By signcraft
Posted on Monday, May 8th, 2023
There are obvious benefits to keeping your shop organized. When you need something, you know where to find it—if you put it back each time you finish using it. This becomes even more important when you add staff to the mix. It’s not very smart to be paying people to look around the shop every time they need a certain roll of vinyl or the box of razor blades.
But the other benefit is the message that it sends to your customers. Customers naturally equate a clean, organized business with quality and efficiency. Likewise, they are likely to doubt the competence of a disorganized, chaotic place of business.
Bob and Teresa Kaschak [Artisan Signs & Designs, Peru, New York] have witnessed the power of this in their business. Over the years, they realized the powerful perception that their workspace creates in the minds of customers. A few years ago when they renovated a building to use as their shop, they wanted to use this to their maximum advantage.
“It was not surprising to us,” says Bob, “that the new shop has become a big selling point. A lot of our work is higher-end, five-figure signs. When people come in and see a nicely done shop that is well-lit and very clean and organized, it sends the right message to them.”
Bob first realized this in the early days of his business. At first, staying organized was just an effort to be more efficient, but he saw that it made an impression on customers. It doesn’t matter whether you have a small one-person shop or a large operation. The appearance of your business sends a message to your customers.
“In the early years,” he says, “you’re so caught up in the creativity and the signs that you don’t bother being very organized. You’re turning out the work as fast as you can. But over the years, I started keeping the shop more organized and clean—mostly to make it easier for myself to find things and set up projects. I started to realize, though, that customers noticed.
“I started to hear comments like ‘This is a beautiful place that you have…’ and ‘Wow—what a nice setup…’ A bell went off in my head, and I saw that this was impacting what people thought of the business and our work.
“It’s no different than when I take my car to the garage for service. My mechanic has a very well organized, clean shop and it gives you a feeling of competence. But if you walk into a garage and it looks like total chaos with parts lying everywhere and hardly room to walk, it doesn’t give you a good feeling about their work.”
Now, cleaning up the shop is a daily ritual. Each morning, he comes through the shop and cleans up. He doesn’t like to do it at the end of the day because it seems to take away from the fun of the creativity and production.
“At the end of the day,” Bob says, “I like to wash out the brush, make my last cup of tea and look over the work. Then it’s lights out and I go up to the house. The cleanup can wait till the morning.”
