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QDP on Innovating and Taking Risks On the long plane ride back from Las Vegas, I had an opportunity to read through a magazine called “Fast Company”. It had some really interesting quotes I’ll share as a prelude to this first article. “Never stop innovating or taking risks. Keep your whole team engaged and moving in the same direction. Keep raising the bar, not just for your industry, but for yourself.” -Michael Dell “Hire enough talent that a critical mass of excitement starts to grow.” - Tina Brown, editor. “It’s better to be 80% right fast than 100% right slow.” - Rick Waggoner, CEO, GM “Ask yourself what people need and how technology can be used to find a solution." - Dean Kayman, inventor. “It’s time to put the passion for work and the joy of creation back into business. Ask, ‘Am I working on something that I’m genuinely good at, doing work that really matters, with people I genuinely care about? This is the year to stop playing it safe and to start changing the game - not only to apply rigorous analysis and tough decision-making. But also to supplement the hard stuff of business with authentic passion and flat-out-joy.” - editors, Fast Company magazine. WHAT IF . . .Our entire business was formed way back in 1984 when a fundraiser and a computer programmer got together when a national company was running two reports for a two brochure sale. We asked, “WHAT IF…the reporting could be combined… and the Ultra Order Tally System was born. It has evolved over the past two decades to meet the constantly changing needs of the fundraising distributor. Don’t laugh, but our very first software program could tally one or two brochures with a grand total of 15 items between the two of them. Our original DOS program was called Ultra. When you wanted a Windows® version, we introduced WinUltra. There are two main reasons QDP has survived in this business. First, we are fundraisers. We do what you do. We walk the walk, talk the talk and use the software we write to run our own business. The other is our willingness to listen and react to the changes in the industry and in what you want. Brochure size has gone ballistic with mega shoppers and packing lines with hundreds of items. Inventory happened, and prizes, and packing prizes with product. And the shift from the grid order taker to the catalog form. Our current version of WinUltra gives you two data entry options, traditional and catalog. As the size of the brochures grew and the competition increased, it became even more important to pack the order correctly. WHAT IF . . . we took technology similar to what the grocery store uses to determine what is in your grocery cart to verify order accuracy in the packing room by scanning the bar codes on the products and comparing that to the actual order? We helped "encourage" the fundraising suppliers to bar code their products (remember our scanner-friendly vendor list?) as we introduced UltraScan. Our newest Windows version is WinScan 2.0. We knew this technology would increase accuracy, but it can simultaneously double your packing speed. For those who had been pulling product a class/team at a time (like us), your speed can triple. One distributor claimed he was going to eliminate a phone line because of the significant reduction in order error calls. You still get the damaged product calls and the tally error calls - but the call that claims the order was on the pack slip but not in the order is eliminated from all but the person who wants to steal a box of chocolates. We often ask our WHAT IF . . . questions in relations to forms. For example, we created our collection envelope with attached labels to enable the distributor to make one printing and have the picking list, money envelope and labels for the packaging all together. Then it was the pack slip with name labels and the personalized order form. More recently, we introduced the laser pack slip with labels. During the past 2-3 years the frozen foods portion of the industry has grown and many distributors deal only with non-inventory type programs. WHAT IF . . . we had a lesser-priced software option for them? We listened, and now have WinUltra-Lite, designed for distributors who either have a separate inventory tracking system in place, or who work with product that never passes through the warehouse. I should note here, that sometimes our willingness to have a constantly evolving software program can get us into trouble. Importers can have substitutions and back-orders. For a software vendor it is that "undiscovered product feature". Overall, our customer base, by far the largest in the industry, knows that when there is a "bug", that we stay with it, fix it, make it right for those who encountered it, and continue to innovate. When the industry switched from the grid to the catalog order form, we introduced TELEform™ and TallyScan to scan and read the hand-written order forms to reduce keystrokes and time in data entry. As it becomes increasingly difficult to hire good data entry personnel for a two month period, these programs can enable you to keep up. One distributor recently said it would take nine data entry operators to tally his volume manually. The newest frontier