MI4P Fun Stuff Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

I’m mad at our water company. It got me thinking … who’s mad at you? But I’m getting way ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning. Our New Water Dispenser Our office was pretty excited to get a new filtered water dispenser in the break room. OK, “pretty excited” is a stretch, but I was pretty excited to upgrade from the typical bottled water to an inline filtration system. The new system provides cleaner and better-tasting water for our team, and at a predictable fixed cost that is significantly lower than our regular deliveries of bottled water. Everyone wins! First up: We installed the new water dispenser with the inline filtration system. No problems there. Here’s what it looks like… You can see the water lines coming out of the wall. A few of our teammates joked that the water is now being delivered by Ethernet! Digital water, who would have guessed?!? Next item to do: Call the current water delivery service and cancel future delivery. Calls like that can be awkward, but the call happened with no problems. They said they’ll come out and pick up the dispenser and extra jugs. Finally: The original water service arrived to pick up the dispenser and jugs. No real

Wow, what an experience! If you’re not already a member of a trade association like the National Print Owners Association (NPOA), you should be! Scott Doerfler and myself made the trip down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida to participate in this year’s NPOA Owners Conference. Everything was top-notch: the speakers, the breakout sessions, the socializing, the exchange of ideas … everything! The dues paid to an organization like the NPOA are peanuts compared to the knowledge you get in return. For us, we loved the opportunity to visit with many of our customers face-to-face. Handshakes always feel so much different in person vs. in email! In case you’re wondering, this plug isn’t some kind of paid advertisement. Here at Marketing Ideas For Printers we want to make sure you have the tools you need to succeed, and joining an association like NPOA is yet another way you can make sure your toolbelt is loaded. We’d encourage you to check them out!

Jason’s Many Lunch Adventures We thought it would be fun to include you in a curious phenomenon at our office: Jason from our support team has an uncanny ability to get delayed during his lunch time! We’d think he was making it up, because the reasons he gives are sometimes just too crazy. But since we can see the main road to our building, we’ve actually witnessed several of these things taking place right outside our window! Here’s a sampling of the things that have conspired to keep Jason from getting back from lunch so far: A funeral procession Another funeral — during a blizzard A flock of geese crossing the street A guy chasing his dog in the middle of traffic An extra-long flatbed semi delivering a wind turbine blade, stuck at a corner and blocking 4 lanes of traffic A house blocking all traffic (It was being moved out of a flood-prone area.) But Jason hasn’t seen everything yet. He expects to be blocked by the following in the near future: The Fargo Marathon A zombie attack An alien invasion A giant robot battle A Russian paratrooper sneak-attack Perhaps we should start an office pool on what the

Ben Franklin’s 308th Birthday Today, we threw a surprise birthday party in our office in honor of the 308th birthday of printing legend Ben Franklin. You should have seen the look on his face! But seriously, as this new year begins to take shape, who better to turn to for inspiration than the industrious, witty and enormously successful Benjamin Franklin? So we thought it would be nice to take a moment to commemorate this day in honor of a printing hero and in anticipation of a successful year of printing. Be sure to join in on the fun — take a moment to wish Ben a happy birthday. And while you’re there, be sure to check out the photos of our photogenic crew celebrating. Happy birthday, Ben!

You’ve been hearing a lot about the weather in Fargo lately — it was 22 degrees below zero when we came into work yesterday! But in Fargo, the real news is the exciting three-peat FCS championship win of our local university’s football team, the North Dakota State University Bison. For the third year in a row, the NDSU Bison made the trek to Frisco, TX to claim the FCS Championship title, this time defeating Towson 35-7. This caps another incredible season that earned their head coach, Craig Bohl, the FCS Coach of the Year award. This has been an exciting season, as our Bison were undefeated, winning by an average of nearly 28 points per game. We’re very proud of our hometown team…Go Bison!

Is It Cold In Here? As you might know, MarketingIdeasForPrinters.com is based in Fargo, North Dakota. But one thing you may not know is that winter can get pretty harsh in Fargo! We’ve already been through a week of sub-zero weather this season, and that can sometimes make getting to work in the morning quite an adventure. Here are this year’s members of the Winter Blues Club*, as of 12/23/13: Carl: Furnace started to work intermittently, requiring several stop-gap measures to get it back up and running — including the tech-support stand-by, turning it off and then on again. At one time, the home temperature dipped as low as 50 degrees! Ultimately, it had to be replaced (the furnace, not the home). Dee: Dee went a whole night without the furnace when the North Dakota winds blew enough snow into the furnace’s intake pipe to block it up. But fortunately she was able to get the technicians out there in the morning, and had it fixed within the day. Jason: Winter has put Jason’s car in a headlock, and isn’t letting go. Once the temperature dipped below freezing, his car stopped working as often as he’d like it to. After

Do you have employees that spend most of their day tethered to a desk? If you have any office changes coming up and have the opportunity to invest in new furnishings you should give strong consideration to the purchase of sit-to-stand desks for your employees’ workstations. Marketing Ideas For Printers recently moved to a new location, and as part of the move we were able to upgrade our workstations by adding sit-to-stand desk. I sure am glad we did … and so are my coworkers! Our previous location had built-in stationery furniture and as the day went on I always felt my back and body getting tighter and all knotted up. I went home feeling lethargic and generally miserable. After our move, with just a few days on the new sit-to-stand desks, the knots were gone! It’s pretty common to hear the motors changing the positions on the desks in our office three or four times each day. The ability to change work positions reduces stiffness and fatigue … and that makes for happier and more productive employees! Here are photos of one of our sit-to-stand desks in action:

The members of our development team are some of our most highly sought-after resources, so we closely guard the time available to them. While we don’t make our development schedule publicly available, we thought you might find the process we use to determine their projects kind of interesting. Here’s how we decide what our development team works on. We started a new system this year that has worked well for us, called the Weekly Sprint. It goes like this: Weekly Sprint Each week we use the Weekly Sprint to provide a process which will allow us to rapidly develop projects and concepts in a manner that keeps the team fully informed and unified. The development team’s focus each week is divided into two priorities: Items that are Important and Urgent (Quadrant 1) Items that are Important, but Not Urgent (Quadrant 2) Our desire is to focus on Quadrant 2 items, but Quadrant 1 items will always take priority. Each Weekly Sprint has three components: The Warmup, the Sprint, and The Cooldown. The Warmup The team leader will bring 10 projects to each Weekly Sprint meeting. The strong bias for the projects selected will favor our customers, the print buyers. A

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