Report cards are at the root of much adolescent angst. They are eagerly anticipated or awaited with dread. They are a measure of how much a student has learned, how well they have learned it, and how hard they have worked. Their frequency depends on the school, but report cards come out at least every term, sometimes leading to parental grounding or praise. In the case of poor grades, punishment is still too often the response. But what is the proper response for good grades?

Report cards are at the root of much adolescent angst. They are eagerly anticipated or awaited with dread. They are a measure of how much a student has learned, how well they have learned it, and how hard they have worked. Their frequency depends on the school, but report cards come out at least every term, sometimes leading to parental grounding or praise. In the case of poor grades, punishment is still too often the response. But what is the proper response for good grades?

Oftentimes, the grades themselves are seen as the reward, but for students from kindergarten on up, it’s sometimes hard to get excited about letters on a piece of paper. How then does a parent or a school reward its students? Athletes receive trophies and medals. How is academic achievement recognized? We spoke with a few shops across the country about their academic-awards programs. Here’s what they had to say:

Richard Hernandez, Owner

Premier Awards, McAllen, Texas

Richard Hernandez says that the academic awards his shop makes take several different forms. “We offer a little bit of everything—trophies, plaques, etc. Volume-wise, we do more trophies than anything else, but we also offer plaques, medals and ribbons.”

Hernandez says they work with most of the schools in his area, from elementary to high school, and they primarily provide awards for academics, not athletics, and they are quite lucrative for Premier Awards.

“Similar to how the Christmas season is the time of year when jewelry shops make most of their money for the year, that’s how the academic market is for us,” says Hernandez. He adds that the awards are presented annually, and the time is the end of the school year, usually in May.

However, Hernandez begins contacting the schools long before the end-of-year fever hits the kids. “We start calling the schools around the first of the year. We have been in business for more than 20 years, so we have a pretty well-established customer base. They know us, so they’ll typically either give us a call or send an email for their order, tweaking it from the previous year. If we don’t hear from them by a certain date, we give them a call,” says Hernandez.

As for the types of awards created, most of them are selected based on different educational metrics measured by the state of Texas. “In Texas, we’ve got different levels of achievement in what they call a TEKS test (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills). It measures their comprehension of different academic subjects, rating them at different grade levels based on certain criteria.

A lot of the awards are based on that. The volume for these awards is really in the elementary schools. The awards for junior highs and high schools are more for the band and athletics,” says Hernandez. In addition to the local public schools, Premier Awards also works with a couple of nearby universities. “We have two universities in our area, and those awards are a little bit of everything. There are a lot of departmental awards and service awards for the schools; there are more of those than there are specifically for academics,” says Hernandez. Of course, teachers are candidates for awards as well. “At the high school level, we also take care of the staff awards and the teacher-of-the-year awards,” says Hernandez.

He adds that Premier Awards usually delivers the awards a week or a few days before they’re due to be awarded. The company is invited to all of the banquets, but Hernandez says they don’t attend because they can’t make it to all of them. “The schools are competitive with each other, so we stay away because we don’t want them to think we favor any one of them over another,” says Hernandez.

Curtis McClees, Owner

Winning Concepts USA, Orange Park, Florida

Curtis McClees explains that most of the awards personalized by Winning Concepts USA are for the corporate market.

However, they do handle certificates and ribbons for the local schools. “The way they are presented varies from school to school. I know that they do have certain particular events, such as spelling bees, where they will go with trophies. Winners at the science fair receive plaques,” says McClees. “Those are all special events that we handle, and they are generally done on an annual basis.”

He adds that some events are put on by the school, and some are county-wide competitions. He also notes that awards aren’t the only products Winning Concepts USA produces for those events. Personalized T-shirts and hats are also created. “We’ve been in business for 12 years, and we’ve been offering academic awards all of that time,” says McClees.

Debbie Hallar, Employee

Academy of Awards, Peoria, Illinois

“We offer trophies, plaques and certificates,” says Hallar. She adds that the recipients of those awards are students at their local elementary, junior high and high schools, although the bulk of the awards go to the high school.

Hallar says that in the case of Academy of Awards, a relationship is established with each of the schools in order to earn their business. “We’re fortunate, actually, because the schools come to us. We don’t go to them. Usually, the teachers will come to us and order awards for the different academic achievements they want to recognize,” says Hallar.

