Editor's Note: IRgA member Doug Weidner of A&I Reprographics in Ontario, California recently emailed us about how things are going at his shop. Here is the email, which we are reprinting with Doug's permission:
The picture at A&I is one with two distinct sides, one side is an Olympic gold medal winner and the other is the first alternate who nearly made the team but ends up staying home because he came up just short in the trials.
Gold medal winner: We are enjoying our most profitable fiscal year (Oct 1 through Sep 30) since 2008, both in profit percentage and total net dollars. Over the past 18 months a considerable amount of effort has gone into making this happen.
First alternate: The story here is sales. Our overall revenue figures remain flat in comparison with the previous fiscal year. In some respect I believe the amount of time and effort invested in making the business much more profitable came at the expense of the effort required to increase sales. In some cases we've found the new products and services we offer to our customers don't necessarily increase the total revenue from them. We find a new product or service is often the replacement for an older one they were buying from us.
In those cases we're glad we were there with the new stuff otherwise they might have replaced us to buy from a competitor.
Gone are the days when we could count on our revenue increasing just because our loyal customers got busier. We're great at retaining customers once they've used us for a while but we haven't been so great at adding sufficiently increased market share to realize the benefits in our revenue. Ironically, prior to 2009-2010, that's what we were doing best. We have the know-how and the talent. All we need now is the unified effort to make it happen again. And we will.
Doug