Positive Signs

Just another chapter from the School of Hard Knocks Textbook 😆 so grateful for the lessons in plagiarism and copyright law this story afforded me 💁‍♀️ and another great yarn to share 🤣

When I’ve got a vehicle in for signwriting the hustle is real! The vans, utes and cars I’m entrusted with are an essential tool for my clients so it’s all good to get it done and back out the door 🙊 once everything’s on I can relax a little and get some shots to share.

Being able to swoop in and save the day by knocking a job out quickly is one of the best things about what I do. We do a lot in house and hold stock just for that very reason. But rush work has a knock-on effect that isn’t always obvious.

It can mean rearranging jobs that were booked well in advance, making an extra supplier trip, running machinery less efficiently, creating more waste, or simply having less time to stop and think about the best way to approach a job.

And that’s the bit I’ve become more conscious of: being helpful to one customer shouldn’t come at the expense of the customers who gave us plenty of time. I have suppliers and know others who flat out refuse urgent jobs, regardless of extra fees. It’s not worth upsetting their customers.

So where do you draw the line - Do you charge a rush fee? Say no once the schedule is full? Build spare capacity into your week? Make exceptions for genuine emergencies?
And what about the customers whose jobs are always urgent?

It’s a cruel irony that our native design files are known as Ai (Adobe illustrator) vs chatGPTs generative artificial intelligence = ai 🙃 if we ask you to email through your file to have a look before quoting changes… it’s just better for everyone that we’re on the same page (there’s a difference of minutes vs hours to make the changes between the different “ai’s”

The secret to every sign shop’s performance

How pretty’s this? Xx