Addressing The Questions and Calls My Last Blog Entry Generated - "Fixing the Local Print Business – The LightsOn Solution – Part One - First Taste".

Several calls with several similar questions were generated and asked from my last blog entry Fixing the Local Print Business – The LightsOn Solution – Part One - First Taste – so let’s address those questions for everyone.  I have summarized and paraphrased the questions and are in the order of the interest.

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“Why would I use the LightsOnGraphics.com website rather than my own?”  There are several reasons here making this a complex answer unless broken out into individual pieces – I am trying here.

• Cost in knowledge, time and dollars.  If you have the knowledge and the time and dollars to do this, you are most likely not in the printing business and definitely not a potential partner of ours.  I am not questioning the knowledge (you would not be here if you did not have that), but the time and dollars; I estimate at least 5 person years in this so far.

• Doing this alone, as in your storefront, will not get the traffic it needs to satisfy the objective.  The objective is to get new business that is currently going online, recapture that business that has been lost to online and finally, add new foot traffic to your store. Our object IS NOT (and your object should not be) to move your foot traffic online.  When someone picks up the phone and calls, you should bypass the website, assuming you make more by doing so, and strongly suggest in-store pickups for obvious reasons.

• By our estimates, at about 200 partners we will be on top of the search engines almost everywhere because of “relevance”, an important component in being on top and on the 1^st page.  We know that business really well.

• Collaboration brings the knowledge and power of many to one place and shared amongst the collaborators.  The knowledge and power is much much larger than the sum of its participants.

“I understand this, I like this and I want this, but… I am part of a franchise group and do not have this flexibility to do so per my UFOC, what do I do?”

• Contact your franchisor and have them contact us!  If their interest is to the franchisors prospering and not in just selling more franchises, they will be all over this.  The quick print franchisee and the shipping store franchisee will have different reasons for doing this, but the results for everyone is the same – increased business opportunity, increased market share and increased revenue.

“Why can’t my franchisor do this for me?”

• They can, but will they recreate the wheel; probably not.  For those that have a “oh, we have one of them” answer, you really don’t.  I am going to seem to pick on the PostNet franchises here; only because they are such a perfect example (several companies use this exact same service).  The website component (it’s not theirs) does not permit ordering, it permits, basically, a request for information (no prices either) Click here to try it.  They would be better, in my opinion, to simply say on their website “We Will Do Your Printing Too – Call ###.###.####”.  This is not a debate; simply ask yourself, “have I EVER received an unsolicited order from the site?”  Go back to our objectives addressed in the first question.

• Collaboration and the benefits that will come from having broader geographic coverage which no franchise has enough of, in our opinion.

• Finally, the postal store franchisor and the quick print franchisor have different reason to do this which I will lay out in future blog entries.

More questions, email me or call me, here is my cell - 561-371-4113