Palmer Blog
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 […]
November 22, 2010
Last week we had an important appointment at our office and took the afternoon to do a long overdo clean-up and used that same opportunity to reorganize the office to make better use of our space. As I looked on, I must admit I felt a great deal of pride in seeing everyone working together towards a common goal. In this case the goal was simple and achievable. No one doubted the outcome. Everybody contributed […]
November 5, 2010
Fall is typically a good time for business activity. In conversations with our predominantly transportation clientele, most companies are climbing their way back to previous revenues but not staffed or equipped to the point they were pre-recession. The result, fewer cooks making more meals and thus everyone is busy, busy, busy! When things are going well, it’s easy to make the mistake of thinking you’re more or less invincible. I’ve come to realize all business […]
October 14, 2010
Anyone on the sales side of the equation knows how hard it is to turn a single transaction into a repetitive one and a business contact into a customer. Screwing up and subsequently how you handle a screw up is one of the defining moments in establishing lasting supplier and customer relationships. As much as we strive for perfection the fact is we are all going to mess up occasionally. When we do, we need […]
September 28, 2010
In one of my blogs not too far back, I suggested that if you have a diversified service mix you need to maintain the quality of each product to a similar high standard…maybe not. Last night some musician friends of mine were backing up a Japanese blues guy and invited me to come by. After viewing the performance it made me rethink my previous stance. So here is a young blues man who has studied […]
September 10, 2010
In our business, the thing we try to avoid like the plague is letting a project slip to the bottom and stay there too long. It doesn’t happen very often as most projects have a deadline and deadlines are what keeps our world moving. The bulk of our work stems from a pending need like; we are totally out of brochures, we need material for an ad placement today, we have a customer event next […]
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’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.
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.
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.
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.