Do you consider yourself resilient and what does that mean to you? In this podcast, Resilient Entrepreneurs with Two Four One, we chat with business owners about what resilience means to them as they share their inspiring stories and life lessons.
What we've learned running our own business, is you're never alone even when it feels like it. So tune in anytime to this podcast. We're always here for you celebrating resilient entrepreneurs just like you. We're Laura and Vicki from Two Four One - a marketing company for early stage business owners who want to launch, grow and be resilient.
Daniel Edwards joins us today on this episode of the Resilient Entrepreneurs Podcast. Daniel, you are an Award Winning Leader in the Printing Industry and you have many fascinating twists and turns in your story in your journey as an entrepreneur, once a chef and then for the last 20 years a printer where you've been recognised since 2017, winning the Word of Mouth Gold Service Award, I just love that whole concept of that award and now you're an author. And you joined the Printing Industry in 2002, starting your own business in 2006, PosterBoy Printing- great name for that, I might say and just this year, you've published your book: The Power of Print available on Amazon and we'll be putting the link to that in the show notes. Fantastic.
Welcome.
It's been an interesting year, getting the book published this year and having a few awards come through again just last week which I think you might have seen. But it has been a.. it has been a bit of a winding road from where I started to where I am now. But life is never in a straight line isn't one thing I've certainly noticed. As with as I've gone along.
So true, so true! We connect the dots looking backwards is one of my many favourite sayings.
Yeah, that's very true. Yeah, totally.
You're based in Goulburn. So for those of our listeners who don't know Australia well, it's a Regional City in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, with about 32,500 people. And I'd mentioned that number because there's something to be said for living in smaller populations, our co-host Laura lives in Bermuda and Island of about 60,000 and I used to live there too and that's where a lot of our listeners are, too.
So it's about two hours south of Sydney and an hour north of Canberra so kind of in between. But it's a relatively small town, I suppose. I mean it’s big for regional areas. We moved here a couple of years ago and have been very, very happy like all these connectivity things that are the standard these days like zoom, like we're talking now has made it very possible for me to make that move and keep operating my business with basically no interruption at all.
Yeah, that's fantastic. I think you might have been one of several 1000s of people who took the tree change, they call it.
I was a COVID escapee, for sure. The COVID lockdowns proved, we thought about moving to Goulburn for a couple of years, we have family down here and there was always the things that we thought we'd miss and the things that we didn't want to leave behind in Sydney but the COVID lockdown meant that we couldn't do any of those, we had to stay home. And one day, we kind of looked at them when we haven't done any of those things, we don't miss anything. So why don't we just do it? And that kind of pulled the pin for us and off we went.
So tell me why printing? Why did you go into printing?
So I was a chef and what I loved about being a chef was working with my hands, it's very creative so you're constantly creating things with your hands and there's a really high energy to it. So all those things you see like Gordon Ramsay and all that carry on, like it's totally true, it's exactly what it's like. And while I was working as a chef I've always been interested in illustration and drawing ever since I was a kid and at that time, I had this side gig where I was making stickers that were selling through the local surf shops. I’d do these cartoons and make them into stickers and then the shops would sell them for me and getting the stickers created, that was my introduction to the print industry and I didn't realise it at the time, but I was actually creating a portfolio of print ready artwork. The guy who was printing the stickers for me, offered me a role as a junior graphic designer and I took it. I was keen to stop working nights and to stop smelling like an onion.
Yes, my sister is a chef too, I was a chef so I definitely can understand that. So you went into printing. Okay, that's amazing.
Yeah, it combined those two things that I love, creating with my drawing and the graphic design and then actually bringing it to life and making something real and something tactile. And it just ties those two things together and it had a really similar energy to cooking because, when you're cooking all the waitresses are university students typically and then when I moved into print, all my customers were marketers and they’re recent university graduates so it was almost like I was working with the same people. It was a lot of fun and a lot of tight deadlines and I just fell in love with it straightaway.
So Daniel, your book is called The Power of Print, what in your view is the power of print?
