Monthly Archives: August 2013

Marketing

Monthly Outlet Sales Winner

Between May and August 2013, we offered a monthly reward of R1000 to the best sales person throughout the Paperight network of registered copy shops.

The challenge was announced through the weekly newsletter and on the Paperight blog. Our intentions were to drive sales of Paperight books, encourage copy shop employees to familiarise themselves with paperight.com, and to drive home the need for all employees to have their own individual Paperight accounts, albeit subsidiary ones to their main business account.

Individual staff accountability within copy shops has been an uphill battle and a necessary struggle to secure the safety of the book titles already available through the Paperight network. In order to negotiate with publishers, it is essential that we put all the measures that we can in place to protect their copyright and offer complete reassurance of our efforts to combat book piracy. Knowing who specifically has accessed certain titles can assist Paperight and the copy shops themselves to identify any potential pirates.

Similarly, there has been an unusual trend through copy shop owners to not inform their staff that they are officially offering a new service, namely Paperight. The number of customers that have been turned away simply due to ignorance on the part of the copy shop employee cannot be measured, however we have had feedback from customers to let us know that it has happened to them. We hoped to also remedy this issue with this competition.

The winner was announced for each month in the first week of the following month, once we had double checked everyone’s sales figures.

Our very few ‘fine print’ rules were:

  • Free documents do not count towards sales (e.g. Quirk Emarketing and College Campus guides) – that would make it too easy to cheat!
  • The customer’s first and last names MUST BE INCLUDED on every purchase.
  • The competition is only for South African shops.

The winners were:

  • May 2013: Dean Mostert of Minuteman Press
  • June 2013: Aletta de Witt of Aloe X
  • July 2013: Unice Davies of Revprint Claremont
  • August 2013: Hennie van der Merwe of Minuteman Press Vanderbijlpark

The competition was supposed to run from May to December 2013. However, by August 2013, we came to realise that copy shop managers were not sharing Paperight information and news (shared through the newsletter) with their staff so the competition became effectively meaningless.

More often than not, copy shop managers expressed an unwillingness to share the Paperight account details with all of their staff in order to prevent abuse of the system. This was an unexpected insight as it showed us just how serious these managers are about avoiding copyright infringement in store- which is great reassurance in our negotiations with publishers about distributing their content through Paperight.

Sales

Another bookseller signs up, and we face some inertia

Caxton books, a top bookseller of academic books in the southern suburbs, registered with Paperight. They purchased a small printer as a pilot project and asked me to train their staff. I visited the store several times to discuss Paperight and train their staff. Caxton books advertised the Paperight service to their customers via e-newsletters.

I had a meeting with the CPUT Library Services board regarding a possible Paperight partnership. The head of the Library Services was especially interested in Paperight but, was unable to attend the meeting. The board was very pleased with Paperight but, similar to UWC Library Services, needed to determine how paying for top-ups would work and how monitoring purchases would be done. We’ve discovered that bureaucracy tends to have a strong impact on slowing down the progress and flexibility of an institution.

Riso sponsored Spine Road High in Mitchell’s Plain with past exam papers for Mathematics. I attended the handover to take photos for the press release. A few weeks prior to this, Arthur and I attended a meeting with the school H.O.D.’s alongside Riso to present Paperight and our part in the Riso partnership. The meeting was successful and discussions continued around the possibility of the school obtaining one of the Riso machine. Arthur and I also noticed how different our pitch is compared to that of the old-school corporate salesperson and how uncomfortable we were with that style.

We weren’t achieving what we set out to achieve which was for outlet staff to take more pro-active roles with Paperight. Instead, outlet managers continued to keep their staff uninformed

After several months of running the salesperson of the month competition we decided to cancel it before schedule. We weren’t achieving what we set out to achieve which was for outlet staff to take more pro-active roles with Paperight. Instead, outlet managers continued to keep their staff uninformed which meant that most outlets’ staff didn’t know Paperight let alone the competition. We had no power or incentive to offer to change this.

