The Best Printer for Small Business and Managing Customer Privacy

The Small business show episode 339 for Wednesday, August 4, 2021. Greetings folks and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co where we are always small business ing. Sponsors for this episode include bam b.comsmall that's b a m b e.comsmall where you can schedule your free HR audit and ladderlife.comsbs where you can visit today to see if you are instantly approved for term life insurance. We will talk more in depth about each of those in a few moments here. For now, small Businessing here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I am Shannon Jean. How are you, sir?

I'm doing all right, man. How are you?

I'm doing great, man.

Good. Cool.

Yeah. Out here in the nice weather out here, we actually got a little rain today in California, which is crazy odd. Even during the winter we don't get much. So it was, it was, it was nice.

That's good, that's good. Yeah. Hey man, we got a question in about what's the best printer for my small business?

Oh yeah, that's a, that's a good one.

Yeah. And I don't know, I know a few businesses that have gone totally paperless. Uh, most of us have not. And I, I certainly put myself in the not paperless category. There are a few things we still print here and still some things we print at the house too. So. So I figured let's talk about you. Yeah. You still use printers in your space?

I do. You know, I, I have a love hate relationship with them. Probably like many people certainly, it's certainly if, if you looked up, you know, the worst technology ever, it printers must come up in the top 10 Google things, you know.

Well, what kind of printers are we talking about here?

Yeah, well, so I use a few different kinds. I mean, I still use an inkjet, but I switched up my whole thing after using all. Go ahead.

No, I was going to say I inkjets, I agree with you that they are the worst. If there was a period of time because ink is such a weirdly priced commodity with such a profit margin. There was a time where the way I bought ink for my printer was I went to Walmart once a year or so. Whenever I ran out of ink, I would go to Walmart and I would buy whatever printer they had for 20 bucks and it would come with ink and I would use it until the ink ran out and then I would look online to see what it was going to cost me to replace the ink. And I'd go back to Walmart and I'd buy another printer for 20 bucks. That's how I bought ink for my inkjet printers for probably four or five years. Yeah, it was the only way. And now I don't, I don't keep inkjets in the house.

I like inkjets for a few reasons, but the I have found a solution.

Okay.

And that is the Epson Ecotank Inkjet. Total different concept. You know, giant reservoirs of ink that you just fill up with bottles of reasonably priced ink that's readily available. You can find all kinds of discounts on ebay on factory ink. You know, Epson stuff, the thing is just a beast. It always prints. The quality's great. One of the things I do with this, you know, inkjet is I do marketing stuff that goes in boxes or, you know, mails out, that kind of thing. And I really like to do short run stuff like that because every time I order 500, 1,000, 10,000 copies of whatever, as soon as I get it, I want to make some change and I'm kind of stuck it there. So I really like it. I think Epson nailed it. The inkjet, problem solving, you know, it's air print, everything prints to it, your phone, you know, whatever it is. So from that aspect, I really like it. Every other printer or every other inkjet I think is garbage just for that ink issue.

Yeah. Okay. The last time that I researched this and decided just not to get an inkjet, and I'll talk about that in a minute. The Ecotank was definitely. That floated to the top of the list. It was kind of pricey compared to inkjets. But again, up front, you pay a.

Little more for it.

Right. Zooming out a little bit. It's, it's, it's a better way to go.

Yeah, it's a game changer.

Yeah. So is that the only printer that you have?

No. So I, the other printer that, you know, I just live and die by is a label printer. Not a label maker, but a printer that I can print address labels, especially shipping, if you're shipping anything, you know, I mean, if you're doing high volume with FedEx or UPS, they'll bring you a whole system to your office, of course, and give you a high end label printer to help you ship more. But you know, now that I'm, I'm more working from my office at home and shipping, you know, less volume each day. Although I do ship every day. I have a Dymo, you know, label writer 4XL. It's a thermal printer.

Yeah.

Thing. It just works. You can find inexpensive thermal labels. There's never any ink.

Of course I was going to say. So with thermal labels there's no ink. It's. It's just in that sense it's like a label maker where it's, it's thermal, thermal.

It's heating up the label paper, this thermal paper and, and burning the, you know, the image into the paper and.

So, so that way if the label gets wet, it doesn't wash off.

Doesn't matter. Yeah. And it's, it's, you know, it prints barcodes and QR codes on everything. And I mean I use it every single day. They make some wireless ones. I don't have one of those. I just do it through my airprint on my Mac. But you know, that's connected to the network. But they work great. And I think you just have. And now how about you? You. Are you a laser printer guy?

