Good Morning 

"How much will it cost?" This month we'll look at how you can turn the answer to this perennial question into a much more engaging experience for your walk-in customers. How? By electrifying your counter price list. On the cheap.

Speaking of costs, what are the maintenance and related fees for Morning Flight programs? It's all spelled out in the column on the left. In a nutshell - Nada, Zip!

Finally, a question that comes up regularly is the imposition of business cards. Specifically, how to quote cards that are nearly always printed x-up, often with more than one name. Intriguing enough to make it this month's video.

Hal Heindel
Unitac International Inc.

If you're familiar with how Unitac got its start, you know I'm a big fan of counter price lists. We put together our first one-page price sheet right after the doors of our upstate New York print shop opened in 1969, began mailing a much fancier 40-page price book in 1976, and followed that up by publishing, in July of 1980, the first computer-generated price list for printing in America. Read more

That same year, Bill Gates and Paul Allen were hired by IBM to develop an operating system for the company's first PC. It was launched on August 12, 1981, and entered the history books as MS-DOS 1.0.

Yes siree, big fan! So why are counter price lists missing in Morning Flight? Because plasma screens and the internet have made them obsolete.

Counter price lists were never all that good anyway. Limited selections of paper brands and colors, no intermediate quantities without a calculator, no prepress, postpress, or ink colors - you know the drawbacks. But when confronted with no viable alternative, you don't turn down a glass of water in the middle of the desert because there's no beer!

Following on the heels of the Gold Edition will be the release of a simplified, Cousin Mel could use it Consumer Edition of Morning Flight that you can bundle with copies of your existing product and paper files and load into a bare bones Windows computer sitting on your front counter.

The app will present a wonderful opportunity to showcase your state-of-the-art estimating procedures, and will be free to all users of paid Morning Flight programs, from the Express Edition on up.

Your walk-in customers are used to making their own copies. Why shouldn't they be able to find out what it costs to get stuff printed the same way?

Whenever you enter a quantity in Morning Flight, that quantity always represents the number of finished pieces. It's never the number of press sheets.

That's blatantly obvious with things like envelopes but tends to get murky when you're quoting business cards, usually run more than one-up on different size sheets. The picture can get downright opaque when you throw in a bunch of names.

Our June Video can help with that. It also demonstrates how to override the program's automated x-up calculator. With just a dab of creativity.

Screencasts are
a great way to learn how to use Morning Flight.

Click here to watch our June video on how to set up and price business cards.