This post was contributed by Stuart W. Margolis, CPA, MT and Suzette Margolis from Margolis Partners, LLC. Together with Printing Industries of America and membership participation, Margolis Partners brings you the annual Ratios Survey. Visit www.printing.org/ratios to learn more or participate in the 2015 Ratios Survey.  For most of us, ratios are not something we think of every day, at least not until springtime and the onset of baseball season. If you want to compare two Major League home-run hitters, you are likely to compare their batting averages.  If one is hitting .389 and the other’s average is .236, you immediately know which is doing better, even if you don’t know precisely how a batting average is calculated.   When applied to business, think of ratios as “batting averages for business”. In baseball or in business most ratios measure some form of productivity. They generally give an indication of how one result varied in relation to another. Ratios are a tool to make it easier to do an “apples to apples” comparison.  In fact, the classic batting average statistic is: The number of hits made by the batter, divided by the number of times the player was at bat. (For baseball enthusiasts, those are “official at-bats,” which is total appearances at the plate minus walks, sacrifice plays, and any time the player was hit by a pitch.)  The batting average is thought of as a measure of a baseball player’s productivity; it is the ratio of hits made to the total opportunities to make a hit.  HITSAT BATS Other baseball ratios include Earned Run Averages, Average Pitching Strikes to Ball Ratio, and more.  For some reason, they all make sense to us. Avid fans can visually see each pitch, strike out, and hit so they have a general idea of how players and team are performing.  In business, it is more difficult to “see” productivity, especially productivity as compared to the competition. After all, we don’t line up and engage a competitor in an open field for the whole world to see. It makes monitoring ratios all the more critical. There are many ratios you can use to monitor productivity verses the competition.  They all measure how good a job your company is doing using its assets, generating profits from each dollar of sales, turning over inventory, or whatever aspect of your company’s operation you are evaluating. For your business, ratios are nothing more than simple comparisons between specific pieces of information pulled from your company’s balance sheet and income statement. You can use ratio analysis to examine the current performance of your company in comparison to past periods of time, from the prior quarter to years ago. Frequently, this can...

This post was contributed by Kelly Quinn Mallozzi, RainMaker, Success.In.Print and speaker at the 2015 Print Leadership Summit, May 18-19 in Minneapolis, MN. It’s hard to believe that 21 short years ago, when I got my start in sales for a small digital print shop, my sales tools were a desk, a landline, a pager, and my resourceful brain. No cell phone. Certainly no smart phone. And a shared computer that only had access to the company’s database of accounts wasn’t in the picture. I called companies that I thought might have a need for printing, and if they did, I would get an appointment, go see them, talk to them, show them samples, and a good lot of the time, they would become customers.  And that worked for me, for kind of a long time.   And gradually times changed. I got my first cell phone a couple of years later. The company got access to the internet and that made it easier on me when a client was looking for some particular item for a project and I had no idea where to go. No longer did I have to grab the yellow pages and start dialing looking for lengths of nickel chain or a particular kind of laminate that was dry-erasable. I adapted my skills and ability to access resources based on the tools available to me at the time. Adaptation is scary and exciting and cool, and it’s often the way through challenging times. It allows people who are willing to adapt to soar to new heights. And it often leaves those who are unwilling to adapt feeling left behind and lost—as if they are missing out on something. And they are missing out on something. Today when it comes to communication—both one-on-one and to a mass audience—there are so many new tools available to us. I know you know what many of them are: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.  At the 2015 Leadership Summit I’ll be talking about 11 different ways to engage with your customers that go beyond the phone. You’ll still use the phone. It will never die. But there are some great new ways to get your message heard. So join me on Tuesday, May 19th and get ready to celebrate the new life of new communication! For more on the 2015 Print Leadership Summit, May 18-19, 2015, in Minneapolis, MN, visit...

This post was contributed by Kelly Quinn Mallozzi, RainMaker, Success.In.Print and speaker at the 2015 Print Leadership Summit, May 18-19 in Minneapolis, MN. It’s hard to believe that 21 short years ago, when I got my start in sales for a small digital print shop, my sales tools were a desk, a landline, a pager, and my resourceful brain. No cell phone. Certainly no smart phone. And a shared computer that only had access to the company’s database of accounts wasn’t in the picture. I called companies that I thought might have a need for printing, and if they did, I would get an appointment, go see them, talk to them, show them samples, and a good lot of the time, they would become customers.  And that worked for me, for kind of a long time.   And gradually times changed. I got my first cell phone a couple of years later. The company got access to the internet and that made it easier on me when a client was looking for some particular item for a project and I had no idea where to go. No longer did I have to grab the yellow pages and start dialing looking for lengths of nickel chain or a particular kind of laminate that was dry-erasable. I adapted my skills and ability to access resources based on the tools available to me at the time. Adaptation is scary and exciting and cool, and it’s often the way through challenging times. It allows people who are willing to adapt to soar to new heights. And it often leaves those who are unwilling to adapt feeling left behind and lost—as if they are missing out on something. And they are missing out on something. Today when it comes to communication—both one-on-one and to a mass audience—there are so many new tools available to us. I know you know what many of them are: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.  At the 2015 Leadership Summit I’ll be talking about 11 different ways to engage with your customers that go beyond the phone. You’ll still use the phone. It will never die. But there are some great new ways to get your message heard. So join me on Tuesday, May 19th and get ready to celebrate the new life of new communication! For more on the 2015 Print Leadership Summit, May 18-19, 2015, in Minneapolis, MN, visit...

