Maui Printing Company

"You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run." This iconic hook from the song "The Gambler" is about more than just playing cards. It's also a metaphor for many circumstances that we encounter in life and business. Knowing when to end a dead-end job or a toxic relationship is critical to maintaining a happy life. Likewise, understanding when it's time to quit a product you love, but that is not providing you with the gains you want, can mean the difference between success and failure, or even fulfillment and frustration. In 1976, 23-year-old Don Schlitz wrote "The Gambler." After pushing it around for a few years, eventually, it was picked up by Bobby Bare and later, Johnny Cash. Despite the talent behind the lyrics and performers, the song never really took off. That is until Kenny Rogers picked it up and launched it to the top of the charts. Schlitz knew he had a song ...

As a skilled graphic designer, you are truly a superhero with special powers. But no matter how formidable you are, one of the following prepress foes will challenge you. We can help. We have fought and overcome every one of these tricky opponents many times. Here is our list of the evil prepress horde and the techniques we use to fight them. Low Resolution Man This strength-sapping fighter sucks the resolution out of your images, often leaving puny 72-DPI husks in their place. This evildoer can be hard to find. Enfocus's PitStop Pro is a sure-fire weapon against him. It can warn you of every image below a threshold you set and will even compute the actual DPI of a scaled image. If you don’t own a PreFlight program, you can still find Low Resolution Man by printing your job on the highest resolution printer you have and checking for jagged images. Ms. Extra Plate This fiendish foe adds extra printing plates that you don’t want in a host of ways. She can hide one in a slight...

How often do you dread coming to work in the morning? Even for business owners who love what they do, sometimes getting out of bed and coming to work can be a chore. Putting a priority on developing a company culture that inspires your employees to have fun at work can help take the dreariness out of the everyday mundane. While not all businesses have a budget to implement all of these ideas, you can find some creative juice from what these companies have put in place to make their workers enjoy the workplace. What Makes a Great Place to Work? Sparks, a marketing company, creates activities that make work fun for their employees. Some of the activities they have implemented include: *Mix & Mingle - A program that coordinates employees from different departments having lunch together. *Food4Thought - Focuses on lunchtime presentations from various departments and what they are doing. *Events - Creating parties for holidays and other occasions. Encourage Staff to ...

Entrepreneurs are a different lot. It takes a certain type of person to hang out there on the edge and take calculated (and sometimes not so calculated) risks. The rush of adrenaline that keeps tycoons in the sweet spot of success can wear a person out, though. The hard-charging, always-ready attitude is a unique quality that has its own set of rules when it comes to taking a little downtime without losing precious time and opportunities. The following are excellent strategies for how to recharge for moguls of business. Contemplation There is no "right" or "wrong" way to sit quietly for a few minutes a day. Taking the time to think and contemplate things is a real game changer. It teaches you to quiet your mind and gives that big brain of yours time to rest. That's all it is. Give it a try. Take 20 minutes and sit quietly. Let your thoughts come in and gently focus on them one at a time, allowing yourself to sit in silence. Over time, the effects b...

If you ask any business professional what they dread on their calendar the most, many of them would tell you the same thing: all of those pointless meetings. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who hasn't been pulled away from their desk at the most inopportune time, only to sit in a room and hear people convey information that they either already knew or that they didn't need to know in the first place. The dirty little secret here is that there are NO pointless meetings in the world of business - only wasted opportunities to get things done. If you want to make sure your meetings are justifying their existence, you'll want to keep a few key things in mind. Know When to Schedule a Meeting and When Not To The first step on your road to a more productive meeting schedule involves coming to an understanding of what type of information should be conveyed in a meeting and what would be better left for some other delivery mechanism. One of the reasons why meeti...

Building a team is an inherently personal proposition, regardless of the industry in which you're operating. These are people that you've hand-selected based on their unique strengths to come together to form a complete whole. When everyone is firing on all cylinders, a well-designed team is more than just a tool - it's a reflection of yourself, of the type of work you do, and of the quality of the product you're about to deliver. So what happens when you didn't form the team, but you're still being asked to lead them? Things change in business all the time and at some point, you may be invited to take the reigns of a project that had already existed long before you got there - inheriting the project's team at the same time. Jumping into a team as the newly deemed leader can be a difficult situation to find yourself in, but it doesn't have to be provided you keep a few key things in mind. Trust - The Most Important Element of All When you...

Any marketer worth anything will tell you that the key to increasing sales is to use A/B testing to determine which sales tactic is more successful than another. If you're not familiar with it, A/B testing (sometimes called split testing) is comparing two versions of something to see which one performs better. With that in mind, have you ever wondered why some tactics are more successful than others? Logically, we think that if we appeal to the rational brain, we will convince people that our product is the best possible product for their needs. However, if that were the case, would anyone ever buy Croc Accessories or Pet Rocks? Nope. Unless you're selling to Mr. Spock, there's a much simpler way of convincing people to buy what you're selling. The key to turning prospects into clients is tapping into the deeply embedded emotions inside each one of them. By identifying these emotions and learning how to trigger them, you can increase your revenue faster th...

One of the key things that all successful team leaders find a way to overcome is the simple human need to be liked. When you've finally risen in the ranks and find yourself in a position of authority, it's natural to want everyone to see you as "the cool boss" or "the friendly boss." While this is absolutely recommended to a certain extent and it's a whole lot better for productivity than barking orders and becoming the boss that everyone hates, you still need to know your limits. You need to draw a line in the sand and establish yourself as a team leader by setting boundaries for both yourself and those beneath you. This is something you can do in a few different ways. The Dangers of Not Setting Boundaries The potential pitfalls associated with not setting boundaries for your employees extend quite a bit deeper than just having people who look at you more as a friend and less as a leader. A lack of boundaries can also easily translate into a lac...

Let's face it - we all have our quirks. Part of working with others is the opportunity to develop collaborative working relationships. Other people's habits and behaviors affect us when we are in a shared environment. In many instances, these are the people that we interact with for the majority of our days. As a natural result, friendships form as trust and respect are gained from our day-in and day-out interactions. You may have experienced this in your own company. And then, one day... BOOM! Like a bolt of lightening, an employee begins to engage in storytelling that looks and smells an awful lot like gossip. "Did you hear about Kathy? She is dating one of her supervisors..." or "I think Corey is on something. He has been late a lot lately and his eyes are watery..." And with that bolt of lightening you have an out-of-control wildfire on your hands. It only takes one person to spark this type of destruction. Once one person speculates to ...

Modern technology has ushered in a bold, new era in terms of employee productivity. Case in point: thanks to not only cloud computing but mobile technology, almost ANY employee can become a remote worker if they truly desire. Employees can be just as productive at a coffee shop as they could from their desk in the office, which has meant big things for businesses in all industries. For the people tasked with actually managing these remote employees, however, it can quickly become a challenge, to say the least. If you want to get better at managing employees who are working remotely and your goal is to bring your team together even when they're a world apart, you'll want to keep a few key things in mind. Lay Down the Ground Rules Some employees who are working remotely tend to have this romantic idea that they are their own boss or that they "work for themselves." After all, they don't have to go into the office to be productive - they can work with th...