Palmer Blog
March 28, 2011
I’m looking out my window at a snowy day in Mississauga. It would have been a reasonably good weather day for March in small town New Brunswick where I grew up. But here and now, a little snow can shut this city down. Twenty minute drives can end up being 2 hours. Hard to believe I had my motorcycle out for a spin on the first day of spring just two days ago. Life is […]
March 21, 2011
Every department, company and democracy has a leader for a good reason. The one thing most of us would agree on, is that with any given issue there are as many opinions as there are stars in the sky… and someone needs to make the final call. I like the sayings “a camel was a horse designed by committee” and “too many cooks spoil the broth”, and of course to counter that “two heads are […]
March 15, 2011
Although nobody is jumping up and down with joy, we find the general mood in the transportation sector to be positive as we shuffle into 2011. There have been a few acquisitions, quite a bit of shuffling at the senior management level and the driver shortage topic has come to the forefront once again. Does anybody know where this economy is going? Not really. But one thing is for sure… in the next few years […]
January 28, 2011
There are notable advantages and disadvantages related directly to the size of your organization. As a small company, it would be helpful at times to think like a bigger firm and have more processes and procedures in place. The opposite is always true; with larger companies favouring process over the kind of entrepreneurial decision making that made their companies a success in the first place. It’s basically a spin on the economic theory of marginal […]
January 25, 2011
Although there are not too many Donald Trump’s or Tiger Woods amongst us, we’ve all set out to accomplish certain things and have achieved them. Whether it’s good health, financial security, a better education or a nicer home for our family, we know the importance of having dreams and making progress towards them. What a recession teaches us is that it’s one trick to get there and a whole other trick to hang on. A lot of […]
December 23, 2010
A seasonal thank you to our valued customers We would like to take this time to thank you for your continued support. It is truly appreciated by each and every member of our PM team. This year, we have decided to donate those monies traditionally spent over the holiday season to Cancer Research, in the name of Bob Hatfield. Bob recently passed away from cancer at the age of 51. He was Lee Palmer’s first […]
December 23, 2010
A short while ago, before I left for 1 week’s vacation we tried an experiment. I decided not to run my business from afar and trust my very capable team to keep the balls bouncing and the wheels rolling. We drew days from a hat and 5 members from our team got to be “Boss for the day”. No great amount of thought went into it other than determining a fair way of selecting those […]
December 10, 2010
This summer, Tim Horton’s introduced a new procedure where the person taking your order got a little more personal, “Hello my name is Debbie” were the words you heard as you drove up to the area where you initiated your first cup of java for the day. I waited for the new procedure to fall off but after several months the location I frequent has kept up the pace of being as warm and comforting […]
I started Palmer Marketing at age 34 in January of 1988. I had 2 kids in diapers and a crazy idea about running my own company. I came from an entrepreneurial family and had no good reason to believe it wasn’t possible and as it happens, it was.
I’m definitely a country girl. I didn’t grow up in an actual town, village or hamlet. It was more like the middle of somewhere along Highway 28, surrounded by trees. Many thanks goes to my high school art teacher, Mr. Edwards, for inspiring me to choose this career path. With the realization that I actually could create art for a living, college lured me away from country life to the big city. Kitchener, to be exact, to study Graphic Design & Advertising at Conestoga College. Talk about beginning an adventure and a culture shock! Not staring at people with purple, green or some other wildly coloured hair was a bit of a challenge. City buses (lol thinking back), who knew they only stopped on the same side of the street as the bus stop sign!? Lesson learnt.
I love my work like I love summer. Why not? Summer is when I get to play my favorite sport—golf! Playing artist is a lot like playing golf. You need to be calm and cool under pressure if you ever hope to keep the ball in play; that’s rare for an artist. My best shots happen when I talk less and concentrate more; that’s not so rare for an artist.
I am the 8th of 9 children raised in Essex County outside of Windsor, Ontario. We lived on a gravel road, no sidewalks and our greatest adventures were in our own backyard. I still have friends I made in grade 1 and continue to stay in touch today. After graduating from the University of Windsor with a Bachelor of Commerce degree, I moved to the big city of Toronto and have worked most of my career in the printing industry. I got to know the folks at Palmer Marketing as a key supplier to them for over a decade.
To say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree would be an understatement in my family; at least when it comes to picking a career path. There isn’t a person in my immediate family that hasn’t at some point or another worked in the IT field. I guess there’s something in our DNA that pulls us towards computers.