Colley Avenue Copies & Graphics Inc.

Colley Avenue Copies & Graphics Inc. Printing services for clients large and small. Friendly folks operating at the speed of business. Small business feel... Big business impact!

We can handle all of your printing and graphic design needs and emergencies with ease.

09/15/2026

Another True Story from Colley Avenue Copies
10 Things that I would have included in my Business Plan if Iknew better.
Time always teaches you.
1. I would have set mile stones including time lines. Without it I headed aimlessly towards my ultimate goals but did not realize that I could have gotten there with more focus using less resources by achieving smaller goals and following the time line.
2. Make sure that your business plan includes an avenue to scale up. Plan for your business to grow.
3. After incorporating. Plan for the IRS to audit you after two years. An audit in the first year doesn’t give the IRS enough material to audit. The call from the IRS is the scariest phone call I ever took. A simple thousand dollar mistake with interest and penalties turned into a forty thousand dollar bill and an audit every year for seven years. The IRS is especially focused on payroll taxes. You should hire an accountant to set you up with best accounting practices or take the sure path by hiring a payroll service.
4. Learn more about running your business A great chef doesn’t necessarily make a great restaurant. One of the most common reason that businesses fail is that the owner doesn’t know how to run their business or do sales. Never stop learning. seek out information Holly and I even took unpaid internships to learn more about what other businesses do and know. Set a defined time to do research and learn. There is no shame in Googling. It is better than no help at all.
5. Stay fit. Schedule time every day to improve your physical self. If you get sick and work at a reduced capacity, then your business will operate in a reduced capacity.
6. Have a plan to cross train your employees, especially yourself. This allows you to hire less employees and makes you less reliant when employees call in sick or leave.
7. Staff up as soon as you can. As the owner your time is valuable. Shift as much of the daily tasks as you can and do what you do best, running the business!
8. Watch your money, cost of materials change, and every penny counts.
9. Review your business plan periodically. Businesses have to grow with the needs of the clients.
10. Include an exit plan. We all grow old, including our business. You may want to move on or start something new.

09/08/2026

Another True Story from Colley Avenue Copies …
Pay Yourself
We have worked with and mentored many small businesses over the years, and a highlight of these interactions is when a small business owner bursts through our doors, all smiles and excitement, and tell us that they were able to take a paycheck for the first time! The greatest feeling you can have as small business owner is to be able to pay all your obligations and then, being able to pay yourself. In the early years, paying all your obligations and also yourself was an incredibly high bar to achieve. We said we had the same feeling when we were first able to take a pay check. The follow-up quest on was always, “were you able to take a check the following month”, I would gently reply “no”. However, I did say that I always wrote the check, for each pay period, and I collected the checks in a desk drawer. “Why write the checks?” Simple, you have to value your time. When receivables allowed, we cashed them.
People often start businesses for various reasons, to spend more time with family or to pursue a vocation that they love. Unfortunately, many small business owners forget to include the need to pay themselves in that plan. This is a mistake. The purpose of any business is to make money, otherwise you are running a non-profit or being a hobbyist, and will help you to accomplish your base goals. Try and satisfy the other reasons, but always make sure you put value on your time. Even if it means collecting checks in a drawer.

09/01/2026

Another True Story from Colley Avenue Copies

5 Things I Learned

The five most important things I learned in thirty years of running a small business, I learned making the following mistakes.

1. Don’t buy your customers
When most people first start a business they make a list of their competitors and their pricing, then price their products and services lower without ever knowing about their overhead. This can be dangerous if you need more to cover your overhead and make a profit. You should always price for the product and solutions that you provide. If no one ever says that your pricing is too high, then you may be pricing correctly. If you gain a client because of pricing then you’ll loose them to pricing.

2. Don’t set yourself on fire just to warm others.
Another big mistake is to create a lop sided deal just to satisfy a customer to your detriment just to keep them as a client. A business transaction should always be fair to both parties. Don’t use over servicing as a tool.

