Q: Mr. Matt, as a Hamilton grad I am sad to note that I never took the Matt's tour. What advice would you give to a small nonprofit on linking marketing with a strategic plan?
A: First of all I am sorry you didn't take the brewery tour. You would have enjoyed it. I went to Colgate. Any kind of a strategic plan should be well thought out and executing it is trial and error. If things become successful in one area you push that a little more.

Q: From your bio on BizBOOM, it seems that you are very involved in the community. How do you find time as a business owner to participate in all of these things? Btw, I think that it is absolutely terrific!
A: Thank you. I think that one of the things about being busy is that you are better organized. Lots of ideas you pick up from other activities work in business because business is all pretty much the same. Time management is the most important thing that all of us do in our lives.

Q.What would you list as the most important factors in the success of your different business enterprises?
A: I had a lawyer one time tell me there is no such thing as business failure. If you have a good idea and it is well thought out, you stick to it and put the energy behind the idea. Keep at it, if its a good idea it will work.

Q: How can I get a one of a kind, 4 color piece printed at a reasonable price?
A: That is an easy one! Printing has changed dramatically. Digital printing now can be printed one at a time and can be very inexpensive. Normally for 500 pieces you would go with the traditional way, but if you have one piece to try, digital printing works great. It will look very good.

Q: Hi Mr. Matt, How does your company handle and act on sales leads?
A: We follow every sales lead up, depending on where it comes from, with a customer service person who calls on the phone. If it's a good sales lead - a good volume sales lead - we have a salesman follow up on it to make sure we satisfy the customers needs and then see where it goes. Sales leads are important and we follow up on every one of them, I hope. We have 19 sales people covering the Northeast.

Q: How have you chosen which boards to serve on?
A: That is a very good question. Normally I hope that I choose a board based on my changing interest levels. I think particularly on community boards, you wear out after a while and you need to change to get fresh ideas. Friends and acquaintances attract you to the boards and sell you on the great things that boards are doing. One of the most interesting things is there are an awful lot of people who care about the community and it's amazing the number of hours and effort people put in to them. In a community the size of Syracuse you get a great deal more of that than you would in major metropolitan cities. In this community there are all sorts of opportunities.

Q: With many companies leaving our state due to many factors, have you ever considered relocating your company?
A: We do have an operation in the Philadelphia area and there are tremendous temptations that would draw us there. That is where our largest customers are in that area and it is like a candy shop for the business available. But, I have lived in Central New York all my life and I think CNY offers a great deal. There is a wonderful quality of life here and 10 years from now I think we will have a real boomtown here. Other areas have tremendous traffic which we don't face now. We have considered moving and we do a lot of business outside of the area, but we certainly like it here.

Q: Mr. Matt, 19 sales people is very impressive! How many employees does Dupli have? Thanks.
A: Dupli has about 135 employees in both locations of our locations in Syracuse and Philadelphia.

Q: Does Dupli have digital printing capabilities?
A: Yes, digital printing is something which is very much in our area now. We use the big docutech for personalizing all sorts of information, including letters. We also own the large format machines that do the digital printing and have color machines. Its amazing the quality that comes out of digital today. It offers great value for people that want to do small quantities as a test and then expand it as the project works. Also in the direct marketing area, the personalization is something that is very big today and really does work. You are more apt to read it then. It is very big in direct mail these days.

Q: What marketing methods do you feel are the most successful for your business?
A: We spend a great deal of time on marketing. First of all I think you have to determine what it is you want to sell. You really have to understand who you are looking for. There are all sorts of ways to do this. We do a great deal of prospecting through all kinds of lists. We use Dun and Brad Street and many of the various community business lists. Our best customers are really banks, insurance companies, major companies and direct mail users. We find those companies and then try to get to the right person who is the decision maker. I feel that any small business has to define themselves carefully to find a niche that they are going to be good at. In our case, we have Dupli Online which is a wonderful new service where people can order small quantities of personalized items and save a tremendous amount of money. We look for people where this service would be most useful and then contact them. Our mission statement is: Dupli is a service oriented systems company. Our number 1 job is to understand the needs and exceed the expectations of our clients though continuous improvement of process.

Q: How do you motivate your employees?
A: Boy that is a wonderful question and it is something that every manager spends their life thinking about. The best way to motivate employees is by getting them really interested in what they are doing. You have to communicate, communicate, communicate and get them to buy in, making sure that they understand that their ideas are most important. In our company there is only one person that has to do as I say - my personal executive assistant. Everyone else does what they think is best. I think everybody wants to do a good job. I am so convinced of that. Most people want to do a good job and walk out satisfied that they had a good day. If you can communicate to them what it is that makes a good day and make them feel that they have accomplished that, then that is a good day.

