Building Relationships
Steve Cole writes; It's tough to operate a game publishing business, because the only way to do it is to work 6.5 days a week (and most holidays, such as yesterday) 10 or more hours a day, and that gets tricky because so many "real" businesses we depend on are not open on weekends or evenings.
We normally ship new products on Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, so that all of the wholesalers get the product on Friday, and get it into their inventory before the retail stores (who do most of their selling Friday-Saturday-Sunday) call in on Monday morning to order stuff to be in stock and ready for sale by the next weekend. And since we print things ourselves, that means we start printing on Friday and if the printers break down we cannot get a repairman before Monday morning.
The copier company that has the support contract for our print engines works with us (they get huge checks from us every month, we're big enough to be loved and not big enough to be feared) and when we have a big print job, they send over their repair crew on Friday morning to make sure the engines are totally tuned up, and go ahead and schedule emergency repairs for Monday morning. (The engines were designed to print about 5,000 pages a day and we use them for 13,000 pages a day when we print at all, so they "take a hit" and need to be "dialed back into the proper range". The repair guys get them back up in an hour. Yes, I know that Brand X has fewer repairs than the Kyoceras (they aren't better machines, they're just designed for the heavier work load), but I also know I can buy seven of the Kyoceras for the cost of a Brand X machine. (I have three kyoceras instead of seven because I cannot afford the other four yet, nor do we have space to put them.) We built that relationship with three things: pay our bills on time, LEARN how the machines work so we can minimize problems, and cooperate as well as we can with them (treating them as a partner, not a vendor). We stock the favorite drinks of the repair guys in the fridge, and we allow the copier company to use our print room to train new repairmen. We have three engines and if we're not in the middle of a mass production run when one goes down, we call the repair guys to come "whenever its convenient" because we have the other two machines to use and we know their other customers have only one machine and if it's down, they're down. At the annual trade show in Amarillo, I spend time in their booth explaining the "down and dirty real way these things work" that ain't in the manual or the sales brochure.
Another key relationship is with our printer, Cenveo, who do the color printing we cannot (so far) do for ourselves. They also sell us the pallet loads of paper the Kyoceras use. (Think about buying books by the pallet load and you understand buying blank paper by the pallet load to print the books on demand.) We have a wonderful first-name-basis relationship with Vickie (our printer representative) and Tony (her boss and one of the three highest-ranking guys at the printing company). On Memorial Day, Tony (the senior VP of a multi-million-dollar corporation who probably spends more on sunday dinner than I make in a day) left a family gathering to personally go get us a box of paper out of his warehouse. (His crew had accidentally sent us a brand of paper that the Kyoceras cannot print on. Vickie would have done it herself, but she was out of town, and offered to drive home early if she had to.) Today, Vickie (who dresses like Prada, and yes, the Angel Wears Prada, too) went out into the noisy dusty print shop floor to get us the first box of the new print run of maps so we could pack and ship the last of the ACADEMY initial orders today instead of tomorrow. We built that relationship with hard work and effort. We pay our bills on time (always a good thing, don't even try asking for favors if you don't pay your bills), we listen and learn how their business works (so that we send them print jobs in whatever way least disrupts their business), we plan ahead (with them, no surprises!) to schedule print jobs, we find ways for them to do things that minimizes the grief and hassle we put them through (and minimizes what they have to hire outside subcontractors to do), and we don't ask for favors unless we HAVE to have them.
You don't have to be rich or smart to run a business, but you HAVE to have friends. You have to have friends at other companies who will steer you to good deals and call you up, even when they know it's going to piss you off, to point out mistakes. (GAMA President Rick Loomis, knowing how touchy and defensive I get about my press releases, called up one day to point out a major stupid GOOF that I had made. He didn't do so to gloat, but because he cares if my business is successful. I have known Rick longer than I have known Leanna.) Be a friend, make friends. Ask people who sell you things "just how to do you do that" so you know ways to make it easier for them to do your projects and save your bacon and do favors for you.
We normally ship new products on Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, so that all of the wholesalers get the product on Friday, and get it into their inventory before the retail stores (who do most of their selling Friday-Saturday-Sunday) call in on Monday morning to order stuff to be in stock and ready for sale by the next weekend. And since we print things ourselves, that means we start printing on Friday and if the printers break down we cannot get a repairman before Monday morning.
The copier company that has the support contract for our print engines works with us (they get huge checks from us every month, we're big enough to be loved and not big enough to be feared) and when we have a big print job, they send over their repair crew on Friday morning to make sure the engines are totally tuned up, and go ahead and schedule emergency repairs for Monday morning. (The engines were designed to print about 5,000 pages a day and we use them for 13,000 pages a day when we print at all, so they "take a hit" and need to be "dialed back into the proper range". The repair guys get them back up in an hour. Yes, I know that Brand X has fewer repairs than the Kyoceras (they aren't better machines, they're just designed for the heavier work load), but I also know I can buy seven of the Kyoceras for the cost of a Brand X machine. (I have three kyoceras instead of seven because I cannot afford the other four yet, nor do we have space to put them.) We built that relationship with three things: pay our bills on time, LEARN how the machines work so we can minimize problems, and cooperate as well as we can with them (treating them as a partner, not a vendor). We stock the favorite drinks of the repair guys in the fridge, and we allow the copier company to use our print room to train new repairmen. We have three engines and if we're not in the middle of a mass production run when one goes down, we call the repair guys to come "whenever its convenient" because we have the other two machines to use and we know their other customers have only one machine and if it's down, they're down. At the annual trade show in Amarillo, I spend time in their booth explaining the "down and dirty real way these things work" that ain't in the manual or the sales brochure.
Another key relationship is with our printer, Cenveo, who do the color printing we cannot (so far) do for ourselves. They also sell us the pallet loads of paper the Kyoceras use. (Think about buying books by the pallet load and you understand buying blank paper by the pallet load to print the books on demand.) We have a wonderful first-name-basis relationship with Vickie (our printer representative) and Tony (her boss and one of the three highest-ranking guys at the printing company). On Memorial Day, Tony (the senior VP of a multi-million-dollar corporation who probably spends more on sunday dinner than I make in a day) left a family gathering to personally go get us a box of paper out of his warehouse. (His crew had accidentally sent us a brand of paper that the Kyoceras cannot print on. Vickie would have done it herself, but she was out of town, and offered to drive home early if she had to.) Today, Vickie (who dresses like Prada, and yes, the Angel Wears Prada, too) went out into the noisy dusty print shop floor to get us the first box of the new print run of maps so we could pack and ship the last of the ACADEMY initial orders today instead of tomorrow. We built that relationship with hard work and effort. We pay our bills on time (always a good thing, don't even try asking for favors if you don't pay your bills), we listen and learn how their business works (so that we send them print jobs in whatever way least disrupts their business), we plan ahead (with them, no surprises!) to schedule print jobs, we find ways for them to do things that minimizes the grief and hassle we put them through (and minimizes what they have to hire outside subcontractors to do), and we don't ask for favors unless we HAVE to have them.
You don't have to be rich or smart to run a business, but you HAVE to have friends. You have to have friends at other companies who will steer you to good deals and call you up, even when they know it's going to piss you off, to point out mistakes. (GAMA President Rick Loomis, knowing how touchy and defensive I get about my press releases, called up one day to point out a major stupid GOOF that I had made. He didn't do so to gloat, but because he cares if my business is successful. I have known Rick longer than I have known Leanna.) Be a friend, make friends. Ask people who sell you things "just how to do you do that" so you know ways to make it easier for them to do your projects and save your bacon and do favors for you.
posted by Federation Commander at 4:50 PM
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