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Many printing company leaders say hiring new employees is their toughest challenge. I recently visited a printing company with about 100 employees. Almost everybody in the building was in their late 50s or early 60s. Multiple workers mentioned to me that they were considering retiring. As we were hearing those retirement comments, the firm’s leader
Question: What should we include in a job description? Answer: Accurate and carefully crafted job descriptions are essential for attracting and keeping new employees, setting clear performance expectations, and serving as a critical line of defense in many types of employment litigation. Effective job descriptions include: Advice provided by Mineral. This Q&A does not constitute
Question: A newly hired employee quit after their first day. To keep things simple, can we just pay them as an independent contractor? Answer: No, that approach is not compliant with regulations. The IRS, the U.S. Department of Labor, and state agencies have specific criteria for determining who is an employee and who is an
Introduction When I was a young Applications Analyst for Linotype on Long Island, I was flabbergasted by the number of three-letter acronyms (TLAs) that had developed around PostScript and prepress. (Pre-press was still hyphenated at the time, which gives you an idea of how long ago this was.) For fun, I created a three-letter acronym
These management tips are brought to you by your printing industry association… The customer service representative’s role varies dramatically across the industry. In some instances, the individual is an extension of the sales representative and heavily involved with customer contact including face-to-face visits. In other instances, the CSR is a project manager whose role is
Question: We’ve identified the job candidates we’d like to interview, but we still have applications coming in. Do we need to review every application before moving forward with interviews and making a job offer? Answer: The short answer is no. There’s no legal requirement to review all the applications before moving forward, and you can always
Question: What is mentoring in the workplace? Answer: Mentoring is a professional relationship between a senior or more experienced employee (the mentor) and a newer or less experienced one (the mentee). The mentor shares their knowledge and experience, offering guidance, advice, feedback, and encouragement. The mentee, for their part, can go to their mentor with
What’s the most important number in your business life? Your hit ratio—the percentage of quotes that turn into orders. It’s the number that separates high-profit printers from also-rans. Why? Because it recognizes that a revenue-maximizing pricing policy isn’t created by your internally focused estimating system, “your cost,” but by your customers and the competitors that
A May 2023 study[] of 15 second and third-graders in Haifa, Israel provides new evidence supporting the value of print. The study examined brain wave activity and concluded that reading on paper stimulated key parts of the brain more effectively than reading the same text on a screen. The study has important implications for the
Thoughts from a “Printing Industry Performance & Insights” study Dr. Ralph Williams Jr.Associate Professor of ManagementJones College of BusinessMiddle Tennessee State University Dr. Randy ClarkAssociate Professor of MarketingJones College of BusinessMiddle Tennessee State University Our April 2022 “Printing Industry Performance & Insights” study focused on sales management and marketing in printing firms. In that survey,
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