Few folks are lucky or energetic enough to have a business that is doing so well they never need to try to improve it, or themselves. Of course, these people are probably off sailing in one of their many yachts instead of reading this article, so if I may, I'll presume that The Rest of Us can stand a little self-improvement now and again.
For many resellers, the summer months are a time when things ease up a notch, in anticipation for the increased activities that accompany the back-to-school period and of course those fine winter months.
Thus, it may be a good time to ask: When was the last time you upgraded your skills? (And we're not just talking about computer skills, here.) Many of us can benefit from refresher courses in areas that directly affect us: business courses for owners and business managers, courses on effective business communications and language skills for salespeople and phone-workers, and of course computer technology refreshers for the new developments in your chosen areas of pursuit. Networking and Internet/intranet issues are two areas that have experienced such enormous change and growth over the last couple of years that they are simply the most obvious examples.
The general principle of something earning more than it costs is, of course, the fundamental principle behind effective advertising efforts. Virtually all businesses could benefit from a few hours spent with a good consultant on the subject of effective advertising. Even small companies can afford to bring in a design firm of which the local Yellow Pages will list many, under the category of "graphic design" to help improve the image.
Exercise #1: Take a cold look at the advertisements you are running right now, from your business cards and letterhead right on up to the magazine ads or whatever else the company is doing. If they weren't designed by a full-time graphics professional (and sometimes even if they were!), I'd say they almost certainly aren't as effective as they could be. Invest in your public image. It not only brings you more business; it brings you the right kind of business.
Trends to Watch
Desktop publishing, especially on the PC platform, is an area that has truly matured in the last year or so and is a good candidate for a skill upgrade if you sell to this market. The DTP market, like many others on the PC, has a clear line of precedence to help you chart out the issues your customers will need to deal with. Look at the Mac, which acted as a harbinger for virtually every area of PC innovation over most of the last decade.
With Windows 98 or the forthcoming Windows 2000 (due Feb. 17, 2000), mainstream PCs will have the multiple monitor support that the Mac platform has enjoyed since 1987. Color calibration and color management systems, bootable CDs, true plug-and-play and advanced fonts are many of the issues that are now hot topics on the Windows platform, and are cases of been-there-done-that on the Mac. By looking at the companies and technologies that made it work on the Mac, you can often leverage their experience on the PC side of things. DTP on the PC is, I think, poised for a significant boom, yet the market is still young and largely under-equipped with PC expertise.
Over the last few years, virtually all of the pieces of the DTP puzzle have fallen into place on the Windows platform. Long file name support, better printer drivers, font and color management tools and, particularly when running NT or Windows 2000, improved OS stability finally opened up the PC as a viable alternative to high-end Power Macs for intensive graphics work in applications such as Photoshop.
Despite Apple's relatively small overall market share, the high-end DTP market will probably stay Mac-centric for the foreseeable future, but the corporate and midrange markets are seeing solid growth in their DTP product-line sales on the PC, including graphics software, fonts, clip-art and publishing-related peripherals such as scanners and high-capacity removable storage devices.
Windows Has Its DTP Day
Indeed, long-time Apple stalwart Adobe's increased interest on the Windows platform notably, its growing tendency to release PageMaker 6.5, Photoshop 5.5, and other applications first (or, as in the case of Acrobat 4.0, in a more feature-complete version) on the Windows platform - is only a single indicator of the changing mood of many big cross-platform players like Macromedia, MetaCreations and other long-time Mac developers. These companies that have recently pushed virtually their entire product lines to the Windows side. And, apparently, the time is right.
In these days when so many of your customers are plugged into the 'Net, they often have up-to-the-minute information on the latest issues with the products you sell. Clearly, a little time on-line researching these issues is time well spent.
Exercise #2: Download and study the Frequently Asked Questions documents for the areas your business focuses on. (Can't find the FAQs? Take an Internet expert to lunch.)
I must apologize for a minor error that crept into my column last month. When the issue hit the street, I was suddenly horrified to see the word "Hamburg" leering out of my article as the purported location of the German music trade show Music Messe. Indeed, I fully meant to specify the show's actual location as Frankfurt. You see, just the night before submitting the story, I had watched the video Back Beat, which recounted the Beatles' early days in Hamburg. Somehow, music and Hamburg got tangled up in my synapses, and...
Exercise #3: Ponder the word "prosumer" - we'll talk about that next issue.
Post new comment