At Cardphile, we're big enough to get the job done right, but not so big we can't listen and respond quickly to your feedback. Read our latest tale from the business holiday card front lines:

Simply put, the annual SMPS Build Business Conference is a must for today’s AEC marketing professional—and it’s not too late to register to attend this year’s SMPS conference in Chicago, August 24 to 26, 2011.

You've been asking, so we did the research: How to write a professional business thank you card. We'll tell you what to include, what to avoid, and then go on to the specifics of salutations and closings.

It's time to make business personal again - learn what one of our engineering customers discovered about nurturing relationships during a long term project:
Proper care of your customer doesn’t end when you get the contract—it’s almost more important to nurture your business relationship during the project than it is upon completion, especially in the case of long term and complex collaborations. We all know that you usually get more of what you reward, so be sure to recognize and “reward” client behavior.
One of our larger engineering customers kept re-ordering a custom engineering thank you card we had designed for them using their logo, and they were ordering to the tune of about 100 of them each month! Needless to say, that’s a few more than most firms usually order and we were curious. It turns out that they were using these mighty little business note cards to thank (“reward”) client team members at all levels for their timely follow up to questions, meetings, and requests for information.

In spite of the fact that Americans seem to take fewer vacations than the rest of the world, many of us still face the challenge of how to connect regularly with clients, especially over the summer. It seems to be even more difficult to make regular contact when we're distracted by the heat, the kids, and the sun.

The Problem:
 

Have a look in Cardphile's New Arrivals section and you'll find one of our new architectural holiday cards - "Retro Metro Perspective Order!" (AEC 3019). Actually, you don't even have to be in the architectural profession to have fun sending out this holiday greeting card for your business - you just have to be a little adventurous.

The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan got us to thinking. First of all, if you haven't hugged your structural engineer lately, you should probably do that now. While their jobs aren't the most glamorous, their work in Japan, along with some pretty stringent building codes, clearly saved many lives. And since Cardphile's holiday greeting card design and printing facility in Portland shares a similar earthquake risk zone, we took some notes and decided it was time to take a good look at our warehouse.

Short and sweet, here it is: Cardphile's list of Top 10 Favorite Presentation Tips.

Don't you hate it when you make the mistake you should never make?

A recent request from one of our architecture customers prompted a little research into creating successful presentations and proposals—and we thought we’d share what we learned in the process.