The thing that makes print unique amongst all the communication channels, is its permanence. No other communication channel has that, like radio, visual, it's all ephemeral, it passes in your ear and then it's gone. There's other things about print but that's one of the biggest things because it's permanent and it's physical, it's a tactile thing. I always believed that, you often hear that people are visual creatures and I always believed that but when I started writing the book I came across this thing, what's it called, the name is escaping me at the moment but basically, they took all the nerves and they remodelled the human body and then in relation to how many nerve endings were in the body and so the hands were huge, like massive, grotesquely large, and the lips were enormous. And when you look at the way the brain’s constructed, there's more nerve endings for your hands than in almost the entire rest of your body combined, it's incredible. And then when you look at kids, and my God COVID, I have two young kids and walking around the shops with a three-year-old! Don't touch it, don’t touch it! Like it's got death on it, right? Obviously, we learn later on, but kids touch everything, right? And they can look at it but I like to think this, to see is to believe but to touch is to know. And that's what print has, it's a physical tactile thing in the world and it can communicate with us in a way that nothing else can simply because we can touch it with ease.
I love that! To see is to believe, to touch is to know. That was really solid and I think when you're selling something, one of the tips is that you hand it over to someone you test drive the car, you give it to them to touch and feel, you ask them to try the clothing on, if it's a product, or if it's a service, it's come and chat with us in a discovery call, get a feel for how we might work together. It's really a key point. And so printing, you're being able to create these very tangible products for people to touch and know.
Yeah, there was actually an interesting study done and they found that there was a certain level of transference of ownership. So when you… they did this study where, if you own this cup, if you had a cup, you would think it's worth $10 but for you looking at this cup, you'd probably give me a buck. So when we possess something our value of it is elevated. And there's an element of that when you're given a print so if you're selling something, if you give someone a print of a product and then they're holding it, there's an element of ownership, where they start to feel a little bit like they own the product, it's really interesting. Obviously it's so you're not going to pick up a flyer of a car and then be like, you’ll go buy it, it's all those things that accumulate so there is an element of ownership in that. So when you pass something over and you're selling a service, when you give them that tactile, physical thing, it's like they're starting to own it, they're beginning to own it before they bought it.
And so is that some of what you help your clients to understand? Because Daniel, you've worked with a lot of Australia's top marketers and with companies like Westfield and Carlton United Brewery and Billabong, so what makes what you do different to any other printer?
One of the big challenges in print is selling a commodity, it's a very commoditised thing and a lot of printers I always think about it as cans of Coke, why would I buy a can of Coke from you, when I can buy a can of Coke for him for $1 less or whatever. And so a lot of printers compete on price. So a customer will say, I've got a quote from a competitor for less if you can beat it or meet it, I'll give you the work. And then the other way, they try to compete with time and they try to produce things faster and I mean, you buy print, right? So you know, that's a thing, it's become a thing in print, like, I can get it to you tomorrow and get it to you this afternoon but it's still staying in that commodity space. But what I try to do with my customers is talk to them about what they're trying to achieve and when I can understand that, then I can make a suggestion about how they could do that differently and then I'd back that up with some kind of reason. So for example, I had a customer who was an architect and he was rebranding, he's currently on this bespoke path where he wants to work with people making bespoke fancy houses and obviously the value, that's not a cheap service. And he came to me and he wanted to get new cards and he had a new logo he wanted to drop on and I had done cards with him before but I just did these standard; there was nothing wrong with them but that's the best thing you could say about them. If you handed them out at a networking event, no one would look at them twice which is good in that they're not rubbish but it's bad because no one would look at them twice, right? When I was talking to him, I asked him why do you want to do new cards? I’m rebranding, bespoke, la-de-dah. And I said to him, you’re an architect right, you understand materials and if we were making, if you were putting a front door on a new house and it's a beautiful carved wooden door, it wouldn't matter what colour you painted it, it's still a beautiful carved wooden door. And look at these cards that we're doing, like it's not a beautiful card, carved wooden door, it's cheap cardboard. Why don't we do something that communicates the value that you're trying to give to your customers with your card. And his eyes just… he went from vacillating like, I don't know, like I said to him, stop mucking around with fonts and colours and let's look at the material. The conversation completely changed, he became excited, enthused, decisive, he knew exactly what he wanted from that moment. I mean it's great for me because what happens when people get excited about something they, to say they don't care how much it costs probably isn't true but they're prepared to spend more because we buy based on value not based on price and I changed, like I move from commodity to value in my offering to him, that's what I try to do with my customers and get it to that level.
