The power of partnering

I’ve spent most of this week at the SGIA trade show in the booth of our business partner Mutoh America. Over the last year or so, we have developed the ColorVerify product line and this is the first show where we have demonstrated the solution live to attendees. My role has been to do two or three presentations a day for the audience that showed up. It wouldn’t have been a success without partners and here’s why.

The business partner

The obvious partners in this story are my company ColorMetrix and Mutoh America. Together we’ve built a great solution and it was finally time to start showing it off at this show. As the larger company in this scenario, Mutoh brings credibility and a customer base to the offering. ColorMetrix provides expertise in an area our partner is not necessarily known for.

The partners behind the scenes

For months the ColorMetrix and Mutoh marketing teams have been working together to make these presentations great. A few weeks ago, we spent a day together in Phoenix shooting video for a loop that we ran between the live demos. We’ve worked together to develop a 15-minute presentation that provides useful information about color process control and all the basics about the ColorVerify solution.

A great team makes you look good and deserves thanks

I’ve become the official spokesman for the solution; not by design but more my accident. Since it happened by accident, I was part of the team all along and got to see how hard everyone worked to make this launch a success. The picture with this post shows me delivering the presentation to one of our audiences of about 20 people. It would be easy for me to take all the credit, but the reality is that it’s two teams of people working together.

I’ve had to do these things on my own before and I can tell you having support people at the show is a huge benefit. Knowing that marketing people were scanning badges and providing additional information to attendees allowed me to focus on giving the best presentation I could.

So if this story has a moral, it’s to thank our team as I’m about to. Thanks to Shelby Sapusek, Michelle Pugh, David Conrad, Ron Dahl, Michael Litscher, Chris Brown and all the others who have worked tirelessly to make ColorVerify the great offering it is turning out to be. You make my job presenting this winning combination easy.