About Paperight, Admin and infrastructure, Finance, grants and awards, Marketing, Tech

Marketing steps up, and we do some backroom plumbing

In the last three months we’ve worked on a range of strategic initiatives:

  • paperight-sponsors-guide_2013111324 Jun 2013: We formally created a model for bulk sales as our ‘Sponsor-a-school campaign/programme’.
  • 27 June 2013: We workshopped a marketing plan with Zoom Advertising (who gave us most of a day of their top execs’ time pro bono), and fleshed it out over July and August into a marketing plan that forms the foundation of our efforts for the next 12 months.
  • 1 Aug 2013: We created and implemented a Facebook conversation plan for Paperight Young Writers’ Anthology. This meant creating several posts for every week, including beautiful graphics, scheduled to publish for the next six weeks on Facebook, all promoting the anthology. You can see the posts on our Facebook page.
  • 5 Aug 2013: We revised our rightsholder agreement, which was received with no negative feedback, and even a nice endorsement from top tech journalist Adam Oxford.
  • 8 Aug 2013: We officially finished Software Development Phase 3. This was a big update that included support for VAT-compliant invoices and statements. (See Dezre’s post on VAT.) It’s not glamorous, but massively useful and important for us, and it was really hard work.
  • 20 Aug 2013: We revised our privacy policy, spurred by some concerned feedback from Pearson who said it needed work. It really did: it was originally drafted by Nick, still an intern at the time, while bleary-eyed on an international flight. Sometimes you just have to get it done even if it’s not perfect!
  • 30 Aug 2013: We created a simple tillpoint checklist for stores. It was hard to do. The simplest things can be the trickiest to make.

outlet-cheat-sheet_20130829

Spreading the word

We’ve been getting around:

  • 28 June 2013: I spoke at the Education Week conference in Joburg, arguing that open-license publishing has more in common with commercial publishing than most think.
  • 6 Aug 2013: I went to Gauteng to present at the Accenture Innovation Index Awards (and got through to the finals on 10 Oct!)
  • 4 Jun 2013: In a blog post, I argued that it’s a myth that reading is dying among young people.
  • 26 June 2013: I spoke at Khayelitsha Chamber of Commerce meeting on the need for technology entrepreneurs to focus on simple solutions that solve today’s problems (not tomorrow’s).

RISO on board

Teacher-Paperight-Riso

We’ve entered into an exciting collaboration with copier manufacturer RISO, where they bundle a funded Paperight account with every colour printer sold to a South African school.

This gives us a powerful mechanism to engage with large schools and colleges, a simple message for the media, and a great tool for getting certain key publishers on board.

Loads of media coverage

(Special highlights in bold)

Our roadmap for the next 3 months

  • Our revenue targets are getting serious, so the focus is on bringing in bulk sales, mostly through getting sponsorships. We’re recruiting a salesperson, but meanwhile (and perhaps beyond), I’m going to focus more of my time on this, and delegating other responsibilities to the team.
  • We have a few more software updates to do: most minor but important tweaks, and one major addition: a much better, fully integrated outlets-finding maps, integrated in the UI with product pages.
  • Get our video production stream up and running with new full-time video intern.
HR

Nurturing the team

At Paperight we really do believe in nurturing each other wherever we can.  We assist each other projects, brainstorm as a team, motivate and challenge each other on various projects. Training each other was great fun and we were eager to share  our skill sets.

We shared our achievements and our plans over Skype on a daily basis, checking in with each other on our progress and keeping the team informed about what were busy with. Meetings take place on a weekly basis to go over what we have shipped  and planned to achieve in the next week. Monthly meetings with our mentors are an opportunity to see how we have progressed, make sure that we share the same focus and plan ahead.

We each have our own areas of functional authority which we use as a guideline for planning ahead. Generally though, our workload overlaps and we split the tasks according to who is available and most suited to the task.

