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Adapting your business in the coming year

andy

New Member
I'm planning to stay in bed.....

Spending cuts, public sector layoff's, VAT rises, National Insurance increases, inflation running well over target, mutterings of interest rate rises and a nice juicy Euro Zone crisis to wash it all down with. Misery and penury awaits the intrepid business man or woman in 2011.
 

OCsteve

New Member
Decided to quit the business and collect social security while it is still available. After paying off $280,000 in equipment in November, we decided to sell out and close the doors. Opened the doors in March of 2006. About a year before the economy started to tank. My partner and I decided to take no salary for the first year. That turned into year two, year three and year four. That didn't work out so well. I still have a Mimkai JV 3 bundle with plotter and GBC laminator for sale that I will relist. Good luck to all of you in the coming years. I have to say that it was a fun business for a while but it finally beat us up.
 

iSign

New Member
...we decided to sell out and close the doors...

...I still have a Mimkai JV 3 bundle with plotter and GBC laminator for sale...
sorry to hear that.. best of luck with the next chapter...

I hope you're keeping those print heads clean... I have the same set-up & at 5-1/2 years... it runs like a champ, but you can't buy a service contract anymore at that age, and the price to bring it back to good working condition could be prohibitive if it is left sitting...

anyway, all stuff you probably already know.
 

Gino

Premium Subscriber
I'd like to say, we're gonna expand, but the unnerving-ness of the economy says to sit back and go in another direction and make what we already have.... work harder for us.

Although we had a ton or write-offs, we're still paying high taxes. That is not a political thing, so please don't throw this out as an NHB post. It is pure acknowledgment of a true fact.

We're exploring new customers in a fashion that beats the competition..... quality and service-wise. We're educating our existing customers and potentially new customers as to what is REALLY available to them..... how quickly, in what price range and quality of none higher from which to compare.


:Oops:​
The story of home-based vs. fabrication or store-front sign shops gets old. I have no problem with competition regardless of how small or how large. The vast majority of our competition is basically home-based or backyard mechanics. Whether I want to see it as lowly lowballers setup or legit shops... is up to me. I can't control how my competition survives. However, I can control how I deal with it and what my shop is going to do to handle business....... and for the most part, it's not worrying about my fellow sign-makers. Sure, there are trouble makers out there, but that's in any form of business to pissed off friends or acquaintances...... you just have to remain friendly and get to know more about them, so they don't screw ya over. Ya know, keep your friends close, but your enemies closer type of thinking.

If you want to complain about competition or how others view you in the business field, start another thread about it and then we can roll up our sleeves and piss everyone off without ruining this thread. :rock-n-roll:
 

Amberdee75

New Member
This year I'm going to look at a better pricing structure. This weekend I worked on a spreadsheet for calculating in our overhead, instead of flying by seat of our pants.:smile:
 

prime signs

New Member
The story behind the Latin phrase is over the weekend a customer brought me in a old hand painted sign with the message on it. The sign painters name was Conrad Johnson and he passed away about 15 years ago. Knowing Conrad personally and not having a very good 2010 the old sign seemed to fit. My business was getting to the point were it was wearing me down. After 24 years 2010 was the first year it really started getting to me. I took a four month break and a full time job working another job that I hated. So refreshed I came back to my sign business. This year I will not let the bastards grind me down.:smile:
 

James Burke

Being a grandpa is more fun than working
As they say in Latin "Illegitimi non Carborundum" that is my motto this year.

We engrave a lot of bricks for various organizaions. At one college, the sorority girls somehow got permission to put the feminine variant ("bit**es") of this phrase on one brick.

Moral of the story...don't mess with sorority girls.
 
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