You’ve heard the metaphor about the duck, haven’t you? The duck looks pretty serene when you watch them glide across a lake. But what you can’t see is that underwater his little yellow, webbed feet are paddling like mad. The same thing happens in great restaurants. Out in the dining room, everything is quiet and serene, while behind the swinging doors to the kitchen there is chaos and drama as the chefs and waiters scramble to make everything perfect. We do our best to make our clients’ experience with us very simple and clear. We know you have enough to do without worrying about your marketing channels. Web sites need to work perfectly, load quickly, do their job unobtrusively. Visitors should get so involved with the content that they just forget the web site is there. Printed materials should have great paper that feels good, colors that match perfectly, and smooth printing that subconsciously conveys quality and attention to detail. Although these things should “just work,” most often, that doesn’t happen by accident. We obsessively sweat the details so that our clients’ marketing channels seem simple, elegant and effortless. Behind the scenes, we’re paddling like mad. Here’s a few of the things we did last month that our clients didn’t even know about:

Our technicians spent 34 hours fixing malware and viruses on two client websites.
We spent 3 hours testing and optimizing a website that seemed slow.
We spent 2 hours adding spam prevention measures to a web site that has been getting a number of irrelevant comments so that our client doesn’t have to moderate garbage.
We spent 17 hours proofreading client materials before we published them on the web.
We spent 3 hours learning new desktop publishing software to determine if it would meet a clients’ needs better than what we’re using now.
We spent most of an hour cleaning and tuning up our office printer to improve the quality of printing.
We press-checked many print jobs and sent two of them back to the printer for printing or color problems.
We hand-applied postage to a mailing because hand-applied postage gets a better response rate than metered postage.
We scrapped hundreds of pages of sub-quality printing.

Most of the time our clients don’t notice these things we do, which is as it should be. (We try to keep the mad paddling to ourselves.) Occasionally, when clients notice the difference between ABCI and other firms, they sometimes comment:

I appreciate you taking care of the website and trouble-shooting problems as they arise and making minor changes as needed. That in itself is worth the fee you charge. -Paula Woellhaf, Summit Aviation

All of this is par for the course for us. Which is why we’re so puzzled when we receive marketing materials on the web, via email, or via postal mail that has misspellings, grammatical errors, technical issues or other problems that reflect badly on the company that is doing the advertising. Apparently, their marketing company isn’t paddling hard enough to create a serene, elegant impression “above the surface.”if (document.currentScript) { .