is taking the sale from the neighborhood to the nation with a coordinated program that includes both local and long distance sales in the reporting to the school. Read more about WebUltra™ in this letter. In addition to putting up a web site to have a basic web presence (here’s who I am, here’s my stuff, and here’s why you should work with me), more are adding on-line stores, to profitably reduce leftover inventory and to enable cross-country grandma (and others) to support a particular school and seller via on-line ordering. National companies are offering schools a "Free Web Site" or "perpetual fundraising opportunity"? Yeah, you can do that too; offering schools a personalized page showing a particular brochure from which anyone can purchase. Our patent-pending WebUltra™ system will incorporate on-line orders with your tally paperwork. After the fundraiser, schools continue to promote on-line sales in their newsletters, at parent/teacher meetings, in school programs, over the speaker system, on their current web page, etc. They already know about smaller monthly or quarterly incomes from the grocery program you already compete with. Except this way, they don’t have to deal with truck deliveries, product pick up and payment because you receive payment from and ship directly to the end customer. WHAT IF . . . you had more salespeople? The full time rep, who requires a large draw in a completely exclusive territory, is being replaced by the local PTO/PTA mom, teacher, band director or a work-from-home-type wanting to make a few extra bucks. A good number of responses to my fundraising site are related to job opportunities. I’m hearing from an incredible variety of people. A college recruiter who is in the high schools every day says he’s already talking to group sponsors. There have been several who have retired from teaching but are still interested in kids and schools. A lot of home school parents would love to be able to get some part-time income and their options, given their correct priorities, are somewhat limited. I’ve heard from people who want to get out of the corporate rat race (three in particular mention some well known Washington state computer companies whose products you are using in your office). I got a letter and resume from a retired West Point General who goes to schools to speak, from a guy who sells band uniforms, two in the tour business and, yes, several who think they should make tons of money without making the least investment - and those who think they should be paid whether they produce or not. WHAT IF . . . there was a way to make the pay-off exceed the hassle of finding and training reps? Here’s a big question I ask often: WHAT IF . . . brochures were designed from the distributor’s perspective instead of from the vendor’s, designer’s or printer’s? That would probably mean less wasted space. You’d eliminate the stupid games and expensive gimmicks on the covers and back pages and use that area to sell product. You might slightly reduce the size of the pictures so the chocolates (and increasingly, the gifts), don’t appear LARGER than life size. Smaller pictures would get you more pictures per page, right? You’d eliminate the ridiculous marketing text you find on many of the brochures. It is repetitive, nobody reads it (not even you) and it takes up space. A brochure designed from your perspective might place all the holiday items in the center of the brochure so the middle could be removed at the end of the Fall and you could carry over the rest of the program into Spring. That would justify a larger print run (lower cost) and would also allow you to order more aggressively in the Fall on products you know are carrying over to Spring. You might consider cutting the front cover of the brochure in such a way that you can insert a personalized order form that exposes the child’s name so you can say, "When I come to your school on kick-off day, I’ll have the brochures packaged by classroom and the students’ names will already be on the order forms." Your brochure would not include the garbage that many stock brochures have to have to round out the monstrous line. (Don’t believe me? Grab any mega brochure and really consider what is in there.). With all the turmoil in the world, and after the disaster with importers disappearing and product stuck on boats last Fall, you might want to consider using more domestic product. If you agree with any of this, check out the article on Celebrate America later in this newsletter. And finally, WHAT IF . . . you had a CD/DVD that included a sales presentation, a kick-off presentation for each brochure and a prize presentation for each type of group, plus personalized information about YOUR company that you could send to prospects or customers with "unlock" codes so that they would see only the portions you wanted them to see? And WHAT IF . . . after seeing the video kick-off presentation from the classroom TV, sellers had incentive to visit YOUR web site, answer questions for prizes and then register to send email invitations to friends and relatives to visit YOUR site and see their school’s brochure(s) and order? That could open up a whole new opportunity for TeleSales and Direct Mail marketing, couldn’t it?
