Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Printowners List Surveys Owners

Well, the good news is that approximately 210 individuals responded to a recent survey conducted on the Printowners List Serv. The bad news is that, lacking even the most basic of filtering data, it is difficult to gauge how reflective the responses were to the industry at large.

I guess I have a built in bias that give equal weight to the responses of the "Joe the Plumber" or "Joe Six-Pack types" as against the opinions of owners who operate high $$$ volume and high profit printing firms. I put a lot more weight on the opinions of the latter and very little on those held by the former.

Ideally, I would love to have compared the opinions expressed by the "profit leaders" in this industry and see how they compared to those at the other end of the spectrum. I think the results of the survey would have been quite different had this been done.

You could tell by the answers to most of the questions that the vast majority of respondents were/are clearly anti-big-government, anti-administration, anti-Obama type folks. A plurality favored the Tea Party over the alternatives. A majority see themselves as conservatives, and 92% disapprove of how Congress is doing its job. Approximately 74% say the nation is going in the wrong direction.

The responses to one question did surprise me - that a significant majority (71%) candidly admitted that they have not donated to any political candidates this election season! I would have expected almost the reverse, especially from a group as pro-active and conservative as this group was.

In conclusion, my experiences in surveying this indusgtry for more than 25 years, is that the government, both local, state and national rarely plays a significant role in the success or failure of most businesseds. Most problems or challenges facing businesses today are self-induced and not the fault of government meddling or interference. In fact, the more troubled the shops, the louder they want to blame others for their problems, when in fact outside influences and "big government" rarely has anything to do with the problems they are facing.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Bev said...

I monitor oneof these Lists and I couldn't agree with you more. Too much tea bag talk and who died and who is getting married and who is going on vacation. Too bad you left, you were the only bright spot on the list!

May 4, 2011 at 3:54 PM  

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