I "need" to rant for a minute...

Ok, so business is bad… really bad, back in January we had 33 employees, today we have 19. Our customers are scared to spend money on printing as they don't know what they will be paying for their employees health care, or their cost of energy... So everything is on hold until "the new year, or second quarter"...

One of our customers, (hmm a large university here in town) has sent me a survey.

And I’m about to scream. They have sent it to me four times now, and I so want to respond this way…

I’ll skip the “company name, your name part”.

Here is the first question…

3. Are you a certified Minority or Woman Owned Business Enterprise? 

 How I would like to respond…

Our company is owned by a Cherokee Indian who believes that being "classified" as a minority is a disgrace to good work ethics. A company should stand on its priciples and be judged for its service and quality instead of being rewarded for its "minority" standing. Therefore we have never applied nor would for any "handouts" because of our lineage or ethnic standing.

4. What is the annual spend ___ University currently has with your company?

5. Are any of your 2nd tier suppliers Minority or Women owned Business Enterprise?

We also partner with other like minded companies that also strive to do the best they can and always offer the best service, price and quality available. But, we don't base our relationships with vendors based on prejudices like skin color or how this will benefit our companies "image".

6. What are any opportunities for ___ University to realize more 2nd tier Minority or Woman owned Business Enterprise spend?

7. Are any of your facilities LEED certified?

We are a small family run business that runs its company with Biblical principles, part of those principles is to be good stewards of the funds we are provided with, and spending money to get a certification that we are doing the best we can with our energy requirements would not be a "prudent" use of those resources. The typical LEED certification including audits runs around $10,000.

8. Does your company have paperless efforts?

We are a PRINTING company… paperless reduces the amount of “printing” needed. So yes, we are striving to keep our customers from purchasing the things we produce to be politically correct and save the environment from ourselves.

9. Does your company recycle?

We produce many projects on recycled materials, we also recycle all of our environmentally safe soy based inks, and ink waste. All of our paper waste (trim, and bindery waste) is recycled as well, and goes back into our company. We recycle our shop rags and use chemicals in our process that are not harmful for the environment.

10. Has your company employed any methods to improve energy efficiency within your organization?

We have gone through the ISO process, as well as the Lean process, both of which have helped us curb costs, so that we can try and gain projects from customers like you that only care about the cost of the project, and how many minorities you are “helping” with your purchasing decisions. The way you will give a project to one vendor vs another based on the .29 cent difference on the $20,000 project makes me sick. But, anything to be politically correct I guess.

We would still have our “certification in both ISO and Lean, but in order to drop our prices that extra .29 cents on the $20,000 project that we lost this year, we have decided it is futile to try and keep you happy with all of our “certifications” that do nothing but cost us money, which in turn cost us the projects that you require. We still follow the procedures, but we don’t spend the yearly money for the audit and the “certification” so that we can keep our cost in line with your cheapskatedness when it comes to purchasing decisions.