ProfitMaster Displays
11 SEP 2026
James Parker · Graphics Coordinator
Scott — you asked me four questions. These are my answers, with the evidence behind each one, so we can spend the time talking rather than me explaining.
FIVE WEEKS IN · 53 MEETINGS ON RECORD · EVERY FIGURE SOURCED
Estimates are marked as estimates. Where I am guessing, it says so.
The short version
Q1 – Q4
The next five slides are the evidence behind those four answers, in the order you asked them. Stop me anywhere.
Question one · my role
Graphics Coordinator
I am essentially quality control. And I was additionally hired for special projects — so I am my own department in a sense.
The artwork. Every file a customer sends goes through me before it reaches a press. On the map that is 9 of the 23 steps and 3 of the 5 approval gates, and all three rework loops start at one of those gates.
Special projects. Helping develop better processes and better systems of management and information dissemination, and helping coordinate maintaining and updating the ProfitMaster brand. I also manage the catalogue, the website and all branding touchpoints.
"The design guys — the senior guys, Dave and Anthony — were spending so much time on that nonsense. They weren't doing their real job."
Deron, 2 September 2026
The two halves connect. The gate is where artwork quality gets checked, and the brand touchpoints are what that artwork ends up in. The catalogue is only as good as the artwork index behind it.
Five weeks in, the special-projects half has produced the brand audit, the logo chronology, the die-line manifest and catalogue, the graphics-process map, and the S-code index — all built read-only against the Design share.
Question two · what we do well
Relationships
Ron founded this company on his Coca-Cola contacts. Twenty years ago we hired a designer because bottlers were asking for custom work. The business has never been won on price.
And it is not one relationship — it is Coke proper plus every independent bottler, held separately. It runs to our vendors too: "I've been working with David and Anthony since 2003."
It's a relationship on both sides.03 August 2026
This is the asset. What stops us entering new categories is not equipment — it is that we do not have relationships there yet.
Did we reject the proof? I don't think my customer rejected the proof.A salesperson · 01 Sep
That was a hard proof. We rejected that.The project manager
Not one of those ten saves is recorded anywhere as a save. They exist only because the meetings were recorded — the thing we are best at is the thing we have no record of.
Question three · what is difficult
Exceptions
The exceptions become the rule after a while, and now we end up with this really strange system that has no rules. We have rules — but we also break every one, for reasons. Twenty-nine years here · 01 September 2026
The written rule is that we do not edit customer artwork. In practice it is most of my week. The rule says one thing, the ship date says another, and the ship date wins every time — correctly.
That is why checking one component takes thirty minutes, and a two-hundred-piece programme costs about a hundred hours. Nothing arrives the same way twice.
You cannot write a process for an exception. So it never gets written, never gets trained, and never gets handed over.
It all lives in people's heads — and the last time a head left, it took the whole S-code index with it: "he retired, with his decades… now, with him gone, it's exposed that nobody knows what is going on."
The exception is why we win the work. It is also why none of it is written down.
The cause is not carelessness — our customers change fast and we react fast. Any fix has to protect that, not remove it. A process that made us slower to say yes would cost more than it saves.
Question four · what I would fix
The vision
One identity per job, first email to last carton. Prototypes, die lines, artwork and multi-vendor programmes under one reference.
Today there is no serialised code linking design to production. S-codes are issued for accounting, sometimes before the art exists.
Already live — combining the PM number and the S-code came up on 2 September.
One identity for the company, the same way. Catalogue, website, collateral and every touchpoint rebuilt on one system.
Today: ~45 logo files spanning 2005 to 2025 with no master, no standards guide that has ever existed, and 257 files still carrying our old address against 23 current.
The order is not arbitrary. You cannot rebuild the brand ecosystem until you can find what you own. Tracking is the precondition — and it is the half of my job I was hired to do anyway.
Neither needs budget, headcount or new software. Both need one thing: that whatever we build reads what people already produce. Four systems have been tried here and dropped — every one asked people to type more than the work justified. As one project manager put it: "it was overcooked."
What I would like from you
07 / 07
The ask
Everything on the last five slides I can carry myself. This is the one thing that needs you.
Restart the mapping session — the one that measures how long each handoff actually waits.
Two hours a fortnight. Four hours a month. We are a quarter of the way through, and it has been stalled for over a month.
No budget. No headcount. No software. No new forms.
That tracking is the first thing I work on, with the brand ecosystem second.
I have built the two indexes already, read-only. What I need is your agreement that this is the priority, so it stops being a special project and becomes the system.
Six weeks, then I come back with the measured case.
And one question back to you. You have walked into this from the outside too, five weeks after I did. What is the first thing you would fix? If we are seeing the same thing, that is worth knowing now rather than in six months.
Open the tracking indexes → Every figure in this deck came from a recorded meeting. The good lines are all quotes from people here — I just wrote them down.