Founded in 1990, this is our story to share how to stay in business for 32 years and prepare for your next chapters.
This report shares how ScanMyPhotos.com persevered to reach these milestones over the past thirty-two years in business.
Do you know how professional poker players never reveal their cards? It is the same strategy in business. Yet, during our nation’s public health crisis and economic collapse, explaining the ingredients for our success is shared to help many during these difficult times.
I hope these ingredients for how we sustained our good fortune over the past three+ decades are inspirational.
A Quick Read of Key Tips to Sustain Your Business:
The overriding path towards achieving this milestone is that our employees are like athletes — always sprinting and striving. They also work WITH us, not for us. Everyone is respected and celebrated. Our diversity of people and ideas matters most.
Business is all about taking risks to get stuff done. It requires discipline, intellectual rigor, and trusting your staff.
When you build a great company, the media also notices, and that is how all these reviews and news profiles occurred.
We manage a swarm team to identify at least one new photo innovation to introduce every week. Practicing the reserve strategy of “fire, ready, helps to quickly launch and ask questions later.
Being the first to market with precision matters most. That is how we pioneered the entire bulk photo scanning category. This includes one-cent photo scanning, and “InstaMedia,” so pictures are immediately uploaded to customers as orders are digitized.
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EVERY employee is celebrated and encouraged to make contributions, no matter how crazy the suggestion may be.
We encourage brainstorming and community sharing, where no idea is discounted without analysis.
Practice steadfast determination and diligence to overcome challenges. During the public health pandemic, we identified a surge in orders for families rushing to preserve pictures for online memorial services. This led to a massive shift from the traditional reason people wanted photo snapshots scanned; previously, reunions, anniversaries, and family celebrations — to safeguard memories – were the primary reasons. Today, 40% of all orders are for families preparing pictures for those lost to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Due to the recent U.S. Postal Service delays, we spoke as part of our years of advocacy to profile the problem and overcome their two-week delivery delays. That is why the InstaMedia program was launched for immediate online return.
Practice exhaustive training and feedback. Everyone is asked to share their best daily experience from customer orders and workflow processes. More importantly, study the disasters, what went wrong, and how every challenge was resolved.
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Always stay focused on the customer, always. When there is conflict, identify what the problem is and fix it. However, you must monitor whether someone is merely gaming the system, or has a real problem.
Always build customer loyalty. The goal is for “returning customers” and “referred by” as the leading answers to the question: “how did you hear about us?”
Always have a single-minded focus to be obsessed with the customer service experience.
Overcome your “Waterloo moments,” so it does not lead to where you met your final defeat. At ScanMyPhotos, our apocalyptic crossroad moments included the transition from film to digital. People also stopped traveling and taking pictures in the aftermath of 9/11. Yet, most recently, the disruptions to postal service deliveries created the most significant obstacle. Many orders that took days to return are arriving weeks late.
What are your top customer inquiries? Which problems and complaints stand out? There are no excuses. Every issue must be analyzed and resolved. Create a war room to monitor customer issues, puzzling workflow concerns, and any challenges.
[Tweet “Business tip: Innovate with more choices and expand your marketplace of products.”]
Monitor the competition. Reach out to your own, and other call centers. See how long it takes for an inquiry to be answered and how concerns were resolved. Beyond your direct competition, follow vertical market categories. We reach out to no less than five businesses every week to learn new ideas and identify how effective their customer service network is.
Regularly innovate with more choices and expand your marketplace of products. We always formulate a new warehouse of services in the digitization category and drop those past their prime.
Always be selling. At ScanMyPhotos, when people have their pictures scanned, they will also need to revisit and preserve 35mm slides, movie film, and negatives. Promote other services to solve the “what next” question after photos are digitized.
Test your infrastructure. Each month we place orders. We buy our products and have them covertly filled while monitoring the entire experience.
Our primary marketing is focused on creating customer loyalty to earn glowing raves and trust.
Value, from quality to pricing must exceed everything.
Our business model is predicated on convenience. We recognize people have choices. They can digitize pictures themselves at home or by using smartphone apps. The challenge is to spotlight our efficiencies to be better, quicker, and less costly. We make spoof informational videos and besiege the competition when they fail or are less efficient.
What is your secret sauce? Our unique selling proposition is digitizing pictures this fast.
What ideas worked best for you? Engaging with us is as easy and fast as sending a live support question or sharing a direct message on Twitter.
Everyone at ScanMyPhotos is grateful for earning your trust. To your continued success,
Mitch Goldstone
CEO
ScanMyPhotos.com
We want to hear from you. For all your photo scanning projects, if you have questions, we have answers. Reach us with this instant direct message Twitter reply.
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