inventing something.  Of course, the whole concept is preposterous.  If something is invented the first time, does it really make any sense to try to re-invent it?

And it’s complicated. Re-inventeration is frought with Catch-22 scenarios. For those who have not read Joseph Heller’s famous book, the Catch-22 was the ultimate bureaucratic boondoggle.  Catch-22 (the book) told the story of Yossarian, a WWII B-25 bombardier and his squadron, as they were forced to fly increasing numbers of bombing runs over Italy.  The squadron commander, Major Major, literally embodied the concept of Catch-22. It was possible to schedule an appointment with Major Major at any time; however, one could only actually see Major Major if he was not in.

Similarly, if one was deemed insane, it was possible to get discharged from the Air Corps. Because Yossarian’s desire for discharge was deemed very sane, his insane behavior was considered by his superiors as a natural expression of his  true sanity. Catch 22.

Not unlike Yossarian, Poor Richard is struggling with the Catch-22s of the re-inventeration process at his downtown Macon Gralpharaphics shop (name carefully disguised to protect the sensibilities of the franchise). The first Catch-22 is simply time.  Business is down, we’ve cut back on staff, and more time is spent working in the business than on the business.  Without more time to work on the business, we’ll never be able to grow the business back to a point where more folks can be hired to work in the business; relieving the requirement for the owner to fold brochures until 2 am and allowing him to use his brain once again.

The next and more worrisome set of  Catch(es)-22 have to do with scope, the literal definition of the business. Behind the red awnings on Poplar Street, we’re taking jobs that we probably wouldn’t have looked at a couple of years ago.  A lot of these are small and risky.  The risk is that the expense in time and effort to produce the small jobs will exceed the revenue that results. Catch 22. The potential benefit is a new customer who might actually bring us a profitable job one day. Poor Richard is not sure how this one is playing out.

The low hanging fruit has been picked. We’ve responded to economic pressure on mainstay product lines by adding more products. In our case, we’ve added wide format printing and reprographics to subsidize some of the losses in conventional offset printing.   These were natural additions – similar products and services to what we were already doing. They didn’t disrupt the production process much and they added little in the way of expense. Unfortunately, they did not add enough revenue to compensate for the decline in conventional printing; and these product lines are also facing economic and competitive pressures. Catch 22.

So what’s the next step? Poor Richard has written before (with misgivings) about the current buzz-phrase in the printing industry. The latest rage is for printing companies to become marketing service providers. (See Poor Richard’s post Measuring Value). Our little company  is moving in this direction slowly but steadily, unsure of all of the implications, but with a sense that it is inevitable – there just aren’t many other areas of opportunity left.

Becoming a marketing service provider is full of Catch(es)-22. First, the whole notion takes us out of the realm of producing tangible products and into the area of shaping content. We’re no longer working with machinery that prints, cuts or folds stuff; but rather with electronic means of communication and the disciplines that go along with them – CSS, XHTML, Purls and a bunch of other acronyms. The competitive cost of entry into this business is low relative to the cost of a new printing press, which means that the pressure to keep ahead of the technology curve will be steep. Worse, the marketing service provider notion requires a new skill set that takes time to learn.  In our case, that’s the owner’s time that is in very short supply. Catch 22.

Second, the whole idea of shaping content laps over into creating content.  Printing companies are pretty good at shaping. We do layout work, color correct photos, even occasionally light editing for our customers. This is different from creating the content, an area we have generally avoided because of time limitations and a focus on keeping the machines running.

It’s just a little too hopeful to think that we might make money only by implementing marketing services — integrated direct mail and e-mail campaigns, for example. Most of our customers simply lack the time and resources to develop the content for this kind of effort, so it appears inevitable that we will be required to do some development work for them if we want to sell the services.

Hopefully we can do this without stepping on the toes of our agency customers and triggering yet another Catch 22. Ideally, the agencies might find it helpful to use our shop to implement integrated direct mail and internet campaigns for their larger customers. Our challenge will be keeping the focus on implementation (and measurement) of specific marketing services without getting customers confused about what we can do (and want to do).

Creating content, even on a limited basis, is a big step for a small printing company; but it is still a lot different from the conceptual work that our agency customers do. We can make that statement, but will our customers understand it?  Another Catch-22.

Poor Richard supposes that re-inventeration, like change, is necessary and unavoidable; but he hopes he’s not re-inventing a square-wheeled tricycle.

Neither rain, nor snow, nor dead economy?

Poor Richard thought it was only printers that had it bad. It had been a while since I had visited our local BMEU (Bulk Mail Entry Unit). The printshop next to Grant’s Lounge (name withheld to protect the sensibilities of the franchise) had a mailing to go out Friday, and no one else was available, so I loaded up the Suburban and headed for the post office.

First, let me say that the people we work at the Macon BMEU are nice folks. Ken, the boss, helped me get started in mailing several years ago.  I called him looking for information and he actually came out to the shop and spent a couple of hours going through the regulations. Randy, Charlotte, Gary and John are always helpful and friendly.  They play by the rules and let us know when we screw up, but they have always been patient and very good to work with.

This part of the post office (the BMEU) used to bustle with activity.  On any given day, There would be several mailers there with at least one who had made a royal mess of a mailing job.  One of the folks mentioned above would be patiently explaining the rules, even if the customer was irate. There is a Merlin machine behind the counter that checks barcodes and machinability. In days past, this machine was generally running. Other postal folks were continually going in and out behind the counter doing the things that postal folks do.

