Derek Brooks Archives - Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

Have you ever gone on a road trip without a plan? I’m talking no destination, no starting place, no clothes for any particular climate… really, no plan at all. The kind of road trip where you get in the car and start driving, figuring out which direction to head as you go. Unless you are a true “free spirit,” I imagine this would be pretty unusual. Yet more and more, I meet business owners with no idea where they’re heading with their business. Instead of having a plan, these business owners keep coming into the office and putting out fires, doing whatever they do every day, hoping for new orders and new customers to come in. Busy Vs. Productive: There’s a Difference If I’m being honest, and I am, this describes how my dad and I ran our business in the early days of Brandywine Printing. We were super busy all the time, but we weren’t always happy with the work we were doing. We didn’t realize that if we could just get organized, we would be able to accomplish more with less effort, and our “busyness” would be productive and, therefore, more profitable. But as the saying goes, “You

There are two words synonymous with Brandywine Printing: community and family. But those aren’t the only words you could use to describe this family-owned, all-digital printing firm nestled south of the Chattahoochee National Forest and northeast of Atlanta, Georgia. Words such as growth, innovation, and networking could also easily roll off your tongue to highlight the legacy of this unique small business. Introducing Brandywine Printing: All in the Family Derek Brooks, the owner of Brandywine Printing, grew up in the printing industry helping his dad fulfill print orders out of their basement. “My dad was a service tech for ABDick,” says Derek. “One day, he brought an old ABDick printing press home and refurbished it. He restored that press like a classic car taking out each and every piece. When he finished it and the person who was supposed to buy the press didn’t, Dad decided to try his hand at printing something. He started printing overflow jobs from his ABDick customers, then started working with brokers. Before we knew it, we had three presses in our basement, and I was 10 years old helping my dad.” As it turns out, Derek’s dad, Derrell, excelled at printing, and the family business

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear… I remember staring out the car window at that message a lot when I was a child. I couldn’t understand how something could possibly look closer to me than it actually was. I considered myself a logical person, so something was either there or it wasn’t right? Was the object closer to me if I turned my head and looked at it without using the mirror? Of course not; I was missing the main point, “appear.” It wasn’t until I was an adult, and I revisited my childhood memories that I realized that things never really changed sizes. Instead, it just “appeared” that way based on the perspective of looking at things in the mirror. I also discovered, as a result of adulthood, that I can be pretty closed-minded at times and lack perspective in other areas of my life. The Perspective Puzzle During the COVID-19 lockdown back in April, my wife and I spent a lot of time working on jigsaw puzzles. Our process looked something like this: First, we would finish the border, then we would work our way to the center from the outside. We each had our “regular”

It seems like it’s been a year since I was in a room with more than ten people. More recently, I’m hearing this a lot: “We’ve ramped up our direct mail and digital marketing to reach our market, but I really miss interacting with people. I’m ready to start “networking” again!” The word “networking” used to be confusing to me. I thought that in order to be networking actively, you had to be at a networking event. But over the years, I’ve learned that actual events have very little to do with effective networking and, therefore, the limitations put on us to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus also have very little to do with effective networking. What is Networking? Merriam-Webster defines networking as: The exchange of information or services among individuals, groups, or institutions specifically : the cultivation of productive relationships for employment or business I really want us to focus on the last part: “The cultivation of productive relationships.” In a nutshell, that’s all networking is! Someone, somewhere along the way, realized that if we put a bunch of people in a room who were interested in “cultivating productive relationships,” it would remove some of the obstacles

A long time ago (back when my dad and I were the only “employees” of our family printshop), it wasn’t hard to figure out that if we wanted to make the money, we had to do the work. However, as any successful business grows, there is only so much you can do with your own two hands and feet, and soon, it became necessary to begin to add team members. As I started “recruiting” talent, I realized that I didn’t have much to offer in the way of benefits compared to the bigger, more established companies. I found myself hiring the folks that couldn’t keep a job because of whatever personal baggage that kept them from performing well at any company. Because I only had a paycheck to offer them, we became a revolving door for that type of talent. But then, I remembered an entrepreneurship class I took in high school that taught that benefits that matter most aren’t always limited to the usual health insurance, 401k, or other programs. I did some deep thinking about what would make me perform better if I were in their shoes and began offering some different benefits than my competition. Here are