I am all laser printer all the time here. Yeah. In, in fact the laser printer that I, I replaced, well, I added a new laser printer. I replaced the one that was in my office and moved it to the house. So the old laser printer. And when I say the old laser printer, it's this HP multifunction laser printer. I'm a big fan of multifunction printers. Yep. You know, print, copy, scan, fax. Right, like that. That I find to be very valuable to have around. The HP one that I moved to the house. It might be older than my son who is 19 now, but it's certainly older than I've. It's more than 16 years old because we moved into this house 16 years ago and I brought it with me. That's awesome. The only reason I replaced it, it still prints fine from everything but the software to scan from it hasn't really worked on the Mac in. I was able to make it work up until about a year ago. And then Apple changed some things that made old software not run anymore. But HP hasn't updated the software for that printer in, I don't know, let's say five years. It's probably more like eight. And they like. That's fine. That printer doesn't owe me anything. Like I said, It's 16 plus years. I can still get toner for it. Toner is super cheap. It cost me like 12 bucks or something and it prints like a charm. I replaced it with a Lexmark multifunction printer. Still monochrome black and white or grayscale laser printer. I. And there are color ones, but I paid 275 bucks for this one. I'll put the model in the show notes. It's the MB3442ADW. Don't worry about the model number that I got. Worry about what I specked out. Right. A black and white multifunction laser printer. Because the models change constantly. This is true of inkjets too. Right. You just like you mentioned the ecotank. Don't worry about the model you have. Just worry about getting the ecotank. Whatever. Today's model that fits for you.

Yeah. Look at the functionality and inside.

Yeah. Because they changed all the time. But this thing's great. And like I said, 275 bucks. The one feature. Well, it adds two features that my old printer didn't have. Number one, it would work wirelessly although it has an ethernet port. And so I just plug it into my router. It does support airprint and all of that. My old one doesn't, but my synology router does. So I just, I use that to airprint to my old printer which is fine. But this one prints double sided and.

Now that's a big deal.

It's a game changer. I had no idea. I would not have gone out of my way to buy a printer that prints double sided. But now I would highly recommended we print like ad contracts that come in. They're usually two page deals. Sometimes they're four or five page deals. To be able to consolidate that down onto one piece of paper.

Oh yeah, that's great, dude.

It's huge. I love it. It's fantastic. It's. I never thought I would care, but clearly you can hear how excited I am. I care. Yeah, it's good. That's good.

That is great. Yeah. Yeah. And it's critical. The, the thing about printers is, you know, they just need to work. When they stop working, that's when everything goes to hell, you know, and your productivity primarily and you got to fix things and all that kind of stuff. And so finding a good brand that works for you is. Is important.

I think so. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It's it. Yeah. Like I said, look at the features. Don't drive yourself crazy looking for the specific models that we have. Just get what, what works for you. So. Feedbackusiness show. Co if you have any questions about this or if you have a printer to recommend or a model to recommend, we'd love to. We'd love to hear from you. Feedbackusiness Show. In fact, we heard from listener James at FeedbackusinessShow co. He asked us, have you guys done a show on trademarks? I don't recall it. And when I searched your website, I didn't see anything. If you did, if you have, can you point me in the right direction? We haven't. If you didn't, can you put it on the list? So we sort of had, but not really. When we talked last week with Eric, I think it was last week with Eric Benavides, we talked about patents which have similarities. Yeah. A couple of weeks ago. Similarities to trademarks in some of the processes that you go through to get there. But. But they're not the same. And so we do. We should talk about this. I've sort of been through. Have you been through it, Shannon?

I have been through it a couple of times. It's. It definitely is worth talking about. I'm shocked that we haven't done a show on this. So that's the power of giving us a nudge there@feedbackusinessshow.co to let us know what you'd like to hear about. So I'll share my knowledge, but we certainly would like to learn more. If you know, you have experience trademarking your own business and other things, or if you're in that business of trademarking, we would love to hear from you. Feedbackusinessshow co.

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Yes.

But I'm supposed to be speaking on privacy as it relates to podcasts here. And privacy is an important thing for your business, don't you think, Shannon?

I think it's. It's critically important, but I also think that we need to focus on the simplicity side of it. You know, we came up with this topic when we were doing the show last week about simplicity and not, you know, and being careful about complexity creep in in your business.

Yeah.

