No, your sign isn't done yet.

[Asuma01]

Had a guy calling for 2 days straight that he needed his posters done ASAP and asking when we would have them ready. Still sitting here a week later... His shop is literally down the road from ours.

This is the one that happens ALL the time at our shop.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

how long do you store material before trashing?
can you ship or deliver, if nothing more than to free up space?
at this point is the print job even relevant?

Avery says its junk, we are still holding it since they are trickle taking it. It still works according to their needs. We gave them till June because we are remodelling.

 

[TheSnowman]

I kinda struggled with that too. Everyone wanted me to keep hours that they could just stop by whenever it was convenient for them...and I totally get that, that's the way business is done all over the place. I basically closed my front door two years ago now, and I put up a sign that just said "production facility - by appointment only" and I've literally been delivering or shipping every single item. I can deliver all my orders for a day in about an hour, vs sitting around waiting on them to show up (maybe) and getting a lot more work done.

I was lucky though, I had a pretty good chunk of business trained to send an email instead of stop by, and now that I've closed, I've basically only had to deal with the few people being upset that I'm "never here" and when we do schedule a time to meet, I kid you not, I've had maybe 2 of those 40 meetings or so, result in a job, and it wasn't a high paying job.

I have quickbooks on the cloud, and all my designs on the cloud, and can access anything from anywhere, so as far as my ability to get work done, other than printing, I have zero reason to be in the office other than to meet with people, but in todays world, if my customers can't send an email, they're not hardly worth dealing with in the whole design/approval process because they're going to want to stop by and tweak their $30 project 5X before we finally get it into production.

That's just my experience, I realize not everyone has that luxury, but I'm now 2 years in, and wouldn't look back. Getting ready to build a pole barn at home and get setup there, and not even advertise that I exist. My customers that I have relationships with think it's great, they get faster, better service, and I can get stuff done without spending half my day talking to someone that stopped in for a job they'll never do, or being asked to donate money to a complete stranger for their event they're doing.

All this being said, I do spend a lot of mornings in here from like 4AM-9AM, then going out and doing installs, so there was a trade off, but I'm still ok with it. You can get a lot done while the rest of the world sleeps.

I also have a storefront and it's so darn hard to maintain hours since it's just me. I feel like I'm constantly "closed for an install" or "opening late for an estimate". It's not reasonable to assume I can hire someone just to sit here in case I need to leave. I'm not sure how to handle this, do I reduce hours? Only have it open a couple days a week? Take my hours off the door completely? I feel like I'm in jail sometimes not being able to leave to get a burger in case I miss someone. How did you go about this?