Recently, I met a lady at a Chamber of Commerce event, and we hit it off. A while later, I saw her again, and she mentioned that she saw my banner on a fence at a local high school near her house. I asked her if she drives by the school often, and she let me know that she passes it every day, multiple times. She was shocked when I told her that the banner she mentioned had been there for almost a year before she had seen it. You may think that the lady lacked observation skills, and while that may be true, I bet we’ve all had similar experiences in our life if we really think about it. Recognizing Your Brand Think back to a time your printing company sponsored an event of some kind. When you went to look at the list of sponsors, it probably went something like this: You immediately saw your company first. Then, you glanced at all of the other companies you recognized. Lastly, there were the logos you didn’t recognize and didn’t even give them a second glance. Shallow? Not Likely. Does that order of brand recognition happen because we’re all shallow

printers, marketing ideas for printers, small business, passion

Have you ever been called a “People Pleaser”? I have. Early in my career in the printing industry, I had aspirations of my company being the largest printing establishment in the Universe! To accomplish this monumental task, I had the mindset that I would never use the word no when a customer or prospect asked if we could produce their product, no matter how ridiculous the request was. In those days, printing 50 wedding invitations were just as important to me as printing 5,000 full-color sell sheets. Circling the Energy Drain It was evident to me that some customers were more profitable than others. However, I couldn’t help but think about those I would help with their tiny little jobs may eventually turn into something bigger. You never know who someone knows that may be the decision maker of the big insurance company down the street, and we know that they do a lot of printing! Therefore, I would spend a lot of time and energy on tiny little projects for “consumers” hoping that one day my ship would come in as a result. Taking A Hard Look at Our Customer Base One day a couple of decades into my

Have you ever heard the saying, “Never do business with friends.”? Maybe you’ve even said it yourself, or it’s a rule that you live by. No matter the case, for some reason doing business with friends can feel like we are giving more than we are getting. Because of that feeling, it can tend to put a strain on the relationships with those friends. In reality, that feeling is just a trap that we set for ourselves. I’m sure we all have those friends or acquaintances who are looking for a deal and want to leverage your relationship for their gain. However, I believe that in most cases, our friends are merely trying to help us out. They need the product that we produce, so they ask us to help them with it. We’ll see to it to create whatever it is that our friend needs, but then for some reason, we feel like we need to treat them differently than our regular customers. “Different” can mean a lot of things. Maybe we think that because it’s for a friend, we aren’t going to charge them full price (or maybe not charge them at all!). Maybe we decide that this

Do you remember when you first started in the printing business? I do. It All Started When… It was 1985, and it was my dad’s hobby in our basement. He had a beat up, old A.B.Dick 360 press with a chute delivery. I was ten years old and loved hanging out with my dad while he was learning the craft of offset printing. He would give me small responsibilities like letting him know when the chute was getting full, so he could take the printed sheets out of the press to make room for more. Eventually, as I aged and matured, I was given more responsibilities. First, I learned to do wash-ups for him between jobs. Next, I learned to set the jobs up for him, but he would still run the jobs, managing ink coverage and paper feed issues. Through this process, by 1999, I had learned the craft of offset printing all the way to running four-color work on much larger equipment. In 2006, I took over the company that my father started in our basement 20 years earlier. I realized around that time that even though I made the personal decision to make a career in the

“Does my print shop really need a Print MIS Solution?” The short answer to that question is: Yes! And here’s why… Print MIS Explained MIS is an abbreviation for “Management Information System.” Like most manufacturing businesses, the printing industry requires juggling a lot of information to function profitably. An MIS solution helps you with the juggling, and therefore, the profits! Here are some examples of the types of information a Print MIS solution will manage for you: Customer names and contact info Paper cost Ink cost Click cost Hourly rates of each piece of equipment in your shop Boxes Tape Overhead Accounts receivables Account aging Sales commissions You get the idea. Although it might seem like an overabundance of bullet points there, that’s really just scratching the surface of the knowledge you can have at your fingertips with a Print MIS solution for your print business. Back in 2006, we implemented our first robust MIS solution. We were able to prepare estimates so fast that many customers reported that we had delivered the completed job before our competition even delivered pricing! A Rocky Path to an Imperfect Result Take a minute to picture this and see if it sounds familiar: