Wow. Twenty eight years.

It seems like it was only yesterday that we all worked in Detroit. There was something called the Soviet Union. The NBFA was the major trade organization for print distributors. And the Red Wings were… well… about where they are now. 😀

It is sort of a strange thing to have been doing the same thing for so long. Certainly almost none of the people we know have had such ‘stable’ careers. We now have a sizable batch of customers in your business who are what we call 3rd-Gens: the same person, in the same industry, but at their third company (We re-programmed our own Contact Manager module to be able to track our history of a person across multiple organisations—a phenomenon we never anticipated.) For whatever reasons (mostly luck, we suppose) things continue to move slowly, but steadily upward. No mega-millionaires, but no unemployment! We are now so far ahead of any competitors in terms of continuous longevity and growth we’ve almost stopped tracking. And as always, we have you to thank. And on that note, two bits of news.

First, there is the annual customer appreciation discount. In the next week or so, we’ll be posting our latest scheme to put some teeth behind our gratitude, so stay tuned!

Second, there is a new product in the works. Some background: As the industry has consolidated we’ve spent the last fifteen years ‘bulking up’; developing features and capabilities geared to ever-larger businesses. Well most of the big shifts in the industry are now complete and our smaller (but important!) group of smaller distributorships have asked us to consider a more stream-lined package—sort of a ‘SAFE-Lite’. So the world is turning full-circle. And we’ve listened. Look for a product announcement after the usual chaos of the ACAD is behind us—end of June. Sorry to be so coy, but suffice to say, if you’re the kind of distributorship where one person is CEO, CFO, Marketing Director and Operations Manager? This is for you.