Month: June 2011

When suppliers drop a massive price hike on you.

How not to be a supplier and what a price shock does to me, their customer – I look for a new supplier right away.

Hi there again,

Writing this while I am still reeling from the shock of a massive price hike by another of our suppliers. Unfortunately for us, all our price lists have been printed so as they cannot be altered now for this year, I will just have to take a margin hit.

So what happens next? The search is on for a new, more reliable source of goods. When prices just creep up, there is never enough impetus to find another supplier but when the shock is big enough, it is worth the effort to do something about it and quickly, so at least there is a back up plan in place.

Happily, this event is unusual, as I have a good set of steady suppliers who do not dump price hikes on me without any warning. Those that do, rarely stay suppliers with me for long.

Most of the time I focus on looking after our customers, but paying attention to suppliers is vital too. Just the fact that I do not have to keep researching and then changing suppliers, saves a large amount of time and effort. In addition, a new supplier may end up being worse than the last, despite the promises.

For a change, I took a cold call from a Card service company and despite having to postpone my meeting with their salesman several times, we eventually met up this week. I am always a bit wary of these types of companies as once they have you as a customer, that’s when the surprise charges start to appear. I ditched Pitney Bowes for that reason years ago – every few months they thought up a new way to fleece me. In addition, I had to pay a ridiculous fee just to have the benefit of their machine that was very costly to run. No winners there apart from Pitney Bowes. Not for me.

With this new supplier, so farI have been impressed by their ognanisation – they do what they promise. This is a massive issue for us, as we rely on other companies delivering the service we have paid for. Most don’t do it and we often have to check that they have collected goods, delivered them to the right address and even that they have read their emails or checked their fax machine. All this hassle does is persuade us not to use them.

If you have any either good or bad experiences with suppliers, please let me know and I will publish a selection in future Blogs.

Sunny weekend coming-Great! Roy Lewis

 

 

 

 

Frustration and hassle = new opportunities

New printer is great but too expensive to use-now what?

Hi there again,

Just when you think things are just fine, another real cracker appears on the horizon.

This time it looks like a real showstopper and the show that is going to stop is your business. If you are in a small business, you will probably have one of these moments. The trials and woes of employees seem easy compared to what you have to deal with and the shocks always come out of the blue. Otherwise you would have know what was coming and would have prepared.

This week’s one for us was tied in with buying a new printer. The old ones that we have used for years, HPBusiness Inkjet 1200, have done terrific service but the print was steadily deteriorating. A new printer was called for so I duly ordered one from the local PC repair company.

The shock was that instead of paying £2-6 for a HP black cartridge that would print out 1,000 pages, the new printer needs cartridges that cost £28 each and print @ 300 pages.

That means that the price per page has gone from 0.005p per sheet to @ 10p per sheet. I have estimated that instead of spending about £10 a month, the cartridge bill will be over £100 per month, perhaps even £2-300 per month.

So what can I do about it?

The new printer is great-very good print. But very expensive. The first thing I have done is to do nothing, i.e. print as little as possible. Before when it was amazingly cheap, prints were made of almost every email and document. That’s all been cut out. Next is to repair the old printer an reconnect it so that we have a high quality and a draft printer.

Now I’m off to find a better source of cartridges-more on this when I have some news. There must be lost of other users of the same expensive cartridge printer that could do with paying less too.

This whole scenario is played out throughout businesses every day of the year. Things are jogging along fine until either a big price increase occurs or the owners come across an issue that is so frustrating that they go out and produce a solution that they can then sell to others in the same situation. Only then does something happen. A good number of the new ideas and products that I have ended up selling have come from just these situations. No doubt there will be others and those too will lead to another business revenue stream.

Fine weather coming-have a good weekend. Kind regards, Roy Lewis

 

 

How not be a supplier. Read on….

How a supplier successfully won and then lost my business before I even got started.

Hi everyone again. I’ve been out of the loop for a while but am now back for more.

Lots has happened since the last post and over the next few weeks I will be writing about real business experiences that just so happen to have crossed my path.

This Blog is all about how not to help your customers and the classic example of this is Royal Mail. They contacted me  several months ago about taking advantage of their small parcel service.

The idea is that, if a customer sends out lots of similar parcels, instead of trudging over to the Post office and waiting for ages to be served, the postage could be printed out on a label and the whole lot just handed in to the local Royal Mail office. The alternative is to have Royal Mail collect the bags each day, for a charge of about £500 a year.

Well, as I have started another business that indeed ends up sending out lots of parcels, I thought this service was made for me.

I duly signed up. then everything stopped.

Various staff got in touch with me, made promises and were never heard from again. At last after several calls to the original sales person, I have at last been able to log into our account. I  watched the Demo on the site and it appeared to miss out the crucial part of how to print out the labels.

I really want to do business with Royal Mail with their Packet Service but it seems overly complicated and tricky to use. Perhaps it will be easier once I get going with it. Only 3 months have passed with no progress whatsoever.

I have used this experience to look again at how we look after our customers. I am getting back to them much faster and sorting things out for them as much as I can. The result is that the customers do not keep calling us and the issue gets dealt with. Sometimes we have to wait for another company to come back to us which is very frustrating. In the end it always get sorted out.

Postscript: I have decided not to use the Royal Mail Packet Service. If they can’t help me get started, i have no chance whatsoever in them helping me once I get going. As I am spending £50-150 per week on freight that they could have carried, this is a bad move for them and a good move for me – at least I can keep the business moving along.

More real life business stories next week-all the best, Roy Lewis

www.hebridean-liqueurs.co.uk