Training workshops have included:

  • WordPress site building workshops (Arthur)
  • Basic business finance training (Arthur and Dezre)
  • HTML training (Arthur)
  • CSS training (Arthur)
  • SEO and social media training (Nick)
  • Spreadsheet training (Arthur)
  • An introduction to SA Publishing (Tarryn)
  • An introduction to Copyright (Tarryn)
  • InDesign/Photoshop (Nick)
  • Metadata management (Tarryn)
  • Productivity (Arthur)
  • Customer service (Yazeed)
  • Negotiation and sales (Arthur)
  • How paperight.com works (Arthur)
  • Defining your target market (Yazeed)
  • Google Analytics (Tarryn)
  • Managing personal tax (Arthur, Dezre)
  • Screencast videos (Philippa, Marie, Tarryn)
  • Mail merging (Arthur)
  • Base CRM (Tarryn)
  • URL shortening (Arthur)

Other crazy things we have done as a team:

  • The Shuttleworth Foundation behaviour questionnaire
  • Entering into writing competitions
  • Competing against Random House Struik in a soccer match

Most of the team were given code names:

  • Nick otherwise known as Nighthawk
  • Tarryn otherwise known as Terrorwolf
  • Dezre otherwise known as Deathray or Kim Possible
  • Marie otherwise known as Captain
  • Philippa otherwise known as Dr. Phil
  • Emma otherwise known as M
  • Arthur otherwise known as Arthvader or Arthur of the roundtable

Our favourite video links include:

Often-shared links and resources included:

Some favourite office games:

Favourite foods:

  • Bananas
  • Cake
  • Macaroni and cheese

Fun times.

Marketing

Adopt-a-copy-shop/Adopt-a-school Project

To increase Paperight study-material sales (and better understand our copy-shop partners), we decided as a team to individually adopt a registered Paperight copy shop and try to partner them with a local school. The aim was to test various methods of promotion (specifically to parents of high school students) and to simultaneously build close relationships with a small batch of copy shops that would ultimately become Paperight Premium Outlets in future. For more on that, read Yazeed’s entries.

Despite our best intentions, this project did not come together according to plan.

One of our major in-house hurdles has been finding the time to get out of the office, to spend time in our adopted copy shops, as well as visiting local schools on their behalf. We managed to find time to do so, but not easily and certainly not as often as we should have done.

Once we had identified schools to visit, we submitted briefs to Nick for personalised promotional materials. Specifically, we took posters and flyers to the schools highlighting educational materials (past exam papers, study guides and textbooks) available through their local Paperight registered copy shops, emphasising the copy shops’ competitively low pricing. The materials themselves were succinct enough to avoid confusion about how the Paperight/copy shop partnership works and the flyers doubled as ordering forms to cut down on the necessary steps to make a sale.

Once the posters and flyers were printed, we liaised with school secretaries for permission to bring them onto school campus. The posters were placed in obvious places, such as in the secretaries’ offices, in entrance lobbies, near school shops and near matric classrooms. Similarly, the flyers were given to matric class teachers to hand out to students in registration class.

more often than not the copy shop managers were either unwilling to do so or too busy to do so

Each team member managed to make the beginning steps to build the relationships, but we all found that we needed our chosen copy shops to really step up to sustain the partnership. However, more often than not the copy shop managers were either unwilling to do so or too busy to do so.

Apart from this, we found that our promotional materials led to only small spikes of sales. I believe this is directly related to the materials being present on the schools’ campuses and not visible enough to the students’ parents. I’m also quite sure that students made paper airplanes out of the flyers rather than giving them to their parents. The kinds of students who ultimately ended up in store buying past papers and study guides were typically the kind that did not need a flyer or poster to discover Paperight because they’re particularly proactive with regards to their studies. This failing on our part informed our marketing efforts that became the Matric Exam Campaign.