It's amazing. I mean that's strategy. That's the difference between having a strategy and not having a strategy because you just helped him to understand how just changing something as simple as the quality of the material he was printing it on, making the difference and then the strategy was, you're going to be presenting yourself as a higher value because you have a higher value card. So you're immediately introducing yourself on another level. That is a strategy in marketing that can set him apart from the next person that the guy meets, looking for an architect. It's subtle, it's very subtle but it's a big big thing right there.
And what does it say about his brand? His brand development?
What I also say to them is your card or collateral, broadly speaking is, it's your representative in the room when you're not there. So if you have this exceptional, remarkable card and when they're going through all the quotes that they've gotten, all the business cards that they collected while they're choosing their architect. You know it’s exactly what you said, it’s this high quality card, it stands out, it communicates and there's an authenticity to it. Like it's, walking the walk. I’ve got another customer and her business is called Alchemy, a little plug out there if you ever watch this Jo!. So she's all about this handmade, natural kind of stuff and she wanted to do new business cards and I talked to her about this new stock that was almost 100% recycled and you could see the recycled in the stock, and that's what we did and we ended up rolling that through all of the stuff that she did, she did gift certificates and a couple other things, postcards and stuff but if there's that authenticity to it, where she says she's about the environment and in the choices that she makes with what she brings into the world she is. It's one of the things that's interesting about print.
And I think that's the value of going in and actually speaking to your printer and having that relationship, that's what we like, I'm a graphic designer so I've worked with lots of printers in my career but it's relationships that really count because I can, call up my printer and say, I'm doing this card for this client, what kind of stock do you have that would work really well for this. And that's the type of thing I think people should know, when they're doing the marketing and maybe they're on a budget, we work with a lot of startup people and this is their first business and they don't know where to start. But just knowing that they could walk in and say, hey, I want to get business cards done, this is what I'm about and then find out their options and what they can do and then carry that through all of their branding. I think that's fantastic to know and I hope that helps people out there who are starting out.
It's definitely something worth thinking about and it's probably worth shopping around for printers because not everyone does that. There's so much in the print world these days where it's all automated,I it's all these web-facing customer facing stuff and there's very little information given; they'll churn it out really quickly and really cheaply like I was saying before that commodity approach but it is worth shopping around to find someone who will talk to you and will share their expertise and their knowledge.
What were the major changes you saw in your industry during COVID? I mean, I wonder with people being home and maybe not being out sharing business cards or at expos where they might be giving out brochures and postcards. I mean, was it.. was it a really tough time for you? Or did you do any pivoting or made any major changes during that time?
Yeah, it was tough. Not for all of printing - catalogues went up, there were more catalogues being sent out but for a lot of stuff. I support largely events and retailers and obviously they were shut down so it was pretty tough for me in any kind of sales, stuff like business cards, all of that just just plummeted. So in regards to pivoting in the industry, a couple of businesses hopped on the face shield bandwagon. All those signs about, stand here and don't get any closer and screens that went up. Because they have the relationships with those shops already so it wasn't a big change for some of them. So some of those guys did really well but for me, I used the downtime to write. That was when I wrote the book. That’s my effort to pivot.
So the book is written for other printers?
Oh it's for print buyers and print sellers. So for buyers, it's something that can help them, that process that I explained is a direct result of writing the book. It wasn't something I had planned. I read so many studies and learned so much. What I tried to do when I wrote it was understand what is it about great print that makes it great? What are the features? What are the characteristics? And not at that “it's on nice paper and it's printed nice” level but on that next level, what's above that? And principles is what I aim for. And what I found is it changed the way that I think about print and then it changed the way I was talking about print and so for print sellers who read the book and understand, read the principles and start to apply them, they'll find that it starts to change the way that they're selling print and the net result of that is sale prices go up, time to produce goes up and then for print buyers, especially marketers, they're looking at ROI as something that's effective, something that gets their message across. If they can understand how print works better then they can design their print to work better, it's a communication tool ultimately. And if you can understand how a communication tool works better you can craft your communication to take advantage of its strengths and weaknesses.
What is the principle methodology that you share in the book?
