Good news story here.
The awesomeness continues
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/bosses-wound-up-company-to-avoid-workplace-penalties-20120202-1qvnb.html
Just gets better and better.
Another Proud Day
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/company-fined-for-dismissing-pregnant-worker-20120202-1qubw.html
Another proud day for Sydney printing. Let’s see you top that, Melbourne!
Clever Marketing
Saw this in today’s Herald – a Sydney designer making waves with a business doing wall graphics.
Interesting thing is apparently with nothing new going on, she has managed to get massive publicity and position herself as some kind of innovator. All looks pretty stock standard to me – the design work is good but apart from that nothing you couldn’t find in most poster printers.
It really is clever that she has set her business in Las Vegas though. Great city and a sure fire place to base an outdoor advertising business.
It also feeds into a theory of mine that America has fallen behind in a lot of basic stuff, but most of all ambition in business. When you visit, they do some things very well but a lot of business practices we would consider standard haven’t shown up there yet.
Catching a Phoenix
The Australian printing industry is notorious for Phoenix companies – businesses that run up big debts under one corporate structure only to declare bankruptcy, walk away and leave suppliers, staff and financiers high and dry and open up the next day using the same equipment, staff and premises and only a slightly different name.
For all their talk of being pro-small business, the previous federal government never lifted a finger to stop this practice. Probably because it was mainly small businesses being hurt and the truth is they only ever worried about big businesses.
But it looks like some of the shonks in the industry may be on their last Pty Ltd. The government has announced reforms to make sure directors of phoenixes are still responsible for the debts if they start up again.
Of course any good crook will change their practices to keep the chicanery going. But at least this government is interested in trying to protect small businesses. Good on em!
More Heidelberg Goodies
Heidelberg’s marketing department are at it again.
Call me simplistic but I really like this more open approach to marketing the equipment. The guys at Pressnet have been doing these bundle deals with transparent pricing for a while and it’s always been more tempting than the more obscure ads the big manufacturers have used. It helps you make a quicker more realistic decision and the cheap prices add to the temptation.
Hope it translates to sales for them. And I’d love to see their A2 packages.
Two of my favourite things
See this article on ProPrint combining Ricoh and digital print equipment suppliers targeting end users to the detriment of printers.
http://www.proprint.com.au/News/282013,armadale-council-brings-work-inhouse-with-ricoh.aspx
The comments section shows how much of a red-button this issues is with printers.
Boggles the mind that Ricoh would publicize it. Just goes to show there really is such a thing as bad publicity, or at least bad publicists.
Clicks and suppliers who want your customers
Came up against an irritating problem last week – and yes I know it happens to all of us but that does nothing to assuage my irritation.
Took a phone call from a client weighing up whether or not to digitally print a job in-house or send it out. In going through the numbers with him it became apparent that his office machine from Fuji Xerox was being charged at a full cent cheaper click rate than my so-called Fuji Xerox “production machines”.
I know I can print it two up and trim it and all the rest. I know production-wise we can do a better job and I know we can save them time. And when we did the numbers it became a tough decision for the customer because of all that. But how wrong is it that we have to compete with our own suppliers?
Why should we invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in their equipment only to have them turn around and undercut us direct to our customers on machines costing a fraction of our investment?
Why do the press suppliers not have a strict retail/wholesale pricing structure to avoid this situation and help us use their equipment? Surely if they did, and concentrated on shepherding people to commercial printers, their own costs would decrease. Instead of paying all those reps to go around selling small office machines to thousands of offices, they could just focus on servicing the production houses and help (through their own pricing) to channel the work though them.
It’s frustrating – and don’t even get me started on Xerox’s habit of going for print supply tenders. I often see this stuff come up in forums and someone always says don’t deal with suppliers who compete. It’s a good argument but often comes unstuck in reality – Fuji Xerox have great machines and give good service and once they have their hooks into you contractually it makes it very hard to ignore them.
But I’m so annoyed about the flagrant disregard they seem to have for their relationship with commercial printers that I did actually take some action. I had a meeting booked in next week to look at some new software and potentially a new machine, but this morning I cancelled it and cited this incident as the reason. I also told them that I wouldn’t be considering another FX machine because of it. Harsh words, and ones I probably won’t live up to, but I hope they (and maybe this post) will make my point. Their behaviour is just not acceptable.
Maybe if a few more of us tell all the digital press suppliers the same all of them will get the picture.
My money is no good
Just had one of the more unusual but weirdly common things that happen in print happen to me.
One of the paper companies closed my account. My money is no good.
For the sake of not embarrassing the company in front of Google, let’s call them Koggets. We don’t buy much from them but we do buy stuff every few months. We sometimes pay small accounts slowly but we always pay and no later than 60 days. But from today they don’t want my business unless it’s COD.
This puzzles me. I’m a payer so they’re never going to lose their money. I’m not ordering 3 reams of Optix A4 paper – when I do order it’s a reasonable amount of a commercial stock.
I have never seen one of their sales reps so I’m not taking up any of their time. My price book is from early 2010 so I’m not even costing them postage.
All I am is a line in their billing system. How does that cost them so much money that they want to kill the account.
I’m not rude, difficult or demanding, so why ditch me?
If it is about saving money surely this is not the way. If I have an account I ring up and place an order and am on and off the phone in minutes. Being COD will not entail emailing the bill to me, me paying it and someone manually checking to see if it has been paid so they can release the stock. That has to waste more time and money that they will save by deleting my record from their MYOB.
I have heard from other printers that when their small accounts have been closed they have been told they have to spend more in order for the company to justify keeping the account open. Sounds like self defeating blackmail to me.
This has happened to us before too, although not so baldly. Years ago, when we were much smaller, we used to divide our print spend roughly 70/30 between The Paper House and Dunlops.
Even though The Paper House got the bulk of our spend, in a company wide review of costs they deemed us small and so took away our rep, telling us to deal with the internal sales people only.
Our book quickly became out of date and we couldn’t get what we needed when we needed it so we started buying more from the Dunlops rep. Eventually it got to the point where we were buying about 90% our stock from Dunlops.
By this time The Paper House realised the error of their ways and reinstated reps to the smaller accounts but it was too late – we had found a better home and so had a lot of other smaller printers offended at how easily The Paper House had decided we were not worthy of their paper. And here we are a decade later – no The Paper House, no Thomasetti but Dunlops’ direct descendant BJ Ball still gets the bulk of our business.
All of which I think is a bit of a lesson to the paper companies. I’m especially surprised it’s Koggets doing it – they are a small company themselves and you would think they would be a bit happier to look after the smaller accounts the big boys might not be so keen on. Or at the least not to close an account they know nothing about – never once have they come out to see me and try to sell me more paper or see what they can do for me – they just flick me.
Anyway I guess it’s COD from now on and I’ll get used to it. But in return I will never buy another thing from them that I can get anywhere else. Just like I did with The Paper House.
Why magazine printers need to rethink their future
This is something I have observed with my own kids to a lesser extent, but only because my kids were older when exposed to the iPad. They still like to read books, but getting the iPad/iPod off them every night before they go to bed is a fight.
Magazines have an interesting time ahead.
