Know your customer's business. "So many people in our industry have tendencies to be order-takers," says Pat McGuffin, owner of Reliance Media, a Apopka, Fla.-based distributorship. Instead, address your clients' business challenges and offer suggestions for improvement.
Design with purpose. Always keep cost, time management, and details for your client and the end user in mind. Don't waste precious time--and money--on superfluous design. "If it's a basic and boring in-house document, just get it done," McGuffin says.
Cultivate customer loyalty. McGuffin makes contact with as many employees in a company as possible, from the purchasing agent to the human resources director, each of whom may request different products and services. "If you do a good job, everyone will be talking about you, and you become known around the whole company," he says.
Pat McGuffin comes from a newspaper family and worked in publishing before founding Apopka, Fla.-based distributorship Reliance Media in 1990. Of the services the company offers--including print brokering, promotional items, warehousing and distribution--commercial publishing is its niche and the closest to McGuffin's heart. "Because of my background in the publishing fields of newspapers and magazines, I understand what it takes to put together a complete, attractive package," he says.
Membership Directory Gets a Makeover
The president of Florida's Kissimmee/Osceola Chamber of Commerce recently approached Reliance Media about producing a perfect-bound annual membership directory. The directory attracted about $25,000 per year in advertising but was in desperate need of a makeover. McGuffin and his marketing team took one look at the directory and saw dollar signs. "We added index tabs and separated the book into 10 subsections," McGuffin says. "So within one directory, there were 10 individual minibooks."
This approach created premium advertising positions on the front and back cover of each subsection. Potential advertisers were offered twice as many key ad positions, and the Chamber of Commerce increased its rates. As a result, the new directory generated $100,000 in advertising. It also won an award for Best Membership Directory in Florida.
The project wasn't an overnight success, however. The time frame to complete the directory was double the standard two months his company spends on a task. The extension was due partly to a multitude of meetings and brainstorming sessions between Reliance Media and the Chamber of Commerce.
Additionally, Reliance Media took over correspondence with advertisers to avoid burying the Chamber of Commerce with technical questions they couldn't answer. "Usually, we work with just one client, but in this case we had about 100 different advertisers to handle," says McGuffin. "So we had to make sure we had everything moving in the right directions, almost like conducting an orchestra."
--Sarah Wassner
Reliance Media, a distributorship based in Apopka, Fla., redesigned the Kissimmee/Osceola Chamber of Commerce's annual membership directory, helping the group increase advertising revenue.
