Customers leave when they are forced to deal with untrained people, or even trained people who change frequently. We will get more and more jobs off the Internet, and more of our proofing will be done remotely, as well. We re only doing remote proofing with one client as of now, though. Some of our file sizes are still too big to do effective file transfer, especially if we can drive over and pick up a zip disk. We will fight most attempts to depersonalize our services, though, until it becomes evident that sales calls are less convenient to clients than accessing us on-line would be.
Most people still buy from people.
I sure would, because it is one of the few businesses that has a fairly low economic barrier to entry that isn t retail. I would also prefer to see someone get real sales experience somewhere else before making the move into printing.