I’ve been wanting some icons that would match the blog’s new look, for readers to click on and submit articles to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and others, so I designed a full set while I was at it that anyone is welcome to use for free.  These social media network icons can be used on your blogs, websites, etc. for linking to all the most popular networks.

These free social media icons have a “parchment” or “torn paper” look, and they look great on any background.  The goal was to create some icons that just look super classy.

Here’s how the icons look on a transparent background:

Here they are on a white background:

And, here they are on a black background:

Attribution Would Be Appreciated.

You are welcome to download these icons for linking to your favorite social networks and use them freely.  If you use them, however, I would appreciate it if you would place an attribution link to estimatesoftware.com.

Also, if you use them, drop me a note at mark (at) estimatesoftware (dot) com.  I’d love to see how they look in the wild!

Here are the download links:

• Original Fireworks PNG file (editable) containing all 24 social media networking icons
• ZIP file containing all 24 social media networking icons (individual files) ready for use

These icons are 40×40 pixels, saved as 32 bit transparent PNG files.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

She would drum her fingers on the desk for a while, all the while staring at her “calculator on the ceiling,” and then she would get back on the phone and say, “that’ll be $500.”

Sound familiar?

Fast forward to 1993. I just left my job at the newspaper designing advertising, and got my hands on my mom’s old Gerber IVB. I had two fonts: Helvetica and Brush Script. I read everything I could get my hands on about marketing, and went around town putting flyers on car windows advertising magnetic signs for $49.95 per pair. Orders started coming in and all of a sudden I had cash in hand and my business was born.

Little did I know, I was losing money on every pair that I sold.

For a couple of years, I continued on selling my work based on what my mom would charge, or by asking around on the Letterville BullBoard (the primary online forum at the time for signmakers) to see what other people were charging for similar work. After a couple of years, even though I had built a customer base and had steady work, it seemed like I was just barely keeping my head above water.

Then I got lucky and got my hands on a stack of old SignCraft magazines.  In the May/June 1989 issue they published an article called “An Accurate Hourly Rate Is The Basis For Effective Pricing,” written by Jeff Cahill.  I can still remember exactly where I was when I read that article, and how I sat up straight and realized that I had just found the answer to my problems.

I followed his instructions to the letter, and then set about reworking my entire business around the philosophy of profitability over quick cash. The result? Within a year, I had a viable business running and was not just making ends meet, but was actually able to take a family vacation! I knew I had turned a very important corner.

EstiMate Was Born

Since I was 12 years old, one of my passions had always been programming. It was my favorite thing to do when I would procrastinate.

So it occurred to me, why not write a software tool that would allow me to price my work quickly and get quotes out the door that I knew would make the amount of money they needed to, and automate that whole side of my business? I had just read Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth and was inspired to automate things.  As a result, I set about writing EstiMate, and over the course of three years got it running in my shop. I started talking on the Letterville website about my new program, and found out that a lot of people in the sign industry needed the same thing.

As a result, in December 1998 I started a website and began offering pre-orders to my Letterville friends for an April 1999 release. Amazingly, in those four months, I received 16 pre-orders for software sight unseen. On April 15, I shipped the 16 pre-orders and EstiMate was born.

The Tradeshow Circuit, Or: Making It Fly

Within two years I closed my sign shop in favor of selling EstiMate as my primary line of work. I probably held onto the shop about six months longer than I needed to, because I was so afraid of losing my “back up plan.” To this day, I very much miss making signs, and maybe someday it is something I will do again. For now, however, my focus remains on leveling the playing field for the sign industry and continuing to bring this fantastic product to market.

It’s been a long haul. We went to over 50 tradeshows over the course of the next seven years until the Internet usurped tradeshows as the place to learn about new products and information. We sold EstiMate hand over fist and I got to meet thousands of amazing people who were all excited about his fantastic industry.

To The Future… And Beyond!

I’d just like to say thank you to the thousands of people I’ve met so far that have been so supportive of this project both with their words and their dollars. We couldn’t have gotten here without you!

I’d also like to say thank you to the incredible team members that I have been able to work with over the years: Nancy Peterson, EstiMate’s current vice president and all around right hand woman; Phillip Komar, our technical support magician; Jacqui Ackerman, who for many years ran the customer service desk; Johnathon Bakan, who did technical support for many years and had the uncanny ability to make you feel as if he’d handed you a nice hot cup of tea when you called for support; Scott Cutcher, who helped me widen my mind to new marketing possibilities; my mother Myra, of course, who came with us to show after show after show; and many others who have graced the EstiMate office.

Finally, to my son Ivan, who EstiMate helped raise and who is now pursuing an education as an illustrator and graphic designer – my hat is off to you!