Yesterday’s scene was quite different. Only Ken and Charlotte were there and there was no activity at all. The first words from Charlotte’s mouth were, “This is my last week. I’m taking early retirement.”

And apparently she’s not the only one. The USPS has offered its employees an early opt-out program in recognition of the changes in their business. And the mail business has changed indeed.  The official statement from USPS on the Voluntary Early Retirement (VER) program reads like this:

Automation and technological advances coupled with mail volume reductions has the Postal Service continuing to look for ways to voluntarily reduce its workforce while maintaining excellent customer service.

Source: Liteblue.usps.gov

Dear readers, I hope you don’t think it inappropriate for Poor Richard to read a bit between the lines and hazard some not so bold inferences.

First, the reduction in mail volume is easy to document.  First Class mail peaked in 2001 and (with one year’s exception) has been declining steadily ever since. In FY 2008, the USPS lost $2.8 billion (yep, billion) on it’s operations and total mail volume decreased by 4.5% from the previous fiscal year. It’s a no brainer . . . email continues to replace mail.

The recession has impacted direct mail in the same way that printing has been affected. Direct mail is an easy target for businesses cutting expense. Standard mail piece volume for FY09 was down almost 20% from the same time period in FY08. (Source USPS Financials).

Staunching the flow of red ink seems to be more important to USPS than excellent customer service, though. It seems obvious that USPS is moving toward a much less customer-friendly environment. Bulk mail facilities in smaller communities have already been shuttered with customers told to carry their mailings to centralized units in larger communities.

The postal service is also quickly heading towards enforced online entry of mailings for mail service providers. At this point, the online service (PostalOne) is kind of clunky and complicated. That’s no big surprise. The problem, though,  is that all of the customer-friendly postal employees are taking early retirement. There’s no one to explain the new systems.

Finally, transferring costs to the customer may be exacerbating the problem. Poor Richard thinks that it started with rubber bands. Only a year or so ago, the bulk mail offices actually supplied rubber bands to their mailers for use in packaging standard mail. When mailers were told that there would be no more free rubber bands, most of us just shrugged our shoulders and passed that little cost on to our customers. Since then, there have been a lot of incremental cost increases that we’ve had to pass along. For example, the USPS has added a move update requirement that has increased the cost of list processing. They’re also charging a small fortune for address corrected pieces that are returned to the mailer.

Postal rates and costs continue to increase while the perceived cost of electronic communication is low.  Even when the potential impact of mail can be very positive (high ROI), it is perceived as an expensive way to market.   Simply put, the cost to mail has gone up while the perceived value of mail compared to the alternatives has diminished.

This is not a winning scenario for the USPS . . . and it does explain the drastic changes at the Post Office.

So we have to ask the question. Is printed mail, especially direct mail, still a worthwhile endeavor? Is there a place in the new economy for the US Postal Service?

NEXT POST – Direct Mail and the Internet

Squelched

So maybe I’ve crossed the line. I never intended this blog to belittle or to  be demeaning and certainly not to frighten off a customer who might consider coming into our printshop. The phone call I received from the franchise just a little over a week ago led me to believe that I may have done all three. It was from the new marketing director, a person I had never encountered before. She began by asking questions about the blog . . . what was it’s purpose?

I explained that it was mostly for fun, partially therapy, and that I occasionally write about something that is substantively related to printing.  The marketing director didn’t beat around the bush, but explained that the franchise was concerned with a negative tone toward customers and about the adverse impact it might have on their brand. She also stated that the franchise would do whatever was necessary to protect their brand. I understood that part clearly.

We didn’t argue. I did ask if she had read the blog and didn’t receive an answer that indicated she was very familiar with it. Mostly I listened and ultimately concluded that the best way to make sure that the franchise was not threatened was simply not to ever mention them in my blog again. This is admittedly problematic, since our printshop is usually recognized by the franchise moniker (begins with A, 2 syllables, second syllable is “graphics”), but I guess I’ll have to live with it.

Mind you, it did occur to me that marketing directors were supposed to be about marketing their business, not squelching such efforts. It also occurred to me (and I even mentioned this to the nice lady) that whatever recognition the brand name has in Middle Georgia is largely due to the efforts of my company.  That’s probably all irrelevant, though.  Besides,  the franchise has never really been very good at marketing.  Operations, yes . . . marketing, no.

So, I have a quandary and a conundrum. How can I continue to blog about my printshop without mentioning the name? I guess it will just have to be a game.  While I won’t mentioned the name A_____G______s any more, many of you will know where I work. Poor Richard might also mention the printshop behind the red awnings on Poplar Street. Or perhaps we’ll take a lead from the artist formerly known as Prince and just use some mysterious glyphs, like this, Ω&♣ζ±. Or maybe we’ll take a cue from Scooby Doo and call it GralphaRaphics.

I hope that many of you will continue to frequent Ω&♣ζ± and visit us at the place with a more recognizable name on the red awnings. To anyone who has been offended, I do offer my sincere apologies; and also the consolation that it probably wasn’t you that you thought you were reading about.  To my good customers, I offer continued thanks and the promise that we really, really do appreciate the business you do with us.

Finally, Poor Richard recommends a strong dose of humor to all of those who occasionally read these paragraphs. I really hope that you don’t take it all too seriously . . . I surely don’t.

Signing off from the printshop next to Grant’s Lounge in lovely downtown Macon!

–Poor Richard