Stanley's is changing the way they bring you useful industry, technical, and management information. Instead of this blog and a monthly email, there will be a Monday-morning "newsmail" with two items of information and a coupon special with which to kick off your...

Passwords are an key element in personal and business online security. How you use them matters. Hacking is a constant threat and underestimating the expertise of hackers and the sophisticated tools they have, can be a costly mistake. No individual and no business...

Customers can be unreasonably impatient but catering to their impatience can win return business. On the other hand, not catering to their impatience can lose return business. And the key to meeting impatience (within reason, of course), is effective production...

The message in this post is best served by being short and to the point. Per Harriet Ekperigin, VP Mental Health at GreenShield Health: "Entrepreneurs are often overworked. They are always navigating uncertainty and many become socially isolated. It's enough to cause...

While their contribution can be similar, a coach and a mentor are noi the same thing. A coach is usually a paid-for service whereas a mentor is assumed to be an experienced no-charge contributor of advice. Both can make a huge difference to a business. Conceptually...

Customer complaints are part and parcel of running a print shop. You already know this. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t frustrated by complaints when they occur, even when you ought to know better—when you know that the complaint is justified. I...

By now we all know that the glitter we've been using for decades (and still use) in t-shirt prints, is a microplastic. And we also know that microplastics have become a huge ecological problem to the extent that we apparently each imbibe plastic to the equivalent of a...

It can happen that when you’re printing with a low-bleed or bleed-resistant white on dark tees, you can end up with “ghost” images on the back of the garments. The usual assumption is that the print has somehow penetrated all the way through the tee to the back....

I recently came across a report produced a few years ago by American Express. There's no reason to think that it's any less valid now than it was then. In fact, given the increasingly impatient and entitled nature of today's typical customer, these stats are likely...

In the past few weeks we’ve had devastating fires all over the country. Businesses like yours have been lost. And, alarmingly, this appears to be happening with increasing frequency and ferociousness. In that regard, I’m repeating an updated 8-point disaster...

When I've discuss money management and cost saving with screen printers, they've often reminded me of the story about the drunk crawling around under a street lamp outside a pub. A police officer turns up and asks him what he's doing. The drunk points down the road...

As with any small business, bosses of textile screen shops range from likeable to dislikeable. Where do you fit on the likeable-to-dislikeable scale? You might be wondering whether it matters where you fit on the likeable-dislikeable scale. The short answer is, yes....

It’s not difficult to offend some people (even unintentionally)—it’s just part of existing in a society. In most cases it blows over quickly and we all continue with the rest of our day. But sometimes it doesn’t blow over quickly, such as when a message on a T-shirt...

Any business owner has at some time or other had to deal with employee performance or behaviour issues. It's never easy but it can be made easier and produce better results if it's handled according to a deliberate strep-by-step process. This is where "progressive...

For more than 10 years, this blog has been steaming along at the rate of two posts a week. This last post is here merely to explain that older posts are archived and that we only show three-month's worth of posts in order to keep the site current and limited to a...