Who knows what the future holds? We have a lot of very exciting ideas for expanding EstiMate and our product line, and look forward to bringing you new products such as our DiamondMine™ business analysis tool among others.

Thanks for reading, and as always, Happy Pricing!

How’s that for refreshing?  A few evenings ago while I was cruising around the interwebs, I found this video interview with Jessica Hische on humblepied.com.  Jessica is a type designer and hand-letterer working in Brooklyn, NY.  One of the things I absolutely love is hand lettering and the state of mind I get in when I’m doing it.  Painting and graphic design have always overlapped for me — probably why I ended up so deeply embedded in the sign industry — and it’s just a total breath of fresh air to find Jessica’s work.

Back to the comment above, however, I think she is making a very important point for all of us.  Every day when we are working, we are doing bread and butter type work that often robs us of our creative spirit.  I think Jessica is absolutely correct that the things we do to “play” — those things that inspire us, bring us happiness and joy, and that we can completely get lost in — are the things we should be focusing on when we ask ourselves, “what am I here to do?”  I know that for me it’s some pretty odd stuff – discovering haml the other day, for example, had me re-doing large sections of the website and really enjoying myself.

In addition to using this as a tool to find what you really should be spending your time on, it’s a great way to relax.  There’s nothing that can compare to the good feelings that come from doing what we love, and when we are stressed, there’s a reason we return to the tasks that make us happiest.

Right now my son Ivan, who is a senior in high school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, is applying to art schools around the country to become an illustrator.  He has always been into comic design, and for awhile last term was so overrun with other projects that he couldn’t spend time doing what he loved.  Fortunately this term he is able to do some of that again, and his stress levels have dropped tremendously — a perfect illustration of what Jessica is talking about.

So, thanks Jessica for the wonderful quote, and the fabulous lettering design! You’re a real inspiration to me and I’m sure you will be to others as well.

P.S. Check out Jessica’s Buttermilk Font — it could be great for boutique signs.

I live in a really beautiful part of the country — near Asheville, North Carolina — on a relatively rural road with gorgeous views of the backside of the mountains in Bent Creek that I can see from my bedroom window every morning. The other day, I was heading out to the grocery store when I passed a coroplast sign in the front yard of a small home.

The Sign Said: “$20 Signs”

Pretty ironic that sign would be in the yard of a house just a quarter-mile from the home of the guy who wrote EstiMate! Needless to say, I was stunned.

It’s really tempting to stop and talk to them about profitability, but I fear it would fall on deaf ears. I’ve found over the years that people really think cash in hand is the same as profits. I suspect this guy got hold of a vinyl plotter, a few rolls of vinyl, some coroplast blanks, some stakes, and set himself up to make some money. Granted, his cost on those signs is probably in the neighborhood of $8 apiece — or, he might think it’s $3 if he wants to believe some of the people out there shouting “get into the sign business now — it’s a gold mine!”  But, his $12 profit won’t get him very far except as funny money on the side.

It amazes me that even in our industry, a solid industry of hard workers, intelligent people, with a long track record of advertising businesses around the country and making them more profitable, we have hawkers setting people like this up with false expectations and high hopes. There is a lot of money to be made in this business, but it’s not by undercutting and devaluing the industry as a whole. We have to stand up for ourselves, and make a fair profit on our work, or there’s no point in us being in business at all.

If I sound like I’m on a soapbox, I am. This one issue is the one I’m most passionate about and long after I’m gone, I hope the impact I have on the sign industry is to help raise the floor for everybody and bring us all to a for-profit mentality. There is no reason in the world that we shouldn’t be able to sell coroplast signs for $50 and charge for the stake as well.

Why are we in this business anyway?

1. We love it! We eat sleep and breathe signs, we love beauty in advertising, and we’re passionate about this.
2. We want to be our own boss.
3. We want to make better money than if we had a “J.O.B.” — “Just Over Broke.”

Number 3 is where the profitability piece comes in. Neglecting profitability, and undercharging for work, hurts us, hurts the industry, and hurts our futures. Being in business for ourselves gives us the opportunity to retire early, and were throwing it away when we undercharge. Every time we undersell our work, we are incrementally giving away our retirement, our health care, our vacations, and our futures.

As promised, here’s the math

OK, so you’re selling a 4′ x 8′ sign with basic vinyl lettering on it for about $250. You should be making about 100 bucks on this sign, if you’re pricing your work correctly. Now let’s play with the price.

If you cut your price down to $200, yes, you’ll be more likely to get the job. However, that customer is going to come back and expect the same sign for the same $200. If you raise your price, you’ll lose the customer — not because you are too expensive, but because you set their expectations too low the first time you sold them a sign. So now you’re stuck making half the profits you should be, which leads you to work the classic 10 to 14 hours a day in the sign business!

