HATTIE: So your title around here is?

KENDRA HARRIS: Trail boss. Trail boss is our fun title for operations manager.

HATTIE: So, Kendra, do you ride a horse?

KENDRA: I do, but I ride my Harley more than I ride the horse.

HATTIE: Do you ride your Harley to work?

KENDRA: I do.

HATTIE: This is really cowgirl stuff. OK. Now running the office, keeping up with customers, what do you do to keep your name in front of customers?

KENDRA: Well, one of our marketing communications programs is to put together direct mail to our customers to let them know of new promotions that we have put in place. And every six to eight weeks, we put together a program and have our designer put together postcards, such as these, and we send them off to our retail accounts and also to our mail-order customers.

HATTIE: You've learned some things because you've sent a lot of postcards. What have you learned? What piece of advice could you give someone about using direct mail?

KENDRA: One of the big things we've learned is that in the past our artists used line drawings and graphics to put on our postcards. Recently, we have now started using photographs of our products. And we understand that our customers really like seeing the photograph rather than trying to imagine what it looks like.

HATTIE: Are you trying to tell me when they see the photograph, they buy more?

KENDRA: Yes.

HATTIE: All right. So, again, you have to weigh out the risk vs. costs because it costs money to take these pictures.

KENDRA: That's right. But we definitely say it's worth it. Through our software programs that we use to keep track of all our accounts. We also are able to create an inventory item that describes the source of our orders. So we are very easily able to track where our orders come from, which marketing programs are producing what kinds of numbers.

HATTIE: OK. So if I got this postcard and I called in and said, `All right. I want this gardner special.' Then whoever does the data entry here says, `OK, gardner special is 1009.'

KENDRA: Right.

HATTIE: And then they add it up at the end of the month and we know that that worked.

KENDRA: Exactly right.

HATTIE: What's the hard part about working in such a tiny business?

KENDRA: I would say the obstacles are trying to find sources of labor that will handle our volume. We've had to do some searching for those people. We found them but it took a fair amount of effort to get there. I would also say that some of the difficulties come from sales. We don't have a solid distribution network set up yet. We're in the process of doing that and that takes a lot of work for a small company.