shop talk - Amy Ashbridge - Daily Star 2.3.2007
Shop Talk is a weekly column featuring locally owned and operated businesses. This week, we talk to Chris Quereau, owner of GrafiQa Creative Services Inc., an Oneonta-based graphic design company.

How long have you lived in the area?
I moved here five years ago from New York City. My wife and I met in college upstate, and we needed somewhere in the middle to live. We liked the area, so we moved up here.

Chris Quereau, owner of GrafiQa, stands in his Oneonta design studio Friday.

We started out with small clients; a lot are in the Oneonta-Cooperstown area, but we’re trying to push toward Albany and Binghamton, including more of Chenango and Broome counties. The goal is to have a big 10-person studio, but it will take time to get to that point.

The biggest difficulty has been hiring. All of my employees are here because of their spouses. Even in Binghamton, there are no firms our size that do what we do. So a lot of our talented youth are looking elsewhere. The city’s only three hours away, so if you’re looking for a job, it’s the obvious place to go.

One of the employees here wants to develop a program for interns. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a way to spot talent.

Describe a typical day in your business:
Well, for example, I was just taking out the garbage. I have to wear all the hats, but really, my job is creative director and business development. I generate new business and oversee the creative work that goes out. I try to hire people I can delegate to, so that they can pretty much be turned loose to do the work on their own. At the end, I might say, "Let’s tweak this or that," but that’s mostly just because I might have had more contact with the client and have a better idea of what they’re looking for.

Where do you see this business in five years?
Hopefully, we will be about eight to 10 employees, including sales people, hopefully doing very large branding projects. Even now, we don’t do $1,000 or even $3,000 websites. When we started out, we were taking projects that size or even smaller, when we were just in survival mode, but it’s just not cost effective for us to do that. As we get bigger and bigger, we’re going to get bigger and bigger contracts.

Describe a memorable moment in your workplace:
Hiring my first employee, getting our first office space _ our expenses each month are just astronomical, so it’s funny to look back and think about a time when $200 a month for rent seemed like a lot of money.

Then some of our first big clients, like Springbrook _ that was really a big step for us.

What have you learned from your work?
I started out as very introverted, and I think in some ways I still am, but people sometimes think of me as outgoing because I go to networking events and put myself out there. I’ve learned people skills and networking skills, which are crucial. If you can’t communicate in this business, you won’t get very far.

What is the hardest thing you have to do?
I would say educating some of our clients as to the importance of brand identity. To some extent, we’ve realized that if they don’t get it, there’s nothing we can say that will make them get it. It’s something we think is very important but can be a losing battle. So we just try to keep our clients educated and happy.

The most enjoyable?
Undoubtedly, being in a creative job, and showing clients things that totally make them beam. When we do presentations, we almost always nail it, and it’s a great feeling.

What are some advantages/drawbacks of doing business in this area?
A big advantage of this area for a services firm is the fact that Oneonta is really in the middle of the state. So if you talk about strategic growth, you can hit a lot of cities from here, starting with Albany and Binghamton and expanding to Utica, Rochester, Syracuse and so on. Oneonta’s a really good spot. The other advantage is quality of life. You can afford a high quality of life here.

The disadvantage would be the level of commerce. You go to Binghamton, which is not even necessarily a thriving business community, and there could be one building that holds more businesses than in the whole city of Oneonta. If we were in a bigger city, I could be doing 10 times as much business. But would I have been able to get started? That’s sort of the trade-off.

What sets you apart from your competitors?
I don’t consider that we have any local competition. Let’s say there’s a website guy and he gets a large company as a client _ I don’t consider that to be competition with us. The real competition is big firms, large advertising agencies, who are going after the big clients who really know what they want. What sets us apart (from these firms) is our quality of work and the fact that we listen. Whatever we do for a client, it’s got to communicate that client’s needs. If we do a package for a winery or for an accountant, it’s going to have a totally different look, because those clients are going to have different needs. We don’t have a certain style that we’re imposing on our clients. If you look around at the work we’ve done, you can see that it’s not one particular style, because we work with our clients to determine what will work best for them.

What advice would you give to someone trying to enter your field of work?
Definitely, an internship is crucial. People often ask me what courses to take or where to go to school, and that’s important, but the internship is really what’s going to get you real work. School is one experience, and work is another _ at school, you might have a month to finish a project, where at your job, you’re going to have a day to do it. I would say the same thing to anyone, in any type of field.