We recently connected with Steve & Lea Wolff and have shared our conversation below.
Steve & Lea, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start on the operational side – do you spend more of your time/focus/energy on growing revenue or cutting costs?
Without a doubt, growing revenue matters most. We say this for a couple of reasons; first there is a limit to how much costs can be reduced. Secondly, generating revenue, even if it’s not growing, causes expenses. The trick is to make the rate that revenue increases outpace the rate costs increase.
Also, there are fewer ways to cut costs than ways to grow revenue. Ways to make cuts are; to reduce the quantity, reduce the quality, or do without things. For example, we could buy a cheaper, lower quality piece of equipment. Some companies, especially at large organizations like corporations, lay off employees — they do without.
The most common ways of growing revenue are advertising, marketing hiring sales reps, customer referrals (especially Google reviews), customer retention, and even by acquisition.
But far and away the most effective way is efficiency. We spend most of our time on increasing and maintaining an efficient operation and this enables all the things listed above to work. Interestingly, this is also the way to hold the line on costs.
So you could say that by focusing on growing revenue, we are cutting costs.
Steve & Lea, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Lea has owned a couple of small businesses starting in her twenties. One of those was a bedroom-based design business, pre-Internet. This is where she gained experience as a print buyer. Later, she taught design courses as adjunct faculty at Collin College in Plano, Texas.
Steve spent the first 15 years of his career as a graphic designer then moving into media production and finally into digital as it evolved starting in the mid 1990s. He joined Lea in that bedroom-based business as it expanded into digital, offering website design and development to small and medium size business.
We learned many hard lessons the hard way and had to pick up the pieces before trying again with Minuteman Press.
Our Minuteman Press franchise offers printing, graphic design, signage, and promotional products. We picked Minuteman Press since we both have a strong background in design and media production and were familiar with the print business as print buyers. The MP brand appealed to us because it is fairly well known having been around for nearly 50 years.
Having the network of MP field reps and other MP owners around the country to rely on has been a huge help to us. We’ve enjoyed a great support system without sacrificing the autonomy of business ownership. The MP program strikes a very good balance.
We’ve learned there is more to the print business than we expected. It’s much more varied, particularly in regard to design. Many times to solve a problem, we design a product. So our designers have to be more “pure” designers.
We like think of graphic design as visual problem solving. Graphic designers use the principles of design, like shape, form, and texture, applying them to graphic elements on a page. But when the design problem is not about a page, it requires applying design principles more like an architect or engineer.
For example, one of our dearest customers hosts a users conference each year and wanted two informational kiosks, kind of like a mall directory. The catch was, they had to be disposable since they were only needed for 3 days. That ruled out using our usual promotional suppliers for trade show displays.
So we designed a solution; making them out of coroplast (yard sign material) with printed graphics on vinyl applied to the panels. The bases and tops were made of painted plywood to make them stable when placed in the hotel lobbies.
Our customer loved the solution and the price. Now she calls us every time she needs print or anything that she doesn’t-know-what-to-ask-for but she needs it.
You would think that printing is very routine, bordering on the monotonous. You would be wrong. Every job, even printing business cards or postcards, may have a little wrinkle or nuance that requires some head scratching. Our designer isn’t the only one who must be creative, everyone on our team has their own challenges requiring critical thinking.
Our business strategy depends on this approach. We are not the cheapest printer in town and we don’t care to be. But, we come up with good solutions, we’re easy to work with and pleasant to be around.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
The key to having an effective team with high morale is respect.
We’ve I’ve learned how people speak reveals themselves. Start with the phrase “managing a team”. It implies the manager is a superior person instead of someone who has a different role and responsibility. That atittude causes them behave like a parent and treat the team like children and the team will start behaving like children.
Instead of managing the team, work with the team, monitor their progress, establish the goals, provide what the team needs to accomplish the goals. Words matter. They affect attitude…and morale.
Here’s how we work;
– Hire people who you are comfortable with and like. Very important.
– Hire people who can do the work, who will like their teammates and the team will like.
– Set clear, measurable, goals for each person and the team. Make sure they are in alignment. Put everyone in the same boat; the only way for the company, the team, and the individual to be successful is if all three are successful. Only players on championship teams get endorsement deals, after all.
– Be uncompromising on meeting the goals.
– Be consistent.
– Be generous.
– Serve the team. The only job of the one in charge (the manager or owner) if is to put each individual in a position to succeed. The team’s performance is the only measurement of the manager’s performance that really matters.
If someone is not working out, move them out. Both the individual and the team will benefit. In my 35 years leading teams, I’ve only fired two people. One for stealing from the company and one who did not want to resign even after meeting with me and agreeing that things were not working for them or the company.
We have a fairly simple program. We have monthly revenue goals and when we meet them, everyone on the team gets a bonus and a team lunch on the company.
We never turn down a time-off request.
We do not work overtime, nights, or weekends. If we can’t meet a particular customer deadline working regular business hours, we turn down the work. We do not do “rush charges”. If we decide we’re going to have to start turning down work to avoid overtime, we hire more help.
Lastly, we try to keep perspective. We don’t have anyone die on an operating table in our business.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
At one time I was the director for the Center for Media Production at the University of North Texas. Our center was a cost-recoverable unit of the university which meant we had to charge for our services. We also had to pay for everything except for payroll and the office space the university provided. This meant we had to operate as a business.
Our services included; photography, video production, interactive media, website design and development, and graphic design.
We were constantly being asked to teach someone how to use the software tools we used, especially the Adobe Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, FinalCut Pro, and others. It was a sore point for me because I did not want to turn our customers into our competition, and we were not qualified to train people, but they didn’t recognize that. All they knew is that we were not assisting them and, maybe, just being mean. Remember this was before lynda.com and udemy.com.
Finally after a couple of semesters fielding these requests I realized we were missing an opportunity. I found some training course materials for the apps we were using and had the team review and modify them for our use. We started with Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign and FinalCut Pro.
We converted some of our office space to a classroom, hired a contract trainer, set up a registration and scheduling website, and then promoted it.
It was so successful that the journalism department added a requirement to their master’s degree program for certification from the Center for Media Production in Indesign.
The were several benefits of offering training:
– A new revenue stream for the center
– Great marketing, raising awareness of all our services
– A better appreciation of our profession (you just can’t buy Illustrator and become a designer) and more work because of it
I learned to pay attention and listen to what the marketplace is telling me.
Contact Info:
- Website: northsa-mp.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MinutemanPressNorthSA