3. You can’t pay rent with receivables.
I was speaking with a fellow business owner about, what else, money. He was bragging about how he had sixty thousand dollars in receivables. I thought to myself oh, oh he had a serious problem. As a business owner, you wear many hats. Chief of which is to take sales to cash as fast as possible because you can’t pay rent with receivables. Two years later he had to shut his business down.

4. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
In the beginning we were dizzy with the possibilities of what we could do. We did one-off solutions all the time. Problem was that we lost money because we could not price correctly and pulled resources and manpower to complete a task we may never do again. When we stuck to our core competency we much better!

5. We thought that Sales People were pains in the a**.
I was mistaken. They were a great resource for learning what equipment other shops are using, and what new technologies are becoming available. It keeps us current and future looking. I now look at Sales People as a resource and are now happy to speak with them.

08/27/2026

Emilio took his first practice chanter lesson with us last week.

Interested in giving it a try?

We offer free lessons from 6 to 7 p.m. every Wednesday at St. Patrick Catholic School in Norfolk.

No experience necessary! 💙

08/25/2026

Another True Story from Colley Avenue Copies

Haters Gonna Hate

"C" was a talented graphic artist. Smart, intuitive - but he was a stone cold hater. In the years he was with us, I learned that most of the lunch places we ordered from-he hated. Cool, semi-famous person comes in, he hates that guy. PC based business, he hates Microsoft. Hate. Hate. Hate. Not mean, not belligerent, just, well, just a hater.

We often support golf tournaments and create a foursome of golfers from our crew to play in them. "C" hated golf. No surprise there, but I decided that he needed an afternoon off, so sent him to play golf. He played very well. He was a pretty talented athlete, but made sure he let his teammates know, repeatedly, that he hated golf. They were playing near a water hole when a turtle came out of the water and trudged towards them. "C" saw the turtle his face lit up, and he yelled "I LOVE TURTLES!" Shocked by this foreign declaration from "C", his teammates almost dropped their clubs. He ran towards the turtle, picked it up and the turtle promptly peed on him. "C" gently placed the turtle back on the grass and walked back to the golf cart, a sad look on his face. "I hate turtles."
Haters gonna hate.

08/18/2026

Another True Story from Colley Avenue Copies
You Never Know

We’ve work closely with a major University who worked closely with sensitive government projects, over the years we found out that you can never judge a book by it’s cover.
Take Ms. E, for example. We worked with a little old lady for years, printing poetry and art books. As physician’s wife, we assumed she lived a life of hostessing dinner parties and attending wives clubs. An all around delightful and creative person, wonderful to work with. After her passing we found out from her obituary that she was an agent with the precursor of the CIA.
Through the years we have worked with many interesting people and projects with copying of proposals and other sensitive materials, and acted as support staff for several sensitive projects. The Copy Center itself played a strange role. For a time, we acted as a front for a DOD project housed in the same building as the original Colley Avenue Copy Center. We projected a “Nothing To See Here” image while amazing research was being done just a couple of doors down the hall! Can’t judge a book indeed!
Of all of the experiences we had, the strangest one was when we met with the government officials from the FBI and Department of Energy, also known as the “Men in Black”. The mainframe for the US Department of Energy had gotten hacked. They tracked down a suspect to an email account for a scientist at the Thomas Jefferson Labs. Everyone associated with the email account holder, no matter how slim a relationship, was interviewed. They spoke with was the daughter of the scientist whose email was compromised, and asked her if she knew anyone who could have accessed her father’s computer. Her boyfriend, “K”, was a longtime employee, and she gave him up, very quickly. Within in a short time, two gentlemen in black suits arrived at our offices. We were requested to join the interview. The agents had Holly, myself and “K” in our small meeting room. Holly requested their business cards, as it was a company policy to put the contact information of anyone requesting information on our employees in their employment file. They declined. Holly then asked to see their badges, the FBI agent provided his badge, when asked to see the other persons badge, that official again declined. Their interrogation of was brief, but intense. They found their hacker, someone outside of the US and someone not even associated with our employee, his girlfriend or her family. We still wonder who that other guy was.

