Gil Newsom, Owner and General Manager of Rocketprint and FUELcrm, was interviewed on the Mission Matters Innovation Podcast by Adam Torres.

Rocketprint helps its web-to-print clients grow their businesses and bottom line, while FUELcrm keeps brands in touch with their customers. Read what owner and general manager Gil Newsom has to say about both in his latest interview with Mission Matters.

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Listen to the full interview of Gil Newsom with Adam Torres on Mission Matters Innovation Podcast.

What are the easiest and most difficult parts of starting out as an entrepreneur?

“The easiest part about being an entrepreneur is thinking about the idea or the product or the service concept that you want to create,” Gil says. “The hardest part is taking that next step, then all the steps after that, as you move forward to develop your ideas. Five out of ten friends are going to be pessimistic about what you’re doing, and the other five are going to be envious. So, you’ve got to surround yourself with people who are encouraging and who want to see that vision that you’ve have in your head come to life.”

The evolution of Rocketprint

Rocketprint is an online procurement system which services the print industry. Rocketprint customers range from single person operations to large commercial printers which use Rocketquotes to service their customers. “Every company has print materials like business cards, brochures, maybe flyers,” Gil notes. “Rocketquotes acts as a central procurement system for companies to order those materials” He goes on to say, “We’ve been fortunate In the past years to begin servicing outside the print industry as well, into specialty companies which manage their print procurement from within their organization.”

A key component of Rocketquotes value proposition, Gil says, “ it provides a complete system, from orders to fulfillment, around a company’s print materials.” Keeping that control in-house is a real cost savings for a company. “Our uptime on service is super reliable! It has to be, because we are responsible for many large organizations that place orders on the sites 24/7.“ “The need for a lot of support is minimal, however we still enjoy having a hands-on approach with all our customers.”

What is FUELcrm? How does it help small businesses?

“Many CRM programs can be a little heavy and expensive for small and mid-sized companies, so we wanted to build a customer relation program that had a shorter learning curve yet packed with great tools ,” Gil says. “We started with that objective and now it has developed into what we call the Swiss Army Knife of CRM’s. Today, many companies use three and four programs to manage their business; they may have a marketing program, email marketing program, customer database, customer relations management, spreadsheets, file storage and the list goes on. We have pulled many of those essential tools into FUELcrm.

“We want companies with as few as 2 employees to use our streamlined, centralized enterprise tools at a reasonable price. The small business can have the same tools the larger companies use.” Gil says.

FUEL tools includes: virtual offices, file sharing, project management and an email template design tool. A virtual office can be assigned to a single person or a whole department. So, when the marketing department has a project to mount an email campaign, the graphics can be easily shared and the team can meet around the project in the discussion room to plan their goals and tasks. Fuel allows all the staff to build out the campaign from where they are, eliminating the need for a chaotic mess of multiple platforms. Gil says, FUELcrm is today’s fully equipped virtual office space.

A CRM solution with so many tools. What’s next?

“Incorporating our DesignX design tool, customers will be able to design mailing pieces, buy a database of local customers and do their own mass mailing. They can follow up with email campaigns and learn how to be persistent in keeping in front of their customers. We want to continue to give small to midsize businesses the ability to expand their reach; from local, to regional, to worldwide if they want.

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