Think about it. By cutting your profits in half — remember, profits are really the only money you’re making — you now have to make twice as many signs to make the same money! You’ve doubled your workload for the security of getting that job.

Now let’s go the other way. If you raise your price to $350 you’ve done the opposite. You now have to make half as many signs (read: get half as many jobs) to make the same amount of money, freeing up gobs of time to chase down more profitable work and really bank some profits. So now, instead of being completely snowed under by work and unable to spend any time with friends and family, you’re spending your time chasing down valuable work and going home at five o’clock. There are thousands of sign makers out there doing this every day who will back me up.  Not getting every bid is a good thing.  Actually, here’s a rule of thumb: for every bid you win, you should lose one too.  If you get more than half the jobs you quote for new customers, you’re too cheap.  If you get less than half, improve your sales skills — your prices are good.

An EstiMate Success Story

My friend and longtime EstiMate user, Glenn Taylor, told me a story nine years ago — this was in 2001, so think about what signs were selling for then — about selling the 4′ x 8′ sign described above for $750. That is not a typo. It was a basic 4′ x 8′ vinyl sign, and he sold it for $750. What expectations did HE set in the customer’s mind? Using the math above, he made about $600 profit on that one job.

That’s the kind of money we should all be making on our work. I grew up in my mother’s sign shop, and I remember her selling signs in the 1980s for the same prices they are being sold for today. According to the measuring worth website $250 in 1985 dollars should be worth $500 at minimum today. Yet we are still selling 4′ x 8′ signs for $250.

It’s really time for a wake-up call and for us to start standing up and charging what our work is worth.

From now on, whenever you hear me use the word “profitability,” just insert this entire article instead of that word. This is what I’m really talking about.

Please Comment

I really welcome your thoughts on this and would love to have this evolve into a profitability discussion.  Please leave your thoughts below.

Now go out and make the rest of 2009 the most profitable year ever!

The other day I was trying to learn as much as I could about web typography, and while I was googling around, I came across a fabulous website by Andy Mangold.

After recovering my breath, I started swimming around in a world of some of the best design I’ve seen in a very long time. Now, I’m different from most. A lot of people really like fancy design and “gingerbread,” but as a sign maker I’ve always been an enormous fan of cleanliness and clarity. Andy’s managed to achieve both, with some serious style.

The original article I ran across on his site was about the differences between Arial and Helvetica, which I have always considered to be the east coast – west coast rap battle of sign making. In my opinion, Helvetica is an absolutely beautiful typeface, and I remember when the Gerber IVB first came out that thought cartridges were (I believe) $200 each, but the machine came with Helvetica.

You see, I’m one of those “cusp” sign makers — I grew up surrounded by lettering enamel, hand burned screens, and oh so very much oil. By the time I got into the business, however, the Gerber had just come out and I was a computer nerd  who completely fell in love with the electronics. So, I learned backwards — first I made signs with computers, and then when I went into business for myself, I learned to hand-letter, primarily as a way – initially – of adding drop shadows to my work.  That eventually progressed to a love of gold and smalts signs before I finally transitioned into working EstiMate full time.

But I digress.

I really wanted this to be about Andy’s site.

One of the coolest things I found on this site was his repackaging of the game Monopoly. Clearly, this is a guy who understands negative space. One of my rants about signmaking today,  which I can’t help but go into but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum, is how narrow the borders are on so many signs. Huge margins really set off the type, and make the sign legible and clear. I think the trend toward narrower margins began with desktop publishing. When desktop publishing became common, printers started publishing specs such as “minimum 1/8 inch margin” and then kitchen table designers followed these to the letter, thinking that by maximizing the space for their type they were maximizing the impact of their message.

In fact, it makes any design look crowded if the margins are too narrow. It’s a subtle thing, and hard to describe in words just how wide a margin should be — but it’s one of those “you know it when you see it” situations.

If you’d like to learn more about this and other very important sign design “rules,” I would highly recommend the book , by Mike Stevens.  This book really opened my eyes to some of the subtleties and beauty in sign design.

It also confirmed a lot of what I felt in my gut about design, but couldn’t really understand. All I knew growing up was that something was poorly designed I ended up having a visceral reaction to it — for example, if the picture was hung crookedly, say leaning down to the right, or if any design was right heavy — I’d feel the whole right side of my body sliding down.

I bet I’m not the only one here who just has to straighten pictures when they’re walking by.

Before I Go

One more thing you have to see on Andy’s site is his Ampersand Book. It’s pretty much a tour de force. I’m probably biased because I used to run a shop called Ampersand Signs, But this is one of the most beautiful collections of ampersands I’ve ever seen and I think you’ll get a lot out of it.  Go Andy!

Anyway, whatever you do today, make sure to spend a little time on his site and enjoy the breath of fresh air. It’s quite a nice break from nephew art!

