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 Dan Walsh has been in the memorial industry since
1968, working first as a helper on the setting
truck. In the next years he worked in the shop
learning the sandblasting, shape carving and design
layout. In 1977 he and his wife Fonda purchased
Smyth Memorials. For 6 years Dan served on the board
of directors for the Ontario Monument Builders.
Believing that design is one of the key elements in
a memorial company’s success, the Monu-Cad computer
system was purchased in 1989 with Dan as the
operator. Because of Monu-Cad and the lettering and
design advantages the system offers, he saw
increases in his retail volume in the first year
without having to hire new employees.
The biggest increase of all came in 1996 when Monu-Cad
released a new program called Monu-Cad Lite! Instead
of selling from photo albums we could get the
customer involved with the design process, which
also turned a lot of lookers and price shoppers into
buyers. Because our salesman was now producing the
layout when he was selling the memorial, it was
saving time that I could not have imagined. No more
layout time, and no more sending out approvals. The
customer approved, dated and signed the layout from
the printout from the computer.
In 1997 Smyth Memorials became a Monu-Cad Lite
distributor, selling this program loaded with all of
its designs to smaller memorial companies who did
not have the volume to support the full program with
cutter. The first year we supplied the program and
cut the stencil for 6 monument companies. In 1998 we
cut stencil for 34 companies, but the surprise was
that a lot was coming by word of mouth, and that a
lot of the companies were bigger volume than us. In
1999, we cut stencil for 73 satisfied customers and
expanded our design base to over 8,500 designs and
88 alphabets. The expanding Monu-Cad Lite and
stencil cutting allowed me to bring my son Kevin
into the business and we continued to add the best
of the Monu-Cad CSR cutters to provide the same day
cut and ship service our customers have come to
expect.
June 2000 started yet another chapter in our family.
We had an offer on Smyth Memorials, and we sold it,
building and all. My wife Fonda, my son Kevin and I
moved our MCLite program to another location and
called it Artistic Designs. We have enjoyed the
service end of the memorial business and have made
many friends in the customers we serve. In 2001 we
hired James to our staff who does custom designs for
customers, cutting stencil and customer support with
Kevin. 2008 is even better for us and our customers
with an ever expanding library of over 22,000
designs and 170 fonts. We now have customers in all
provinces and all states.
The newest version of Lite (v 7.09) has been
released with many new features to simplify an
already user friendly program. We have spent months
reworking our data base of components (crosses,
flowers, etc) into 38 folders with sub-folders. The
Flowers folder has 41 sub-folders each named for a
specific flower. When you click the mouse on the
“Orchid” sub-folder you will see on the right side
of the screen thumbnail pictures of all the Orchid
designs. Double click on the design of choice and
place it onto the monument drawing with a left
click. With this program, a personalized memorial is
just a few clicks away.
We supply full phone support to our customers who
get stuck and can’t answer their problem with the on
screen manual. We design the front cover of the
design books with our customer’s company information
on the cover so their clients get a professional
look while viewing their designs.
Please contact us for a Demo disc of the full
program as we would like to add you to our growing
list of friends.
E-mail:
dan@artisticdesigns.on.ca |