This project did not intend to change the schools’ official book purchasing protocols, but instead aimed to turn parents over to using Paperight . Ultimately, parents are the ones who have the most invested in their child’s success and it was on this personal interest that we hoped to ignite support for the Paperight project.

If I could pick out one overarching lesson learned from all this, I would say that the principal of any school sets the benchmark and with their support of a new initiative or supplier, the rest of school will fall into line. This has been proven by Yazeed’s wonderful work with Pelikan Park High School. Despite the difficulty of building a strong relationship like this, the rewards are manifold and certainly worth the work put it. More relationships like this could carry Paperight well into self-sustainability.

Admin and infrastructure, HR

Project 5: Team 2.0: closing report

This project is to extend two existing contracts, create two new positions based on new needs and priorities, and allow us to bring in more interns. In short, it’s a team refinement.

General report-back

This project set out to extend or create positions on the Paperight team:

  • Content Manager (Tarryn’s contract extended)
  • Communications Manager (Nick’s contract extended)
  • Office manager/bookkeeper (new position)
  • Outlet development manager (new position, modified from existing outlet relations manager)
  • Interns (new, two per month)

Extending Nick and Tarryn’s contracts has been an unmitigated success. They’ve continued to produce superb work and to lead thinking in the Paperight team.

For our office manager we hired Dezre Little, who within a few months we gave the broader title of financial manager. Dezre is an incredible member of the team, keeping our finances super organised, driving the process of identifying and appying for awards and funding opportunities, and keeping the office ship shape.

The role of outlet development manager went to Yazeed Peters, who’d been on contract as an Outlets Manager for five months previously. Yazeed has gone from strength to strength, leading the development especially of our relationships with the Jetline and Minuteman Press chains, and establishing our model for bulk school purchasing and book sponsorship.

Our internship model has brought us three more amazing team members: Philippa Dewey as a second Content Manager, Oscar Masinyana, now Reading Communities Manager, and Marie-Louise Rouget, now Marketing Coordinator.

Objectives achieved

Our objectives were:

  • new team structure more effective and streamlined
  • continue building on strengths (such as Tarryn’s impressive content-prep systems, and Nick’s fine design and media work)
  • new approaches to outlet development
  • office manager frees up staff, especially Arthur, from admin to focus their energies on their core responsibilities

These objectives were all achieved.

Objectives not achieved

None.

Measures of success

Before: “We expect to see faster, more focused strategic decisions being made regarding outlets (growth of outlets and use of Paperight by existing outlets). Paperwork and admin will be up to date (nothing should lie unattended for more than a week).”

After: This has been achieved.

Before: “We would like to also see a twofold increase in outlet rate of growth and rate of conversion to paid use of Paperight from late September.”

After: The stats below show that we more than exceeded our targets, but it took more than four months (we didn’t set a timeframe for our measures of success). Note: two outliers do affect the figures: the registration of forty Jetline stores as a chain in June 2012 skews the outlet registrations in May to August 2012; and a single large bulk sale of books in March 2013 has a large effect on the average revenue for January to April.

May to August 2012 (before):

  • Sales per month: $12.83
  • Outlet registrations per month: 31.75 (spike when entire Jetline chain registered at once)
  • Number of outlets starting to download paid books: 5 (average 1.25 per month)

September to December 2012 (immediately after):

  • Sales per month: $22.45
  • Outlet registrations per month: 3.25
  • Number of outlets starting to download paid books: 3 (average 0.75 per month)

January to April 2013 (longer after):

  • Sales per month: $78.23
  • Outlet registrations per month: 11
  • Number of outlets starting to download paid books: 13 (average 3.1 per month)

Before: “We would love to see, in addition, that this team can handle all customer support queries that come in.”

After: Achieved easily.