So there's six principles. And the idea is, or the way that I use it, is.. a job will come in and I'll run through my principles as a checklist and I'll look for where they, they've already got it or where they don't have it and I can usually find something where I can say, Hey, have you thought about adding this or doing this? So the principles are, I've got them on the wall so I've got a cheat sheet here, so the first one is Surprise - do something surprising. And so one of my favourite stories for this was a marketing company in New Zealand, an energy company, they did a mailout in an envelope, just a DL envelope, and it had the same message in it and they sent it to two different towns. One of them, it was just standard, the control group but then for the other, they ripped it, so when the envelopes arrived in the letterbox half of it was ripped off. So the artwork was in such a way that with that section ripped off, it was all still there, there was nothing missing so they got the exact same message. But you can imagine, you open up, you go to your letterbox, you open it up and there's one that's ripped in half, what the hell? And their response on that was more than double. Just by doing something different so you identify every kind of print, there's a certain expectation, it's going to be in a certain stock, it's going to be a certain size and there's reasons for those sizes, often financial - identify what those are and try to do something different. It's not always a good idea, you need to balance it, so there was a trend for a while with little business cards. Just as an example, which I thought were ridiculous because when they go in a wallet, they just disappear.
Yeah, yeah, disappear.
They need to balance it. It's not, with the principles, it's not a matter of I've got to make every six of them has to tick, I don't need to tick in every box, just one box will do, often it's enough.
So the next one is Value. Every piece of content is on its way to the bin and especially promotional prints. So you need to give your customer a reason to keep it, you need to make it precious to them for a reason so that they keep it and there's a couple of ways you can do it with the materials, if you did something unusual like that architect how he had this unique, interesting card, you'd keep just because it was cool, what he ended up doing but then you can also make it valuable with the content that's on it. So I did some flyers just recently for a martial arts studio and he wanted to promote an open day that he had coming up. And I was like, that's cool, that's one side but on the other side, how about we put a timetable? And so with the thinking there that if someone wants to go they're gonna put it on their fridge. And maybe they don't come to the open day but they've always wanted to come or maybe they're, like to some information and you can do that with FAQs, every business gets asked the same 10 questions, 10 times but it's sharing that information, making it valuable through the information. So there's a few ways you can do that to make it valuable.
The next one is Experience and so this is the tactile experience of it. People are very, like I was saying that we're very tactile so my card at the moment is a timber card so it's like two mil thick, it's made out of eucalypt, it’s very unusual. But to touch it, because it's a funny shape as well, I got it cut into a funny shape. I went to a networking event a little while ago and this tray goes around, right, and everyone puts, all the visitors put their card on a tray, and then the tray goes and people can take it. And I watched people sitting at that event just playing with it.
And then when they're standing, talking afterwards, I could just see them holding it and just playing with it and it's created this tactile sensation for them that just fascinated their fingers and then when I went over to talk to them, it was like I'd been talking to them the whole time, Hey, great card, this is really cool. I didn't have to introduce myself, I didn't have to do any of those things. Thinking about that tactile experience and it doesn't have to be something impressive like that. One of the examples I always think of is Vicki, you probably know JB Hifi. So JB, Laura, it's one of the most successful retail chains in Australia. They sell DVDs, TVs, that kind of stuff but their presentation is a bazaar, and so they’ve got handwritten signs hanging everywhere, everything's handwritten, all their signage is cheap paper. They actually employ signwriters would you believe to come in and do all this stuff for the presentation. Yeah, it's crazy, right? So that's they want to communicate, it's a deal, it's a bargain, cheap, through their choice of materials, even though they sell plasma TVs. It’s successful, right? So it doesn't have to be about it's got to be, letterpress, 100 GSM, the best of the best, because maybe you're promoting a garage sale and your garage sale should just print out on your printer on your desk, right? Like it communicates everything.
Connect was the next one so the connected world. What print is very good at is sending people to places and whether that's like the website or on the phone, or to a bricks and mortar shop. It's very good at doing that. I mean, we've all seen posters that say, go this way and so you need to make sure that you're leveraging that and taking advantage of its ability to send people places and put opportunities on there so put your web address, put a QR code. Well, that's the one good thing for print.
There's a big rise in QR codes over the last few months. I've seen them more and more everywhere, whereas they went quiet for a while after they first came out but now they're everywhere again.
I think we could thank COVID for that, right?
I think so, less things to touch and now you could just use your phone to scan.
Because every business has so much content online. The days where print closed the sale are gone, there was a time when mail order catalogues, all that kind of stuff, it used to be a thing but it's not anymore. The deal is closed online so many times so use print, get them online, it's all about touchpoints right? You got to communicate with brand X amount of times. So you're sending them onwards.
