If You Build It, Will They Come?

There is a line from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, he will come”.  That line worked great for the movie but we live in the real world.  If you are an excellent cook some people may say, “Wow! You make THE BEST Mexican food! You should start a restaurant.”  In fact, you may actually make the best Mexican food in the world but that won’t guarantee success.  The truth is, if you build it, they may not come!  Sometimes people with cheap, inferior products are successful while the guy with the fantastic product fails.  Obviously you have to have more.

Consider this, two businesses are located in close proximity, they both sell reasonably priced, quality products and the owners have the finances under control. One will succeed the other will not.  Business ‘A’ welcomes you when you walk in the door; they are happy to answer your questions, they give you their undivided attention and show you they appreciate your business.  When you leave you realize your smiling. Life is good!  On the other hand, no one at business ‘B’ notices when you walk in. One of the employees is texting her boyfriend and the other one is a little ticked because she waited on the last customer and she’s tired of “doing all the work”.  She ignores you.  You find what you’re looking for but can’t decide between two items.  You aren’t really sure what the differences are.  You leave the store without ever being acknowledged and make a mental note not to come back.

 

Lesson number one for success, customers want to be appreciated.   So if you build it they might come, but if you treat them bad they may not come back!

Read the full article How To Fail In Business.

Front Door

Are you following the Daily Word Challenge in our Facebook group? The challenge the other day was "front door". Own front door is a disgrace. Someone - that would be DH - cleaned out the drain with acid and spilt it and the painted door looks as though it has chickenpox. Not to mention the wooden porch that has been a Fix-It project for ten years ...

Fortunately my Mum had just had her front door painted when I took this photo and she always has a wonderful display of plants. I used a Scrap Your Heart Out template by Janet Phillips and the alpha is from In My garden by Natali Designs.

It's Blog Train Time with CatDesignz!

We've had loads of fun with the new CatDesignz kit, Spring Comes Softly. Here's my Dad with my Auntie and Uncle showing it off for you:


Do you like the stacked paper background? That's good because the set of stacked backgrounds is free for you!

CLICK HERE to download them free at the MyMemories store. 

MyMemories is having a store-wide sale giving you 25% off and you can use this coupon code Catz25 for an additional 25% off anything in Catherine’s store.  The coupon code and store-wide sale are both good through May 6th!

You don't need My Memories software to use the freebies, you can download regular files. If you would like to try the My Memories program and get $10 off AND $10 to spend on kits go HERE.

Would you like some tips on making your own stacked paper backgrounds? That tutorial is HERE.

Step aboard our blog train to collect loads of fabulous goodies to go with this kit:

CatDesignz
Ann
Linda
Sharon - That's me!
Yobeth
Digi Scrapping Divas
Laura

Have fun!

Focus on what matters

Storyteller 2 is here! You'll be amazed how the ideas in Storyteller 2 will transform your scrapbooking and make life easier so you can concentrate capturing those memories. CLICK HERE to find out more.

Three Impossible Things Before Breakfast

So, I got PSE 11. I actually bought it last November when it was cheap on Amazon. I then left it in its box for months because I hated PSE 7  (or 8, or whatever I had before) so much I couldn't bear to look at it. I could never find anything. I don't mind a learning curve, it all exercises the aging brain, but I object to a constant headache from a black screen and stuff plainly being hidden to make people who use it think they're clever.

PSE 11 is a whole new ball game. The interface has been much simplified and the black screen is gone. This simplification has caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the PSE snobs. As I mentioned on the Divas blog last week, it reminds me of Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory: "Windows 7 is much more user friendly than Vista. I don't like that."

I signed up for two courses on PSE 11 which I'll tell you about in great detail later. I've been through a bit of the general PSE 11 one and haven't looked at the digital scrapbooking one yet. I just introduced myself last week on the forum where they were obviously appalled at the thought of someone making thousands of pages, owning two websites and teaching scrapbooking when she has used OTHER PROGRAMS. Horrors!

I've written a few tutorials on PSE 11. How did I do that when knowing nothing about it? Well, I've used PSP so I understand layers and much of what you need to know is blindingly obvious. If you have PSE 11 get it out of the box because you will be able to follow these tutorials without studying anything else. Here they are:


Using Masks in PSE 11

Using Templates in PSE 11

Why am I writing them now before I've learned anything? Partly because I wouldn't want the peeps running the course to think I'd stolen any of their material to write my own tutorials and partly I wanted to keep it simple and easy to follow. I know the tutorials are simple because I only know the simple stuff.

Will I switch to PSE for all my scrapbooking now? No, of course not, Memory Mixer and MyMemories a gazillion times faster. I do like PSE templates though and bought lots at 50% off recently. I like the block ones best. I can make those on MM/MMS but my hands are not as steady as they were and sometimes I accidentally shift a photo which spoils the look.

Here's an easy page I made with a Simple Set template by Lindsay Jane (kit is mostly Sea Breeze also by Lindsay Jane):

Lots of Freebies on ....er, Freebies

Unless you've been living under a rock you'll know that this Weekend/all week is iNSD. (Inter) National Scrapbooking Day. The Inter bit always makes me laugh. Let's be nice to those countries we couldn't find on a map if our lives depended on it because we like the way Paypal converts their currency for us. The daft thing is I would have assumed National Scrapbooking Day was an international thing anyway and included me. I don't need to be thrown a grammatically incorrect crumb, thank you very much.

There are tons of freebies out there and we have them listed in a permanent doc on the Digi Scrapping Freebies group if you get a bit lost. There's an article too on Coastal Scrapbooks to help you Build Your Stash With Freebies.

Obviously the freebies are to entice you to spend but since you spend all year anyway feel free to go nuts without buying a thing, especially from irritating people who want you to jump through silly hoops to get the freebies. BAD stores!! Very bad. The deal is you get our eyes on your blog/site/Facebook page and we get the freebies. The deal is not that you get to waste our time with stupid treasure hunts. Shame on you if you can't master that simple marketing rule. For those who need help (or those customers who like to know what goes on) we have an article about Using Freebies In Your Marketing

Here's another couple of points for the stores to consider while we're at it:

1) iNSD sales should be 50% off or 40% if you're going to be mean. Do not waste our time with a mere 30%.


2) Your customers started spending on Wednesday or Thursday at the stores where the deals started early. If you wait until the weekend to have your sales many of those customers will have no money left to spend in your store. Duh.

Have fun! And if you'd like to do some actualy scrapping instead of spending the weekend downloading stuff we have several challenges on our Facebook group and a new list of words for May: