"Merry Christmas!" said the Grinch

The accompanying photo is a shot of me during my recent “Holiday Travel”. As you can tell, I’m not the biggest fan. Don’t get me wrong – I thoroughly enjoy getting out there and visiting our current customers and future customers alike – but I’ve got certain “travel rules” that I like to abide by and all it takes is one little snafu such as “low fog ceiling” to have a domino effect on those carefully laid plans and turn me into, well, you can see. To compound the delightful challenges of the airports, delays, rerouting and planes with malfunctioning thermostats onboard, though I wasn’t traveling to Whoville, my recent trips had me heading up to the frozen tundra of Minnesota (on a day when the temperature was minus 5 degrees. That was without the wind-chill) and Kansas City (which was a balmy 19 degrees by comparison). For anyone who has done any amount of flying, you probably have some horror stories of your own. Before I became President of Grafika, I spent some time in my younger years as a salesman and would spend 6 months out of the year on the road, so my “travel rules” are really nuggets of wisdom that are borne out of many, many months spent hopping across the globe. I’ve since had to get my sales team together and clarify some of my rules. Namely, we travel to WARM places during the winter months and the colder places during the SUMMER months. So if your company is in:

• Tampa, Florida --- let’s get together!
• California, it’s high time we have a lunch together and talk.
• Arizona? I think we need to get together to strategize while doing some triathlon training…like tomorrow!

However, if you are in Alaska and any place that has a temperature with a minus sign in front of it: bundle up, build a fire, and let’s chat when things thaw out a bit, shall we? Better yet, did you know that Sinking Spring, PA is lovely this time of year? Our door is always open. Of course I’m kidding around (sort of). We are blessed and really enjoy the opportunity to serve customers in all corners of the US and beyond. And while I may have dressed up like the Grinch (which was really this year’s Halloween theme at the Elzer House), and travel can sometimes steal some of the joy from my holidays, I’m really the Grinch at the end of the story: the one with a thankful heart and a giving attitude. Thank you for a great year in 2009 and please let us know what Grafika can do to help build our partnerships into the future.

Happy Holidays (and easy traveling) to one and all.