Preparation was the next one so there’s that old saying, half of my marketing budget is wasted but I'm just not sure which half, so marketers love data, right? They love to know, they love to attribute but print doesn't do any of that, it's batteries not included. So if you don't set up a special email address, a special phone number, a special URL, you're not going to know. And so that's important to think about so you can attribute because attribution is important. There’s this really big case study that I reference in the book for the Salvation Army in the UK and this new agency took over and they spent a lot of money researching and trying to attribute where their activity was coming from and what they found was almost 100% of the new donors were through the internet which at a glance is like, well, let's just spend on the internet, right, that's where the money's coming from. But when they dug deeper, what they found was that most of their new customers which is the most important ones, were being led on to the internet by the print collateral that was coming out at the same time. So they started investing in more print, less in different parts, and the net result was increased donations. So it's really important. Then there’s the crazy stories about people getting fliers and then they ring up and then no one knows what the offer is or why they're calling or what's going on.
Doesn’t it drive you nuts? You call up someone I want to order such and such. No, we don't do that, Oh yes, you do, it's in my letterbox, and it's just simple internal communications, they've forgotten to tell their frontline staff what the heck they're doing. So it's very very evident that all of these pieces have to tie in together and that's where it comes into preparation I guess, is being ready before you send those flyers out. So frustrating.
And the last one is Clarity so this is graphic design. I always talk about the five second rule. If you can't understand what it's saying in five seconds it's saying too much. Less is more. I always think the reader's attention is a valuable commodity so don't waste it on stuff they don't need but the number of customers I’ve told that they don't need to have their ABN on their flyer. It's like a tax number.
Australian Business Number. Why do they do that?
I know, right? Anything that's wasting, you need to understand that a marketing piece has one goal which is to send a customer to the next step, whatever that next step is and if you're clear on what that next step is, then that's all you need to say. In my book I talk about highway signs so when you're driving on the highway, the sign will say, Canberra 100 kilometres and then there'll be an arrow and that’s it, and that's all it needs, that's all it needs to say, I don't need anything else. I think your flyers, posters, all these things, there needs to be clarity and simplicity in the message. Otherwise, it's not gonna work if you over stuff it's over stuffed.
Oh say it again, say it louder for those in the back please. Over and over, clarity, simplicity, get the message through with as few words as possible I am a big believer inputting everything on the sheet and then how much can I take off of it when I'm creating something, how much can we take out and the message is still clear, how can we keep it as simple as possible and keep the brand message strong through at all, that's really the key to good marketing and a strong call to action leading to somewhere that's it. I think that's really interesting. How much you're saying print is now leading to online and the sales closing online because I think there absolutely has been a move to everything online. Online is free, online is cheap. Social media is the best place to market. Social media doesn't last, like you were saying and social media doesn't always stick because you are surrounded with zillions of other people's ads and promotions and pictures of their babies and their dinner and everything else. So it's a lot harder to get your message to cut through that noise. I think what's interesting now is we don't often get as much in the mail. How often do we get something promotional in the mail? It's rare now where it's almost like we got something in the mail!
It’s not quite like that in Australia
You still get flooded?
Well, we have a no junk mail sign on our postbox. Sorry Daniel. So we don't see a lot of it but there certainly is quite a lot circulating. But you know, as with anything, you're gonna cut through the noise with something that's a unique and interesting design, like Daniel was saying.
Your principles are solid. I love it.
It's actually interesting what you're saying about the letterbox. So there was a study done recently, a focus group and the idea of junk mail, the term junk mail is now an email thing. It's no longer a letter box and the letter box because of the way that we’re shopping everything so much gets delivered, the letter box has become the good news place. It's not where the bills and the rubbish comes in, it's the good news, it's a positive place. So many bills are sent online, the role of the postbox has changed too. It's where I get the things that I ordered and it's where I get information about more things I could order.
I love that, maybe I should change the no junk mail sign to more mail please sign.
You might be missing out Vicki, you just don't even know what you’re missing out on now.
I feel disappointed when I see that there's been fliers delivered and I can't see what they are. So that goes to your point Daniel, it is the good news box.