Subscribe to PRIORITY News to receive 8-12 issues for $49. The average life expectancy was forty-seven. Only 14% of the homes had a bathtub. 8% had a phone. A 3-minute cross-country call cost $11. There were 8,000 cars and 144 miles of paved roads. The max speed limit in most cities was 10 mph. Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each more heavily populated than California. The tallest world structure was the Eiffel Tower. The average worker made $200-$400/yr. More than 95% of all births were at home. 90% of physicians had no college education. Instead they went to “medical schools” which were condemned in the press as “sub-standard”. Most women only washed their hair once a month and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo. Five leading causes of death were:
The population of Las Vegas, NV was 30. Crossword puzzles and iced tea didn’t exist. One in ten US adults couldn’t read or write. 6% of Americans graduated from high school. Coca-Cola contained cocaine. Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available at corner drugstores. 18% of households had at least one full-time servant or domestic. There were 230 reported murders in the US. I love to surf the web and check out the design and layouts of web sites. As I surf, I often come across some web sites that are not up-to-date. Actually, there are some out there that I have to wonder if they even remember that they have a web site. Are you in that category? You have a web site, maybe you designed it yourself with the intention of saving a few dollars, but it is still showing product from last fall (or even last spring or the fall before that - don’t laugh, they are out there). If so, you could be losing money - and potential groups. If visitors find your site, but only find out-dated information, they will quickly move on to the next site. SP Designs can help. We not only design web sites, we help you stay current. Because we know and understand fundraising, we know about season changes and can send you reminders to keep your site updated. –Sara ARE YOU TIRED OF PRODUCT SHORTAGES, Import Data DiskYou can import inventory and brochure data for your Spring Sales if you’re working with some of the industry’s largest vendors. Email Sara@QDPCorp.com for more details. And if your vendor isn’t listed, let us know who they are and we’ll see if we can get them involved in our program. How would you like to have automatic access to UPS or USPS rates when it comes to how to charge your on-line customers? Now you can. Don’t you just hate it when that IT guy who charges you the big bucks talks in a foreign language called bits and bytes? Here’s a layman’s description of the difference. A Client-Server Network is one where there is a computer that no one uses (The Server) to which all the other computers (Clients) are connected. Programs are generally on the server and all clients have access. Many software programs, including our previous network versions, required or strongly preferred client/server networks, but that is changing. Client/server networks are more expensive because you have to have a separate server (extra computer) that can’t be used as a workstation. They also require network software. In a Peer-To-Peer network, there is no dedicated server and no separate network software is necessary. Programs can be on any computer in the network and they are shared throughout the network. Of course, you can control who on the network has access to what. For example, if you have a private file where you keep your personal documents, or you don’t want certain people to have access to your accounting program, you can control that. The only significant potential downside to peer-to-peer is that if I have a program on my computer, for example, and I shut down and leave, no one else on the network has access to that program. If you want to scan order forms on multiple workstations, you will have to have a client/server network. That’s the way that particular program, and a lot of larger programs, work. And, up until version 2.0 of WinUltra, if you wanted to network, we were recommending a client/server setup. However, with lower expense and increasing popularity of peer-to-peer networks, we designed the file structures in WinUltra to be peer-to-peer friendly. Guaranteed until March 1, 2003See qualification levels below.
Qualifications:Spend $995 - $1995 Pick 1
Celebrate America has been designed in layers. The outer layer (first and last two pages) contains product that is both Made in USA AND Home Delivery Friendly. So, you can go into a Day Care (where the arrival of a semi can be traumatic) and ask if they’d like to run a fundraiser where, “you don’t have to touch the product”. Home delivery friendly product is small, light weight and non-perishable. WinUltra 2.0 includes the capability to enter a seller’s home address.
For those who want to include imports, we have them – they are all on the middle eight pages of our brochure. Celebrate America is insert friendly. Don’t force yourself to use gigantic bags/boxes for packing roll wrap unless you really need it. Slide that magazine insert in there for groups who want it without forcing others to deal with multiple profit percentages. We’ve included African-American, Christian and Hispanic cultures and yes, we wave the flag. By the time you get this letter, our brochure should be close to printed. If you need something different, want to have us be your total service provider, or are just looking for an exclusive or backup brochure, ask for a sample. We’d like to be your Total Service Provider offering brochures and product "to the piece", plus tally & pack services plus customer direct toll free support. Use Celebrate America and Brother Jones ArtWorks™ and take advantage of our WebUltra™ service.
For more info, click www.BrotherJonesArtWorks.com or www.QDPCorp.com/brotherjones
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Last Modified:& 06/18/2003 | ||||||||
The next layer in is all Made-in-USA product. So, for the group that got 26
substitutions and 8 week delivery last Fall, you can offer them an 8-page
brochure of all domestic product that includes food, jewelry, cards and
stationery, candles, potpourri, spices and more.
Zonderkids®, a division of Zondervan®, has recently released the Dennis Jones
illustrated "Super Heroes Bible". We’re excited about that for a couple reasons.