Working on it…
Hi All,
First off I wanted to say thank you.
We are so lucky to be a part of such a vibrant and supportive community.
Your patience is appreciated.
There have been a host of ideas we have always wanted to implement for the business. We realized we didn’t know what tools would work best for us, so we focused on prioritizing building our customer base. Now, with all this experience under our belts, we know more about what we need to help facilitate process optimization.
First step was me quitting my 9-5 in August, to be able to focus 100% our business.
Chris was doing 99% of the work up until that time. Priority 1 was for me to start taking on the customer service, to give Chris some breathing room.
Priority 1.5 was creating a database. One we could use independently that would provide an accurate snapshot of pending and active items.
It needed to be a place for me to add all your order information, and at the same time, be a place for him to add all the technical details of your requests. After some shopping around, we found a simple database solution that allows for 90% of our needs. Oh what fun, more software to learn! Once all the historical data is uploaded, this will vastly reduce prep time for each job.
Priority 2 was getting this website going. This was my first attempt at doing anything like this. The learning curve is steep, but that is what YouTube is for. I know it’s not fancy, but it gets the point across. It is a work in progress, I am sure it will evolve as time goes on, as I get smarter at these things. Starting this blog is a way to stretch my knowledge and communicate to y’all about what is going on here.
Soon, I will be taking on more of the shipping. Doing a QA check on the jobs and packing them up and letting you know when they are heading out. That actually involves more than you might think. 2 different kinds of software to learn, and 3 different printers! We are going to be carving out a new “shipping station” so it is central and either one of us can do it if needed.
We are collecting ideas for our next blog posts. It will be me for the most part in the beginning. But Chris will start chiming in more and more as he is able to process this abundance of work. I will always post in PCF when a new blog post is up…
Until next time!
Andrea/Wifey