Yes, very true. Very true what you're saying I haven't had a bill delivered in years. Everything is, I want to be green and have it all online and send it to me by email. And so what I do get in my mailbox, I got a lovely thing that I designed in my mailbox today. I designed this map which is pretty cool. Triathlon this weekend. So we're really excited to see that in the mailbox. It tells everybody what roads are closed all weekend. Very important, very important information.
Fantastic. So Surprise, Value , Connect, Preparation and Clarity. Six very cool principles. So Daniel, have you felt that you have needed to be resilient through this journey? Over the last 20 years?
Yeah. I mean, look, being self employed, as you guys would know, is a very tough game. And disappointments or mistakes come straight out of your pocket, it's not the boss's pocket. I mean, resilience and being able to get back up again after having disappointment is hugely important. I mean, you couldn't do it if you weren't resilient.
What keeps you going?
I asked myself that very often. you get it right, it's really fulfilling. It just feels great, when you put a project together and it actually works and it all comes off and there's mistakes but I would have been out of business if I didn't get it right more than I get it wrong. I remember when I first started, I was lucky enough that this big company wanted to work with me, the girl there and I remember coming home and I quoted on this job that was like $35,000 and I was just thinking, What is she thinking? Is she mad? Anyway, I did the job. And I landed it and it all worked and it was so exciting to be given that opportunity and I think I got hooked on that. When you get it right, it's just it feels great and that's what keeps me going.
What about mistakes? You've made any really good ones?
I mean, the first printer I bought was a mistake.
Printer was a mistake, because we're not talking about a little printer like Deskjet I have on my desk. You're talking about a big giant?
A $20,000 printer. I was inexperienced at the time, and what I was shopping for was I wanted something that had great resolution and great solid colours and that's great but what I didn't realise was that the ink faded really quickly.
No, yeah, that'd be really hard, did you find that it faded after you had done a number of jobs or when did you find out?
Most of the time it was okay because the stuff I did was short term. I had one customer where he was doing longer term stuff and he showed up and it was all like, it was terrible. So anyway, that was a lesson learned so I learned, the lesson I took from that was what I liked about our printing was it was a great the print quality was astounding,it was top of class, it couldn't get any better but in commercial printing, most of what we do is sale on now. No one's sending me photos, I don't need that amazing resolution and I just learned that what I needed was, I think about it as capability over capacity. And so, my first printer was really good at doing one thing, and that's great, but it couldn't do anything else. And so then I started shopping for things that could do more things, was a bit more of an all rounder. So that was the lesson I learned from that. I don't know if that's relevant for every industry.
Well, mistakes are relevant in every industry because we've all made them some good ones. My big printing mistake, I'll tell you, was for a commemorative issue of a magazine, I had a spelling mistake on the front cover. After 1000s and 1000s were printed and sold and distributed and someone messaged us and said Oh, did you realise that this is spelled wrong on the front cover?
Wasn't the author's name was it?
No thank God it wasn't a name. It wasn't, it was a magazine and it was commemorative was spelled wrong. It was spelled comorrative.
There was no saving it. It's out there and people have saved it. It's a commemorative issue. People were meant to save it. It wasn't even meant to be binned. So some people probably have that now they're gonna go find it and look for it.
I hope so. That's fun. Yeah. Now, back then it probably wasn't so fun.
It was mortifying, absolutely. I check and recheck and send it to somebody else now to check to make sure somebody else signs off on things before they go to print now let somebody else have that final say because oh, it hurts. It hurts when that happens.
So Daniel, what's your mindset around failure, what you've said already that you're gonna fail. And if you didn't fail, you wouldn't be where you are now. But what's your mindset when it happens?
What I try to do is get through the tidy up, whatever it is. So for me, it's often a reprint from a mistake, get that done, make sure the client’s happy and then look back and try and learn a lesson from it. I remember hearing a story, I don't remember where but the story went that this general manager was hired and he was put out in the state office and he made a mistake that cost the company millions of dollars. And then the CEO rings him up and says come and talk to me and he flies across the country back to head office thinking he's gonna get fired and he walks in to talk to the CEO and says, Look, I know you need to fire me and that's fine and the CEO said, Why would I fire you, you just cost me a million bucks to educate you? So that's what I try to think about if I've made a mistake, okay, how can I avoid it going forward? What's the lesson I can learn from it? But initially just getting through, there's no point pointing fingers, there's no point carrying on, just fix it and then, okay figure it out. It's very easy to get passionate I think but it doesn't help, doesn't achieve anything.