Budget

Original budget: R206500

Actual spend: R200681.87

Returned to pool: R5818.13

Item Budget Actual Return to Pool Comments
Content Manager 48000 48374.34 -374.24 PAYE and UIF
Communications Manager 42000 42374.45 -374.35 PAYE and UIF
Outlet Development Manager 42000 42374.45 -374.35 PAYE and UIF
Office Manager/Bookkeeper 42000 42374.34 -374.24 PAYE and UIF
Job Advertising 1000 0 1000
Laptops for ODM, OMB, Comms Manager 19500 18878.40 621.70
Interns 12000 6306 5694.10
TOTAL 206500 201595.87 5818.13

 

Outputs and deliverables

Pitched Report
A new team structure and core job descriptions will be formalised. Done. Areas of functional authority are kept for each team member on the Paperight wiki. Team members have reporting lines, which are intended to define ‘job coach’ relationships rather than task-based managerial relationships.
IP creation is minimal: contracts, job ads. Done.
Team members will create IP including strategy docs and project plans, internal admin docs, media and PR docs, designs in posters, flyers, website elements, etc. Ongoing. IP created is stored in our shared Dropbox folders, in Google Docs (paperight.com Google Apps accounts), and on our wiki, blog, and social media accounts.

 

Learnings

Paperight’s tightly knit, hard-working and productive team is the result of a careful choice of purpose-driven young people, and a supportive environment. As CEO, Arthur reads voraciously on management, and brings this learning to the team as constant, open experiments in running a team and building a business around that.

Exit/Sustainability/Viability

The team salaries will continue to be supported largely by Foundation funding while we worked towards self-sustainability in early 2015.

Conclusion

We have an excellent team that is continuing to grow in numbers and strength. This team spirit is self-sustaining in the way that a marriage is: as long as its members are willing to put in the work, every member of the team can contribute and be fulfilled doing do.

Next steps

The team is growing, so this is the first of a series of team-building projects at Paperight.

Admin and infrastructure

Project 4: Office Infrastructure: closing report

As the team grows, we’re moving to formal office space and setting up infrastructure that enables us to work more effectively.

General report-back

We’re very pleased with our office space and its facilities. EBW and Paperight knit really well together in the office space, and the shared expenses and office maintenance responsibilities have been time and cost effective.

There were a few teething issues to sort out (e.g. blinds not installed, door sticking). But these were easily resolved.

Internet connectivity has been good and stable 99 percent of the time, with limited interruptions.

Storage space and filing systems are still a work in progress. We have found a system that currently works for EBW and Paperight.

Space is becoming quite tight and at present we do not have space for additional Paperight team members without organising more office furniture.

Total office costs did work out higher overall than expected, and EBW has been carrying the extra load. Paperight is paying much less per person for the space than EBW. From September 2013 a new project pitch will include a higher payment for rent, utilities, and contribution to office expenses.

Objectives achieved

The office space provided has been sufficient to house Paperight’s team of eight people. It has also worked well for Paperight meetings. Desk space is now full and if the team grows any bigger we will need to reorganise the office area.

Objectives not achieved

All objectives have been met and the team is very happy with their working environment.

Measures of success

Before: “We expect to see us working efficiently together in a space that suits collaboration and brings an air of comfortable professionalism. Setting up and settling in will be disruptive and have teething issues.”

After: The team have been working well together and have found ways of communication and sharing space that works for everyone. No major teething issues were experienced.

Before: “We’d like to find that existing team members feel more productive in the new space, and settle in quickly with minimum fuss.”

After: The team settled in straight away and productivity definitely increased.

Before: “We’d love to be able to walk in on the first day of occupation and start working; and to feel confident that the office is the ideal place to pitch our services to prospective client organisations.”

After: The team were able to start working straight away, on the same day that they arrived at the office. The team are still happy with the office environment, the view and productivity levels are still high.

