Jim’s Slide Scanning Business Blog

After some well deserve vacations in August, summer is winding down. Orders are winding up!

Late in 2010 I took in a very large order of 35MM slides to scan.  This customer, from Ohio and on a road trip to Virginia,  drove several hundred miles out of his way to deliver his slides to me. He was not willing to put his many thousands of into the mail.  He referred to his slides as “his life.”

The scanning and enhancing of his photos on slide film is nearly complete.  Since the time of his delivery, demand for my services has risen, resulting in a backlog of work.  I’ve put notices on my Web sites indicating I won’t be taking orders from “new” customers for about a month.

I consider myself fortunate to have my service in such great demand.  Due to my limited resources I can’t put work out as fast as it’s coming in.  Already I spoken with several people who are willing to wait a few weeks before shipping there orders.

After the very busy last few months, I’m looking forward to the usual  mid-summer slow down.  BTW, I won’t be taking in orders for the month of July, 2011.

My preferred method for contact by customers is a phone call.   However, not all are callers are ready to ship a batch of slides when they call.  Some are looking for services I do not provide.

Robert called from Maine today.  He has about 1400 negative film strips.  Most are black and white and most are 35mm half-frame images. He was looking for someplace he could drive his negatives to since he was not willing the risk of shipping his photos.  I explained that if he changed his mind and was willing to ship, he should inquire at Pixmonix.com.

Another caller today wanted 35mm slides created from digital files. This is the opposite of the service I provide.  I referred him to Iqimaging.com.

Last week a couple of callers were looking for slides to DVD specifically for viewing on television.  I did my best to steer them in the right direction.

The phone is ringing off-the-hook with callers needing my slide scanning services.  Orders from new customers are increasing.

Local customers who want to avoid mailing their slides are a constant source of business.  Today a local woman delivered her slides for conversion to PowerPoint.

Over the last few days order have come in from New Hampshire, California, Texas and several from Massachusetts.

Business is GOOD!

Many callers tell me that they like my Web site and they like the fact that when they call, they speak to the one person who’ll do all the work on their order.

After the usual Christmas rush, incoming orders slowed to a slower-than-average pace in January

Over the last week, incoming orders have increased, back to their usual frequency

Tonight a local ophthalmologist dropped off his slides.  He’ll be doing a presentation this month and needs his medical slides converted to digital.

In December 2009, a large slide scan order came in from Texas, in addition to many smaller orders from around the country.   This kept me quite busy.  A brief, but much welcomed lull in orders occurred over the Christmas to New Years week.

Tonight I’m working on an order of 150 35MM slide scans for a repeat customer who, over the last 2 years has sent a batch of 100-150 slide every other month or so.

He has his slides converted to digital for presentations using a digital projector.  He likes bright, high-saturation images so I give his scans a saturation boost, in addition to the usual improvements.

 This year’s low month was May and sales / orders have increased every month since.  This could be accounted for by an upswing in the economy.  Each year, Novemeber and December are busy months with “Christmas present” slides to digital conversions.

Business is good!

I just got a call from George in Virginia.  He’s planning to send me a tray of slides to scan as a test batch.

George indicated that mine is the second service he’s trying.  He was not happy with the first because many of his scans were dark and he had to work on the scans himself to improve the quality.  He also indicated some of his slides were lost.

I won’t name the first company he used here, but it was a low cost scan service provider which sends the work out of the country.  George learned the hard way that the lowest price is not always the best choice.

I’m seeing an increase in slide scan orders over the last few weeks.  After the annual mid-summer slowdown, orders are picking up again.

I just got of the phone with Sandy in Atlanta.  She’s got about 150 126 format slides which she’ll be sending next week.

Some of the many orders this month have come from:

• John, a local entrepreneur who’s planning a digital slide show for his daughter’s upcoming wedding.
• Jean-Marie, a repeat customer.  Jean is an author who has me scan her slides from Central America, some of which go into her books.
• Kathleen in Taunton MA had me scan about 425 of her slides to preserve the family memories.
• Ann, from Plymouth MA had me digitize her slides of the quilts she has made.
• Mike W. from Redwood City CA had me scan several hundred of his slides showing the theater projects he’s involved with.

This home-office-based business has been a blessing for me, my family and my customers!

I was recently asked “How’s the business doing?”  I can say that it seems growth of my slide scanning business has slowed just bit over the last few months.   That being said, sales seem pretty close to even with what they were last year, according to QuickBooks.

After almost 10 years of providing slide scanning services, I’ve gathered a large customer base.  Many of my customers send me slides in batches, so a lot of the orders I receive are from repeat customers.

A large part of the success of my business is due to my pages doing well on the search engines, for many different search strings.  Part of the reason for this, is my publishing of lots of not-for-profit pages to the Web, with most of them linking to my scanning pages.  My main scanning page has LOTS of information (and words people search for.)  One of my high traffic pages is my slide scanning tips page where I share some of the logic of the process.

Since I do the scanning work part-time from my home-office, it is not my only source of income.  I’ve been working as a machinist and assembler in a large manufacturing plant for over 30 years.

I get many calls from people looking to convert their slides to PowerPoint presentations and I’m currently enjoying the number 1 spot on Google for the search term “slides to powerpoint.”  That position varies over time.

Sometimes I get swamped with scanning orders, but as I’ve mentioned in a previous blog entry, the inflow of work is often quite close to my capacity to complete and ship orders out.  It’s rare that I don’t have orders in-house.  About every 3 or4 months there might be 1 0r 2 days where no orders are in progress. Except for July…

Speaking of July, as I’ve done in previous years, I plan to shut down the slide scanning for the entire month including the first week of August this year.

Today I added a link in the blogroll to Steve Bennet’s blog, related to his scanning business, Pixmonix.