Business is good!

George indicated that mine is the second service he’s trying.  He was not happy with the first because many of his scans were dark and he had to work on the scans himself to improve the quality.  He also indicated some of his slides were lost.

I won’t name the first company he used here, but it was a low cost scan service provider which sends the work out of the country.  George learned the hard way that the lowest price is not always the best choice.

I just got of the phone with Sandy in Atlanta.  She’s got about 150 126 format slides which she’ll be sending next week.

Some of the many orders this month have come from:

• John, a local entrepreneur who’s planning a digital slide show for his daughter’s upcoming wedding.
• Jean-Marie, a repeat customer.  Jean is an author who has me scan her slides from Central America, some of which go into her books.
• Kathleen in Taunton MA had me scan about 425 of her slides to preserve the family memories.
• Ann, from Plymouth MA had me digitize her slides of the quilts she has made.
• Mike W. from Redwood City CA had me scan several hundred of his slides showing the theater projects he’s involved with.

This home-office-based business has been a blessing for me, my family and my customers!

After almost 10 years of providing slide scanning services, I’ve gathered a large customer base.  Many of my customers send me slides in batches, so a lot of the orders I receive are from repeat customers.

A large part of the success of my business is due to my pages doing well on the search engines, for many different search strings.  Part of the reason for this, is my publishing of lots of not-for-profit pages to the Web, with most of them linking to my scanning pages.  My main scanning page has LOTS of information (and words people search for.)  One of my high traffic pages is my slide scanning tips page where I share some of the logic of the process.

Since I do the scanning work part-time from my home-office, it is not my only source of income.  I’ve been working as a machinist and assembler in a large manufacturing plant for over 30 years.

I get many calls from people looking to convert their slides to PowerPoint presentations and I’m currently enjoying the number 1 spot on Google for the search term “slides to powerpoint.”  That position varies over time.

Sometimes I get swamped with scanning orders, but as I’ve mentioned in a previous blog entry, the inflow of work is often quite close to my capacity to complete and ship orders out.  It’s rare that I don’t have orders in-house.  About every 3 or4 months there might be 1 0r 2 days where no orders are in progress. Except for July…

Speaking of July, as I’ve done in previous years, I plan to shut down the slide scanning for the entire month including the first week of August this year.

Today I added a link in the blogroll to Steve Bennet’s blog, related to his scanning business, Pixmonix.

http://photo.net/business-photography-forum/00T2XY

Things have changed a bit.  Ten orders have arrived since then and five have shipped.   There’s currently about 1800 slides in the queue.  Business is good!

Orders from local customers continue to rise.

This afternoon I’m working on an order of 120 slides for conversion to PowerPoint.  These are for a doctor  (cosmetic surgeon) in the state of Washington.

When I finish and ship this order, it will be the first time since September of 2008 that I’ve had no orders in-house.  I’m looking forward to the break.  I expect it will only last a day or two.

I may make portions of my calender accessible to customers to view receipt and ship status of their orders.  This would save me time over the current way I notify customers.

QuickBooks Pro 2009
I use QuickBooks Pro for the business accounting but it’s not useful for marking incoming and outgoing shipments.

Would love to get some input from other Google Calendar users about their uses for it.