Making The Invisible, Visible...

During a visit with Chris at Vibrant Colour we got on to the subject of him growing his business and how the industry has a quiet period around this time of year which gives him an opportunity to work on the business.

Chris has a list of actions he wants to work on but he hasn’t found the time to do it so far, so he’s planning to get things going over the next few weeks.

We then got on to marketing his products and he mentioned some of the items he thinks will be big next year. In addition he discussed what sort of marketing messages he would like to put out and why people should buy from them.

During this part of the conversation out of the corner of my eye I noticed one of his team, fellow “Swim Parent” Kirstie, unboxing mugs and re-boxing them. I stopped Chris and asked what was going on. Now, I knew exactly what was going on, but I let Chris and Kirsty explain …

After they had told me that Kirsty was checking all the mugs for imperfections I asked “Why?” Chris explained that whilst some orders are shipped direct from their suppliers to customers, everything that goes through their office is quality checked. It’s just an extra level of assurance, and if they did all the work in-house they would have to quality assure everything anyway.

You see, Chris doesn’t do much of the actual printing work. Instead, he works closely with reliable suppliers to keep the costs down for his customers, therefore he designs the items and the suppliers he works with handle production and supply.

I then asked the question, “What do your customers say about this?” The answer was, “We don’t tell them.” One of the fears Chris believes his customers face is that he doesn’t do the printing, and that using a full in-house company might provide more reliability; well, that’s not the case and this is just one message he needs to get out in his marketing!

My question to you today is, what do you do in your business or your industry, but no one knows you do it? What could you tell your customers or prospective customers to stand out from the rest? (Even if everyone does it, you can be the first to shout about it.)

A lesson I learnt a long time ago and had forgotten until recently is making the invisible, visible …