Okay, now this is starting to go the way I expected it to go.
I wanted to jump in this sooner with these thoughts, but didn’t want to be accused for taking it down this path.
You all want to charge for your design fee, custom tailored effects, phonebook ads, grommeting, knowledge, terminology of advertising rather than a banner, commodity items, cheapness of certain products compared to other items, subbing out, in-house and the list goes on.
Y’all want
your customers to realize all of this and respect what you have into this, however, all I ever read on this site and others just like it is….. how can I get cheaper and cheaper banner material, vinyl, pvc, MOD, inks, free images hacked software, cheaper and faster ways of producing prints by only squeaking by with performance made…..how to do it, how do I, how do I get cheaper and cheaper and still demand the respect and loyalty of
MY customers…. when I don’t do it for my vendors, my own equipment and supplies ??
What DRamm said is likewise sad. He’s admitting to selling to our customers because we have convinced enough end-users with incredible bank accounts, it’s easier to go out, buy some machines, software and steal an employee from your sign shop and do this stuff in-house.
I used to get pissed off when I heard the distributors were selling to my customers, but it’s not their fault….. most of you blabbering off your mouth gets back to these end-users and they come here acting as big companies with art departments and looking for help and you want to sign them up as some of the big boys… when in fact, they might’ve been ABC’s biggest customer up until three weeks ago. They just might be testing the waters before costing another sign shop USA their nicest account.
So, you want to complain about low prices from your competition, but your real problem is keeping customers for reasons you probably gave away the farm already and didn’t realize it.
For instance….. customer comes to you and says… hey, XYZ sign shop told me your price of $10 a square foot is high, that he can do it for $8.50. So you match it thinking it’s still pretty good numbers. Four months go by and they come to you again about a discrepancy in a bill and you explain that you need to make something. They pay and go away. Now they know you are still making money, but you can budge if need be, so they start investigating because they spend upwards of $150,000 a year with you. Knowing that out of your little garage and you and one other guy are doing all the work, they do the math and figure, well til Sparky here gets his material, does the work and makes a profit, we could probably cut our own costs of $150,00 a year at least in half, if not more. Let’s call DRamm and see how much these things cost ?? Get all the information on equipment, material costs and bing-boda-boom… they compute it all out and for less than ½ of one year’s investment, they could not only cut their costs in by almost a 1/3, they could increase their advertisements and stretch their advertising dollars out in the first year and still be ahead of the game. Someone drops the s101 bomb on them along the way or they just google and it pops up, they’re in and we are instantly educating our own customers…. or someone that has just lost one of the eggs in their basket. You see this long enough, you’ll start losing more eggs/customers this way, you’ll see why it’s tough to stomach the shannigins that go on in the real world and not this make believe crap the vast majority of you want to believe.
I know this to be a fact, because I know of at least one that has been a member here a long time. I’m not sure, but I think they were a member before I got here. They just don’t post much. They just sit back, listen and take good notes.
