Wednesday, 30 September 2009
As we struggle out of this recession (sorry to use the 'R' word!), we see a whole bunch of new businesses spring up that given a stable and non volatile economy probably would never see the light of day.
That's a nice way of saying "people are being made redundant and starting their own business".
So, with all these new people starting up from their bedrooms, I guess they're going to need stuff, and that's where we come in.
I write this blog because I was asked about publishing manuals and books by a small business just starting out and they'd received a whole bunch of quotes from printing companies. They were quite scary quotes too, and it almost put them off fulfilling their ambition of starting a training company.
Until I pointed out that you can do all this stuff yourself. You see, when you start a business you often get caught up in the thought that you need to make everything you do as shiny and new as is absolutely possible and this guy thought his training manuals needed to be perfectly bound, full colour and published like a book - not so.
In the training world you may notice that manuals are designed to be scribbled on, abused and generally thumbed through every day until they fall apart. They also change regularly and having a few thousand books stuck in a cupboard and unusable because they're out of date is a pretty soul-destroying sight (I've been there).
So, I introduced him to the comb binder. Yeah, exciting huh? But he'd got his first training manual finished and prepared in a week, well in time for his training course which paid for it in a morning.
I was having trouble finding a moral to this story but then it dawned on me - we've just emerged from the age of outsourcing where we send everything we do somewhere else to be done. We're now going into an age of 'do it yourself' where you can not only save money but be closer to your product.