07/28/2026

Another True Story from Colley Avenue Copies

Let’s Have Lunch.
We often hire University Students who need extra cash and lived off of their meal plans. JD was one of our outstanding employees. We had flex scheduling so students would not need to adjust their school schedule. Something other employers usually can’t do. JD’s father was well known to us, he flew everywhere on private jets to get him to meetings to close huge deals. We assumed that JD had a great meal plan. On a Tuesday afternoon, after Holly and I had returned from deliveries, we found JD laying on the floor. We quickly jumped to his side and asked “what happened?”. JD said that he was filling the paper trays on the machine and stood up too quickly and passed out. Holly asked “when was the last time you ate?”. “two hours ago” JD replied. Holly gave him some orange juice and snacks, and sent him home to recover. As soon as he left, Ray, JD’s friend and coworker pulled us aside. Ray told us that JD had not eaten since yesterday. He had a plan to dig up worms in the back of the shop and walk across the street to the waters near O’Sullivan’s Wharf. He was going to catch some fish to solve his lack of food problem. It was a stupid plan. He didn’t catch a single fish. “What about his Dad?” I asked. Ray told us that his parents divorced and his Dad cut off the older kids from his first family. We had wrongly assumed that hunger was not an issue for JD. The next day we bought every employee lunch. We bought it the next day and the next. It became a permeant thing. Every day we would buy lunch for all of our employees. We usually try to focus on small local restaurants, and always have a pantry stocked with snacks for our employees. Food insecurity is rarely where you think it is. It’s why Colley Avenue Copies & Graphics, Inc. supports organizations that feed people. So let’s have lunch.

07/21/2026

Another true Colley Avenue Copies Story

When 27 minutes equal 6.5 million dollars.

A Research Foundation was preparing a large proposal, they fell behind on their deadline and needed to have the proposal copied, packaged and date stamped, the same day, and the Post Office was closing in 30 minutes. We said thank you, and got to work. It was 3 more minutes than we needed.

You may not be preparing a muti million dollar proposal but we’re prepared to treat you as you were.

07/13/2026

Baseball, Another Colley Avenue Copies True Story

At Colley Avenue Copies we pride ourselves on our commitment and dedication to everything we do. Baseball was a good example. On a windy day we found a featherless baby bird on our sidewalk at work. With no nest in sight to put him back into, we knew we couldn't let it die, so we decided to save him. I opened the trunk of my car where I had a box of baseballs. I dumped the baseballs out and put the featherless bird in. The team started to call the baby bird Baseball.
We called around to see if we could find a rescue who could take him, we were told that if Baseball had any chance we have to feed him every 15 minutes until his feathers grew in. We were told that we could use Puppy Chow because it was high in protein. We mixed the Puppy Chow with water and made a mush. With tweezers we fed Baseball every 15 minutes. The team immediately jumped in and took turns feeding and taking Baseball home. Baseball began growing fluffy little feathers, then brown tipped black feathers. We continued to feed Baseball, and taught him to fly by letting him glide from every higher edges. Eventually Baseball got the hang of it, and flew off. One day when we came home, there was a black bird in our lawn with brown tipped feathers. The bird looked at us for a minute and then flew off.
Commitment. It makes a difference in everything we do.
At Colley Avenue Copies, We don’t just make copies, we make commitments.
Email us at [email protected] if you want to experience our commitment.

Mr. Maurice from Rejoyce Car Detailing making sure our teams vehicles, from the littlest Mustang to the Honda beside it,...
06/05/2026

Mr. Maurice from Rejoyce Car Detailing making sure our teams vehicles, from the littlest Mustang to the Honda beside it, are looking good for the weekend!

Address

2706 Colley Avenue, Suite C
Norfolk, VA
23517

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 12pm
1pm - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 12pm
1pm - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 12pm
1pm - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 12pm
1pm - 5pm
Friday 9am - 12pm
1pm - 5pm

Telephone

+17574404000

Website

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