Q: Considering the low cost of archival quality printing ink jets available on the market, how does your company compete?
A: That is a good question. The person that is going to use a low quality ink jet printer would do a lot smaller quantities. Our average envelope business run is 25000 envelopes. If somebody wanted to run that number through an ink printer, God bless them! We can run 70000 an hour. It is really more efficient than an ink jet printer. The quality that has come out of the office $200 printer is amazing, but I think it is for a very, very small quality. Our emphasis is normally toward something that is larger than that.

Q: Hi Mr. Matt, regarding advertising, what do you think about email advertising? We have a very small budget and were advised that this would be an inexpensive way to advertise. However, I am concerning about annoying our customers with unwanted emails. Thank you.
A: Clearly email is very interesting. We all are tempted with the ease of doing email and sending it. I think it's like anything else. My son was just showing me that he had 2500 emails on his site and obviously he doesn't read a great deal of those. I think that is it very much like a direct mail thing. The problem is trying to get the person you are communicating with interested. Most of that stuff goes in the basket. But clearly if you are interested in something and you receive it in the mail, you'll read it and I think it's the same with email. You have to clearly understand what you want to get. If you are a small business you have to get in some sort of a niche that makes sense for you. With all of the viruses that come around, unless you know who it is from, you shouldn't open it. We had a virus which hit a lot of people. It took us down for a couple of days. So we don't open a lot of email unless we know who it is from.

Q: Good morning Kemper. Does your company offer any discounts for small business owners?
A: We try to sell our products at extremely economical prices. I think that probably the best thing we do for small guys is if we have somebody we get intrigued with, we are very anxious to help them. We put a lot more into their project than they would get some other way, and that is probably where we give a discount to small business people.

Q: I used to purchase stationary and cards at your Crestmark Limited store in Franklin Square and loved it. Why did you close this store? Was the city location not drawing in enough traffic? Have you relocated it?
A: I am pleased to tell you that the Crestmark Store is open again. The location in Franklin Square is one that does not get a lot of traffic, but we have tried to do some publicity and it is doing well. We have a wonderful new manager who is great. Stop by and you will enjoy it!

Q: What was your most successful marketing effort?
A: I think that our most successful marketing effort is the online program. It allows us to go into a major company and present a program that they are very interested in. You get in the door and you always sell them something. Statistically it costs major corporations between 75-150 dollars to cut a purchase order, so this online system completely eliminates this cost making the savings huge. Everybody is very interested in it. It has been a wonderful opportunity for us. You need to really understand what you are trying to do and then do it. If you can determine what your niche is and then really push that niche, it helps you. It is sometimes difficult to determine what you niche is, however.

Q: What would you recommend including in an Request For Bid or printing services to ensure the quality of the printer.
A: I think that the most important thing is to be very careful in what your specifications are. If you want 2 color, 3 color, 4 color, or 4 color process, the more detail you can get in as to what you are looking for, the better opportunity you are going to give the vendor to properly meet your needs. If you have a sample of what you want printed, it certainly helps us to look at that to match it exactly.

The moderator says: For everyday Quick Advice from upstate New York business experts, visit http://www.bizboom.com and click on Quick Advice.

Q: In your business life, what do you feel was your biggest challenge?
A: The biggest challenge is to make a buck! Also, identifying what it is that you want to try to make happen and then staying focused on that. The biggest challenge is to stay focused on what you want to try to do. You are faced with so many temptations, so many diversions. For example, if an employee doesn't show up in the morning, or something that is not going to make a difference in the direction you are heading takes you away from your focus. The biggest thing is to stay focused.

Q: How does your company anticipate change in the marketplace, basically keeping pace with the changing technologies that your customers are looking for? I imagine that the changes in printing technology develop as fast as the changes in the computer industry that I am involved in.
A: 20 years ago printing was done on a letter press process, typesetting was very much in its infancy as we know it today. The whole industry has changed very dramatically. How do you keep up on it? You go to lots of shows and see the new things that are coming on. You also read a great deal. More importantly, you talk to your customers and see what they are looking for. Corporate structure has changed, scalping purchasing departments. We used to call on major corporations with lots of people in the purchasing departments that are now down to less employees. As you see that coming, you realize that they need some help. That is what really got us into this online ordering system and ways to try to deal with changing of major customers.

Q: Thank you for your time today!
A: Thank you also! Thank you very much for your questions. I enjoyed talking about it

The moderator says: This wraps up our Executive Chat session for today. BizBOOM.com and National Grid, would like to thank Mr. Matt for his time today in providing expert advice to the upstate NY small business community.