The other day I got into a long online discussion with some folks about prosperity and success in business.  During the conversation it became evident that a few of the participants thought that succeeding in business and earning more than they needed in order to “get by” was the equivalent of cheating the customer.

I was, as usual (you all know me by now , trying to point out how exciting it can be to make enough money to retire, to have what we want in life, to work the hours we choose to work, and as a result to have all the time to do what we want to and have the life we always dreamed of having.

What I didn’t count on was that my ideas would fall on deaf ears.  And I learned a lot in the process.

After the conversation I got on the phone with my friend (and V.P.) Nancy, and I said, “what amazed me today was that not only did some folks I was talking to have serious limiting beliefs going on, they not only didn’t see that they had them, but they wore them like a badge of honor.

Now that’s hard to see, much less overcome.

The Best Gift You Can Give Your Customers

There’s a lot of value — serious value — in “having your customer’s back.”  What many business people fail to understand is that unless they are prosperous, and stay in business, they are actually sabotaging their customer.  The biggest gift you can give to your customers is to stay in business and still be there for them down the line when they need you again.  Your prosperity is your community’s gain.

I’m going to say that one more time.

The biggest gift you can give to your customers is to stay in business and still be there for them down the line when they need you again.  Your prosperity is your community’s gain.

Remember Ebeneezer Scrooge?  In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Mr. Scrooge was the very first literary example most of us had of someone with serious limiting beliefs.  Interestingly enough, you can see how both sides of the debate I was in evolved from the perspective of Scrooge.

The first side – that of not “cheating your customer” by charging “more than you need to,” is a straight descendent of the belief that to be a “Scrooge” is to hoard, overcharge, and not help your fellow man.  This has been hammered into us from all quarters, and it’s a hard lesson to overcome.

But there is a second side.

The second side came after Scrooge had been visited by the three ghosts of Christmas, and became free with his money, and started giving back to his community, and saved Tiny Tim from the clutches of death.

Here’s the important part: Scrooge could do all of that because he was a wealthy man.

The Cratchits got their Christmas goose.

Tiny Tim did not die.

Your prosperity is your community’s gain.

Flight Attendants Know This Secret Already

When you fly on a plane, and you are preparing for takeoff, there’s a little ritual you always go through: the pre-flight safety lecture.

Over and over again, those of us who fly have heard, “put on your own oxygen mask first, then help those around you.”

The same is true in business and life.  You must take care of yourself first and then take care of those around you, because once you’ve taken care of yourself you will be able to take care of those around you.

In my opinion, your own success and prosperity is the biggest gift you can give to your customers, your family, your community, and yourself.

What are your thoughts? Please leave your comments below.

Well.

After a day or so it was still empty and eventually she printed out all the specs of the car she wants and tacked it up on the board.

Damn.  She beat me to it.

So, we were sitting around and looking at it and she said “You need to hang something on there! I am so way ahead of you!”

I wanted to say, “yeah, about 100% ahead” … but then I thought about it and said “you are INFINITY ahead of me!”

The difference between 0 and 1 is not 100% – it’s infinite.  One exists, and the other doesn’t.  She had taken an action step, and I was still just thinking about what to put up on the board.

Are you getting me here?

Ideas are WORTHLESS.  Utterly, completely, bottomed-out worthless.  No matter how good they are.  Until you take action.

Yesterday my friend Jordan called me with a damn good idea for how to make an absolute killing off of video gamers.  I won’t say more than that, but it sounds genuinely workable to me and could make the man a millionaire.

Will Jordan take action? Only time will tell.  I don’t think he reads this blog, but if he does, let this be a shout out to him that he should do something.

How about you?

What ideas or inventions are you sitting on, thinking about how they “might maybe someday” happen?  I know I’ve had a few over the years that I’ve not pursued … makes me wonder what would have happened if I had.

Would I still be writing and selling sign pricing software? I like to think I would, I’m kind of partial to our industry.

If you have any good ideas or plans that you haven’t started yet, let this be your call to action.  Get off your duff and get moving.

Goethe said, “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.“

Randy Gage is a speaker and author I like a lot – and I suspect many of you would, too.  People have called him the “millionaire messiah” and he has a lot of good things to say about action, too.

Go read Randy.  Then figure out what you’ve been dragging your feet on, and get started!

I’ll be over here staring at my dream board.

From the YouTube page:

In Dun Laoghaire the “Festival of World Culture” took place from 21. to 24. of August 2008. Edgar Müller has followed the invitation and continued his series of large-sized 3D Street Art there. For this year’s Festival of World Cultures renowned German artist Edgar Müller transformed a huge slice of the East Pier into a dramatic ice age scene. This project was supported by the Goethe Institution Germany.

Enjoy!! The direct link to the YouTube Video: The Crevasse – Making of 3D Street Art