In the beginning, there were printers. Then as technologies and economies transformed, we emerged into a digital world as … printers. The point is that no matter how you describe your business today—a marketing service provider, packaging solutions firm, display graphics enterprise, etc.—we are all still printers, but how we got here brings us to sharing this transformation story… The 2015 Print Leadership Summit is the event for printers, by printers. In this blog series we will explore transformation stories of some of our most notable speakers, so you can discover fresh ways to reinvigorate your business. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to leave the strain of daily operations and get a fresh perspective, you’ll want to ready this story. Over the course of nearly four decades, Heritage Printing & Graphics, led by President and Co-Owner Joe Gass, has seen plenty of transition. Along the way Heritage has identified itself as a quick printer, then a commercial printer, and today with the addition of wide- and grand-format capabilities, a visual communication company. During this time Heritage has grown geographically from Leonardtown, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, south to add a production facility in Charlotte, North Carolina. Here Joe tells his story of transformation. 1.   When did you decide you needed to make a change? I took the reins of the family business in 1988 after serving for six years in the United States Navy following high school. Heritage was pretty successful through the 90s, transitioning from a multi-location quick printer into a single location commercial printing and mailing company. We invested heavily in the late 90s in direct-to-plate technology and larger, faster 28-inch offset presses to focus our business more on process color publications, marketing materials, and direct mail. Then we, like many other printing businesses, were greatly impacted by the devastating economy that followed the tragic events of 9-11. Around 2003, as I was approaching the age of forty, I began to realize that being a leader with endless amounts of energy and determination was no longer good enough to sustain a profitable business. By that time our company had struggled with the poor economy and shrinking margins for a number of years, ultimately leading to a Chapter 11 reorganization and my own personal bankruptcy.  2.   What impact did this have on you? They were tough years—for our business and family–but ended up being the beginning of a great renewal that transformed me and totally changed the trajectory of my family and our business.  The financial challenges we faced during that time made me totally reconsider what was most important in life.  After seventeen years leading the business, I decided to...

In the beginning, there were printers. Then as technologies and economies transformed, we emerged into a digital world as … printers. The point is that no matter how you describe your business today—a marketing service provider, packaging solutions firm, display graphics enterprise, etc.—we are all still printers, but how we got here brings us to sharing this transformation story… The 2015 Print Leadership Summit is the event for printers, by printers. In this blog series we will explore transformation stories of some of our most notable speakers, so you can discover fresh ways to reinvigorate your business. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to leave the strain of daily operations and get a fresh perspective, you’ll want to ready this story. Over the course of nearly four decades, Heritage Printing & Graphics, led by President and Co-Owner Joe Gass, has seen plenty of transition. Along the way Heritage has identified itself as a quick printer, then a commercial printer, and today with the addition of wide- and grand-format capabilities, a visual communication company. During this time Heritage has grown geographically from Leonardtown, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, south to add a production facility in Charlotte, North Carolina. Here Joe tells his story of transformation. 1.   When did you decide you needed to make a change? I took the reins of the family business in 1988 after serving for six years in the United States Navy following high school. Heritage was pretty successful through the 90s, transitioning from a multi-location quick printer into a single location commercial printing and mailing company. We invested heavily in the late 90s in direct-to-plate technology and larger, faster 28-inch offset presses to focus our business more on process color publications, marketing materials, and direct mail. Then we, like many other printing businesses, were greatly impacted by the devastating economy that followed the tragic events of 9-11. Around 2003, as I was approaching the age of forty, I began to realize that being a leader with endless amounts of energy and determination was no longer good enough to sustain a profitable business. By that time our company had struggled with the poor economy and shrinking margins for a number of years, ultimately leading to a Chapter 11 reorganization and my own personal bankruptcy.  2.   What impact did this have on you? They were tough years—for our business and family–but ended up being the beginning of a great renewal that transformed me and totally changed the trajectory of my family and our business.  The financial challenges we faced during that time made me totally reconsider what was most important in life.  After seventeen years leading the business, I decided to...