And so I'd love to go at it and dig deeper into it, but keeping that focus on, you know, how can we keep things simple but also learn how to build trust and credibility with our customers by showing them that they, you know, we value their privacy, of course, but we also value their time and their intelligence. And I guess a great. A good place to start is a privacy policy, right. We. On your website, we need to have one that's good to tell your customers what you're doing with their data when they're entering stuff in. But, you know, do you need a full page or two pages that no one is going to read to tell people that you're. What you're going to do with their. Their data? And I like this. You know, this goes back to my terms and conditions thing where I just really like to keep it to one or two sentences, because as a small business, you know, having all these words is not going to protect you if something goes wrong. You need to take good care of people. And from a privacy perspective, you know, how about something like, we will only use your data to fulfill your orders and offer you incredible customer service as it is related to your order.

Period.

That's it.

I like it. I like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that. No, that's good. That's good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, definitely, you know, looking at ways to. Can you keep it that simple and still be complying with, you know, these rules and everything that we're going to talk a little bit more about now?

I think. Yeah. I mean, you need to accept. I need to accept. And I think we all do that if we order something from Amazon. Amazon knows, even living within the confines of the privacy policy that you just stated there, the company you buy from knows what you've bought from them. They also probably know what you've looked at on their website and haven't bought from them. Right. So they are going to use that data to suggest things that you might be interested in. That's a. To me, that's an acceptable use of that data where it gets unacceptable. Let's say we're using Amazon as the store is when Facebook not only gets that data from Amazon, but puts a tracking pixel at Amazon and gets that data in real time. That's really. That's where things get creepy. And that's why we're in the scenario we're in. Because that sort of thing has been happening for the last, I don't know, 15 years. And the data we've collected. The data. And I say we. I mean the royal we as humankind, that data that we've collected on each other goes too far, I think.

I agree. Yeah. Yep, yep. I mean, and it's. It's okay, like you said, for where you're shopping and then they can make recommendations based on what you've purchased and. Oh, this goes with that. I get that. It's.

Facebook doesn't need to know what I saw at Amazon.

Yeah.

I don't need to know as a, you know, if I have my own storefront. I don't need to know what you shopped for at Amazon. I don't need to know what you're doing on Facebook. That's where things get really. Because it's not just one place I'm looking at. I'm going to look at 12 different places now. I'm going to build a really accurate profile of you.

Correct.

And that starts to get that. I mean, that's a violation of privacy.

It is. And they're going to other companies and buying little tidbits and then kind of, you know, triangulating, if you will.

That's right.

To build this profile that it then follows you around and it's, it's. We want to avoid that. And I think we are headed in that direction. But I would say, you know, it would be a good idea for as us as small business owners is kind of use that concept that Apple has of using privacy protection, you know, as part of your business model.

Talk about it, you know, use it as a feature.

Yeah, use it as a feature and you can even like be humorous about it. You know, I love this statement, you know that I love to see it like in your lobby or on your invoice or in an email. You know, the only tracking we are involved in is the tracking number we will send you when we ship you order.

That's it.

You know, you're, you're not, we're not in the business of selling your data. I want to sell you a product or a service or whatever. And so I think you can be upfront about that and without burying it in, in a massive, you know, you know, two page or whatever it is. And, and you of course, if, like, if you're selling in the eu, you have to comply with privacy laws, the gdrp, California gdpr. Thank you.

And then California's got that CCPA or whatever it is.

Yeah, cpra and but I still think you can keep it pretty simple by referencing those laws briefly and doing the compliance on the back end. And we'll put some, some links in the, in the show notes about both those kind of policies and there's companies that can help you with this kind of thing too. But in my opinion, you know, you want to focus on the positive sides of it that the fact that we're not selling your stuff and try to, try to do the, all the heavy lifting on the back end so you don't encumber your customer. But I guess, but I have a question here, Dave, and I've always asked myself this. If, do we have to worry about these kinds of things if we're not collecting or sharing customer data with anyone or other companies? You know, I only want to burden my small businesses with the absolute minimum of bureaucracy.

Yeah.

While I, you know, build trust with my customers and ensure that, you know, telling them that we're doing the right thing. So how do we minimize that stuff? You know, it's, it's a constant battle of not building these layers of complexity.