Yep I agree. Just get your nose back onto fixing the problem being a problem solver. See if it can be better than what it was originally intended. And then pour myself a gin and tonic.
It’s all about balance, right?
Yeah, that's great. Great advice. So if you were to look back 20 years you were just starting your printing business then knowing what you know now what advice would you be giving to yourself? Your younger self?
Yeah. Look after your health a bit better. Stephen Covey talks about sharpening the axe, or sharpening the saw, it's so easy, especially when you start to just do nothing but really pour yourself into it. And I mean, that's admirable to a degree but you start to wear down. That's one thing that I've learned as the years have added, and my experience being self-employed, is you've got to draw lines between work and home, especially when you're self-employed, it's very easy to just be work. Some of the choices I made back then, in regards to the hours I worked and stuff, the price that I paid, it wasn't worth it, really. And I could have listened to my body a little more than I did but that’s hard, it takes time to understand your body, in the language that it talks and the signals that it gives you. Like, I see my son, who is never tired, he reckons but from the outside in, it's just I can see his behaviour, it's almost like a switch flicks and it's, oh he really needs to sleep but he would never have one. Maybe it takes time to learn that maybe I could tell myself that 20 years ago, and I'm not sure my…
..Would you have listened. Yeah, would you have listened? Is it? You do wonder, I think it's a very relatable part of entrepreneurship is that working yourself to exhaustion, often to burnout, sometimes you need to hit that wall to know when it's time to rest when it's time to stop and say, Well, wait, hang on, this isn't working, I need to pull back. I need to learn to take care of myself. What do I need to do? But I think if we don't know sometimes where that wall is, you kind of just keep going and sometimes you just got to maybe get there. So I think it's very related. Well, I know I've been there definitely hit burnout in my career more than once. But as you learn, you get to get a little bit better taking care of yourself. So that's a good good piece of advice, whether you listen or not 20 year olds out there. Do take care of yourself, absolutely. That's a good one. Thanks for sharing that. One last question. Have you ever quit? Wanting to quit? Ready to quit?
Yeah, plenty of times!. Yes especially when we're talking about mistakes, it can cut really deep. And you make a big mistake and it's, oh, if I was working for someone else it would still suck but I'd still get paid the same amount of money. So if you're already familiar, a reprint means I've got to buy materials and it's overhead or cost.. cost of goods sold. And probably, for a designer, it's time then that you can't charge for. Some of those times when there's been big mistakes I've wanted to throw in the towel. But I think I'm addicted to working for myself, I really enjoy the freedom. My kids are young at the moment. Neither of them are in high school and I get them to and from school and I take them to stuff and I do the things and my wife works full time and she's got to be there at a certain time. But I can make those choices to be there for them and at the moment, that's important in a couple of years, that might change when they hit high school and they don't want to be seen with me anymore which is going to happen and fair enough.
Yeah, we have to accept that. I know.
But you're the cool Poster Boy dad, come on, Daniel. Everyone wants to be seen with you!
Want us to start walking around in track pants and Ugg boots a little bit more than just
You’re making it worse. I remember my 14-year-old, I get it. I get it.
I remember being 14 and I would walk in front of or behind my parents.
20 steps at least.
Yeah, I mean, it's terrible that I did it.
We all did. We all did. And they’ll do it back to us and the cycle will keep going, absolutely. But I'm with you on the freedom thing. I think that's especially as being a parent. I think that's one thing I'm addicted to as well.
This has been a phenomenal conversation. Of course, I personally selfishly loved it so much because I am so personally in love with print and glad that it is not dead as some people might want to try to convince others that it is. But it makes me really happy to hear that it is alive and well and that you are working on how people understand strategy, and love your principle methodology. People listen to that. Go back and relisten to those principles. They're great in anything that you do, especially in marketing, some great advice there and we just really appreciate your time in joining us on the podcast today.
It’s been great. Thank you for having me.
Thanks for joining us on Resilient Entrepreneurs, we're Laura and Vicki from Two Four One. We love supporting entrepreneurs, especially with mindset, marketing and motivation which is why we’ve built an incredible community of business founders who meet weekly in the Level-Up League. If you'd like to know more about it, look us up at www.twofouronebranding.com