Budget

Original budget: R106500.00

Actual spend: R92051.64

Returned to pool: R6282.61

Item Budget Actual Return to pool Comments
Office Furniture 7500 7500 0
Rent and costs 88000 82230.27 5769.83
Consumable stationary 5500 5918.89 -418.79
Telephone 5500 4568.23 931.87
TOTAL 106500 100217.39 6282.61

 

Outputs and deliverables

The office was set up with a combined effort of both Paperight and EBW staff. Paperight has grown during the course of the year and has taken up eight work stations out of a possible ten.

Learnings

Overall this office set up has been very successful. In future we could look at more shelving and storage space for Paperight’s stationery, legal and accounting records.

Exit/Sustainability/Viability

The contract for this project has come to an end and has been extended in project 8. The agreement with EBW is still strong and our relationship with the landlord is good.

Conclusion

We are very happy with the results of making this move and have no doubt that it has been extremely beneficial for Paperight.

Next steps

Our lease will continue with EBW in project 8. We have started looking at potential adjustments that can be made within the office to make space for additional team members. We will look at shelving space as well.

Content

Updates to the privacy policy, and move over to DocRaptor

By August we had a large backlog of documents to be uploaded. We began the process of prepping and uploading these. We also started scrubbing HTML for setworks (including Shakespeare plays), in order to reformat these as A5 booklets, with no advertising, or line-marks. The clean HTML would be put through the converter to create cleanly re-formatted documents.

I briefed Nick on posters advertising exam packs and study guides, and Dez and I delivered these to schools in the southern suburbs (this involved my contacting schools’ academic heads and arranging a time for drop off etc). We also updated our privacy policy , and informed publishers of all agreement changes.

Near the end of the month Arthur asked Shaine to look into using DocRaptor instead of Prince XML for document conversions. This would save us a massive ongoing expense, but required an update to all CSS due to compatibility issues.

Publisher registrations

  • Palanga Publishing (7/8/2013)
  • Jermaine M Charles (12/8/2013)
  • Xhosa Fundis (19/8/2013)
  • Berg+Bach (30/8/2013)
Design, Marketing, Personal

Lessons learned from distributed in-store advertising

We discovered soon after we began to create outlet- and product-specific posters and send them out via our newsletter that they made a difference to sales. In fact, a survey done by Yazeed at one point showed that outlets that advertised with posters had more success than others. (This, in retrospect, is incredibly obvious, but we thought people might have been driven to stores or to buy products by being encouraged to do so by… well, I’m not sure, actually.)

When Marie arrived in April 2013, it freed me up to do more material design work. Marie set about calling outlets to find out more about them and to make sure they were on board with our system. We made sure that, when she called an outlet, she asked if they wanted any materials made for them for the upcoming matric exam season. As part of our offering, we would design posters and flyers. These materials included price lists on them for up to 50 of our matric products, which we could change for every outlet that wanted them. There was sound reasoning behind this, initially: we assumed that, if we did the heavy lifting for outlets and gave them something specific to them and ready-made for them, they would take to using materials with more enthusiasm, and would get some outlets that didn’t have design capabilities to be able to engage with and to advertise Paperight better.

This was a pretty disastrous idea, for a number of reasons:

  1. The amount of requests for materials that we got was overwhelming, and we only had one designer: me, who had many other responsibilities to take care of.
  2. Outlets sometimes weren’t even too sure of their own pricing structures, or would arbitrarily change things, and so would ask us to make multiple revisions to the same materials because they couldn’t be bothered to tell us what their prices were and, even if they did, tended not to stick to them.
  3. Manually changing 50 or so prices for every flyer and poster, and copy-pasting logos and contact details, was mindnumbing and uncreative work. I felt like I missed a month of my life around July, as every day was the same task, in a sense.
  4. Outlets didn’t buy into the materials as much as we hoped. Some never printed them, effectively making the work a waste of time.

These problems piled the misery on me, with the result that I entered into quite a deep slump for a few weeks. I began to resent my work and what I was doing and, even worse, the people I was supplying materials for. The work was repetitive and seemed to have little effect on sales and/or engagement with products with outlet owners. I realised that something drastic had to change.