Cyrious Conversations: Chat with Keith Nichols, inkDOTS

9/7/2011 - 8:55 p.m.

 

Keith Nichols, inkDOTS owner in Cypress, TX, shared his success with Control in the few months he's been using it. During the demo of Control, Keith immediately figured he would save about 2-3 hours a day. Now that Control has been in place, Keith estimates it actually saves 3-5 man hours per day. Keith estimated a full ROI within 90 days.

 

With a before and after look, Keith depicts how, with Control, he increased his profit on sales, eliminated duplicate work and shares some features he's found most beneficial.


We were entering and duplicating data at least 4 times throughout the process.

We had a spreadsheet for estimating the jobs, then we'd use that info on different templates for handwritten work orders. After that, we put the same info into another spreadsheet to schedule jobs. Finally, we'd enter the info in QuickBooks.

Now: We just enter that info one time.

 


Every morning: An hour and a half was spent just going over paperwork.

We'd have to find all the papers that went with each job, making sure production had everything they needed and getting artwork ready.

Now: It's about a 15 minute daily process. That's a 90% cut!



We had a hard time capturing certain costs. Meaning, we weren't charging for everything.

We were not charging near enough for some of the smaller jobs we were doing, but the thing that really surprised me is we were actually over-charging for some of the larger jobs we were doing, and that’s why we were not getting the jobs. But really, it was an eye-opener to the little bitty jobs that we were just losing our tail on.

Now: We capture more costs, where 85-90% of the time before, we weren't.



My Setup Experience

Very intuitive. I only had a few questions where I needed help. I did the bulk of the work myself with the help of the training videos available. Probably within about 2 weeks, I felt like we had 90-95% of our product line in there and working and going, and it was not hard at all.

 

 

Looking Ahead

I really love a lot of the reporting features. And I’m big on watching sales on a day-to-day basis, only because as you watch them and you progress through the month, you know where you’re at and where you need to be. Now with Control, even if sales are down a little bit, we'll probably make the same amount of money, maybe even a little bit more.

 

Visit Keith's website at www.inkdots.com

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