I think the answer there is a make sure that you can comply with deletion requests. Right. Like, okay, because you will get those, especially if you're shipping to people or serving people in the eu. Whether, whether you're shipping there or not is sort of irrelevant. But if you have visitors from the EU that are signing up and you are collecting data on them in any way, they have the right to ask you to delete that. Now I realize that the EU's laws are not the US's laws, but it's a good thing to get in place because of things like CCPA and the 27 other states or something that now have different privacy laws in place. You should have a way of deleting all the data you have about a given user and depending on what you're using, you know, if you're using WordPress with like WooCommerce or Shopify, like they all have built this functionality in, because, yeah, that's great, right? Because it's there. So make sure you have that. That's step one. And then step two is be careful who you partner with because you need to make sure your partners are not. Are adhering to the same level of privacy that you are, because if they're not, then they become the weak link in the chain. And this is what I'm speaking about next week is, you know, we have, we, we have never done this, but we have had advertisers come to us and at this show and others that we represent here at Backbeat Media and ask us, hey, you know, there's a problem to be solved if someone listens to an ad about Sponsor A. I don't want to name a sponsor because I can't think of one off the top of my head that this. And certainly the sponsors that we have in this episode, to my knowledge, don't do this. And they certainly aren't doing it here because we've never done this. But Sponsor A wants to has a problem because they know that they. That a customer might hear about them on four different podcasts but is only going to use one coupon code. Right. You hear us say, you know, visit sponsor.comsbs right. And if you visit that, then they know you came from Small Business Show. But what if you heard about it here and then you. You went and visited, you know, with some other podcast link. How would they know that? They should give a little bit of credit to us here at the Small Business show and they said we've solved that problem. Which is great on the surface. Right? Again, no, I don't think there's anybody is being intentionally nefarious here. At least I'm going to give everybody the benefit of the doubt because it's how I am. They say what we're going to do is redirect all your podcast downloads through our server so that we can. All we want to capture is IP address and user agent. And when somebody says all we want to capture and then follows it up with things that are very specific to a specific user, I know that they're trying to soften the blow, but this was literally said to me by the CTO of a company called Chartable about two and a half years ago. And I'm like, okay, and then what? And they say, right, and then we go to, you know, sponsor.com and we put a tracking pixel there that also captures only IP address and user agent. And then we correlate these two databases so we know. Right. And this is where it starts to get creepy. Where it gets especially creepy is let's say instead of this being the small business show, this is Bipolar Weekly or something. Right? Right. And you know that if you Visit, you know, sponsor.com bipolar, they could. They know that. That where you came from. So you intentionally don't. Because you don't want anyone to know that you or a loved one suffers from bipolar. Right. Especially a future employer or anything like that. You just, you want to research this. You want to do your thing, and that's great. That's totally fine. But now, without your consent, mind you, they've tracked that. You listened to that show and they've correlated you. And maybe you went and bought something from that sponsor, and now that sponsor captured your IP address and user agent and name and address and phone number. And now let's say all of these companies, the podcast, the tracking agency and the sponsor get sold and that data can now all be correlated to point to you as someone that has bipolar. Right. This is where this becomes a problem. Again, no one, no one of those three parties ever acted nefariously, but as it gets sold and, you know, consolidated up the line, this is where there's a problem. And this is what I'm speaking about next week. Now, you mentioned, you mentioned Apple. What Apple's doing with their new operating systems coming out in about a month and a half here is implementing something called Private Relay. When you visit a website that has trackers on it, or depending on your level of service with Apple, when you visit a website, period, they give you a different IP address. And that way there is no correlation to happen. It just breaks it at the core. Because if you visit a website with one IP address and then you listen to a podcast with a different IP address, well, there's no tracking. That's great. It breaks the attribution that they want to do for you. So we as podcasters have to be very careful to make sure people know, oh, wait, this isn't going to work anymore. That's part.

You have to go here.

That's the PR part of. Right. Why I'm speaking next week so that people know. Yeah.

So I, Yeah, again, I would lean into that as a small business owner like look, we, how, you know, how we protect your privacy. Maybe that's what should be the name of your privacy policies. How we protect your privacy versus just here's our policy with 50,000 words how we can, and you know what I mean, it's just, just tell them, just be upfront with it and tell them we do comply with, you know, X program, this, that, you know, that kind of thing. Whether you have a third party company that's helping you do that or not. But it is important. We do have to keep up with it. But again, I would just lean into trying to keep it as simple as possible because I believe you'll endear yourself to your customers on another level that way when they look at it and go, oh, that's like something I would write, you know, that's a policy I would make. So that's cool.

Yeah.

Versus some off the chart privacy policy. You cut and paste from some website, you know, out there.

So yeah, for sure.

That's my take on, on privacy, customer privacy. I would love to hear what you're doing or things that have worked or not worked, problems or solutions. Feedbackusinessshow.co. share your stories with us and we'll, we'll help other people that are out there in the small business world. World.

We'll make it all happen. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks so much for listening folks. Again, feedback business show co. That's where we'd like to hear from you. Make sure to check out our sponsors. Bambi.com smallladderlife.com SBS thanks for listening. Keep on living that charmed life. We'll see you next week.