She adds that the majority of Academy of Awards’ academic business is done at the end of the school year. “It is similar to the sports awards in that regard. We do the sports at the end of the season. When the football season ends, we do our football awards. When the basketball season ends, we do basketball trophies.” Commenting on the volume of that business, Hallar says that academic awards are not recession-proof.

“Orders were down this year. Unfortunately, whenever the schools get their budgets cut, we don’t do as many awards,” says Hallar. She adds that trophies and plaques are their best-selling academic awards. Those awards are decorated with one of two different methods: laser engraving or sublimation. “It depends on what the customer wants. Rotary engraving we don’t do much anymore. That’s kind of outdated. Usually, that machine is now used for engraving jewelry around Christmas,” says Hallar.

When sublimating academic awards, Hallar says Academy of Awards will sublimate plaques, allowing for color logos (or photos) to be placed on the plaque, and they will sublimate plates for the trophies as well.

David Fowble, Owner

Trophies Etc., Camarillo, California

“We’ve got schools everywhere,” laughs David Fowble, “and I’m real active in the community, so that helps us earn a lot of that business.  All of those characters know us real well, so they usually come in here. We’ve got quite a few colleges. We do stuff for UCLA, USC, Pepperdine, Cal Lutheran, Cal State Channel Islands, the junior colleges, the superintendent of schools office for the county, etc. We do a lot of education stuff.”

Clearly, academic awards are a profitable realm of business for Trophies Etc. Much of that success is due to Fowble’s history in the corporate market, where he was an ace student in the art of networking. He retired from the corporate world, bought an existing awards business, and used his abilities in networking to create an impressive roster of clients.

“I came out of the corporate world. My corporation went down the tubes, so I bought a business. At the time, it was just a trophy shop, but it did a pretty decent volume. I didn’t want to start from scratch. We added a sign shop and promotional products. The former owner was mainly a coach and school teacher, so he had a lot of schools and sports teams already locked in. With my corporate experience, I was used to traveling quite a bit. I had 110 drug stores in five states, but now I get to stay home, which is just a few minutes from work,” Fowble recounts.

However, Fowble still had the energy and social skills he possessed during his corporate career. He put those assets to work in his community, becoming very involved. “The first group I got involved with was the Chamber of Commerce. About two years later, I became chairman of the board for the chamber, and then it went from there. I’ve been chair of the board for the United Way, the Metro County Taxpayers Association and a bunch of stuff like that. The more you do, the more you’re invited to do. Through that work, I got to know a lot of other community leaders: the D.A., the sheriff, the superintendent of schools, and department chairs for local universities,” says Fowble.

It’s easy to look at Fowble’s success and see him as a social animal, someone whose people skills are unusually developed and can be used to promote any number of agendas. However, while Fowble’s ability as a networker cannot be dismissed, the real benefit of this skill is not so much his ability to create strong relationships as it is to use the information he learns from those relationships to identify and create business opportunities.

For example, as you have learned from other shops’ comments, most academic awards are presented at the end of the school year. The season of academic business for Trophies Etc. is as long as the school year. That is because Fowble has, through his various contacts, learned of multiple events within the school year that he has supplied awards for. Previously, no awards were given for those events. If the school could not afford additional awards, Fowble found a corporate sponsor for the event, and they ordered the awards. It’s not just identifying opportunity, it’s creating sales.

“We’re right in the middle of getting ready for the science fair for the county, mock trials and also the academic decathlon, which is a nationwide competition. We do all kinds of awards for those events. Our science fair is the largest in the state of California; it’s really something,” says Fowble. “We were one of the influences that helped start the science fair. They went with the budget, and we used the acrylic awards for it. They’re in the $20 to $25 range, and the fair orders a bunch of them, so it’s a very nice order.”

Fowble is able to take networking further still. Events as large as the science fair require volunteers to pull them off, and so Fowble volunteers his personal time, usually organizing the volunteers. He works with the schools’ staffs while volunteering, and this helps strengthen his relationship. Due to the strength of those relationships, he is usually able to avoid the bidding process that so often lowers margins until they are non-existent.

“I don’t like to bid. I don’t want to go to the lowest price. Building relationships makes it all happen. You give and take a little bit. You don’t give it away, but you provide excellent service, and you support them. You can make it happen that way,” says Fowble. You can make it happen that way, too. That concludes this trip across the country.

Please stay tuned for our next national trip, when we’ll check in with shops on another important topic.