About City Creek Press

If you genuinely believe in the message at the core of your business, it’s likely going to remain the same through the years. However, as the world around you changes, it’s going to be necessary for you to change the way your company expresses that message. The enterprises with the most longevity consistently evolve with the changes around them while still maintaining what makes them unique and exciting. MyWorks is here to help your business develop to stay ahead of the curve and keep your offerings fresh and exciting. We sat down with Judy Liautaud from City Creek Press, a company that has been operating for almost 30 years, to find out how MyWorks became part of her business’s evolution.

About City Creek Press

City Creek Press

City Creek Press was founded by Liautaud and her then-partner in 1992. The pair initially ran the Sylvan Learning Center, where children came to learn mathematics. “We had kids coming to us for help in math, and we could never get ahead because they didn’t know their times tables,” says Liautaud. She saw an opportunity and went for it. “We developed these stories where we turn the number into characters and associate them with a story,” Liautaud tells us. “Then the kids had some kind of clue to help them remember what the answer was. So the ‘punchline’ to the story was the answer to the math question.” City Creek Press started publishing these “Times Tables the Fun Way” educational materials and distributing them to schools and teachers. In 1996, Liautaud sold the Sylvan Learning Center and went full-time into publishing through City Creek Press. “It was really hard, at first, to try to market it,” she laughs. “Then we came upon direct mail. At one point, we were sending mail four times a year to all the schools in the United States. That really made the business take off and thrive so we could live off of it.” The direct-mail distribution method served the business well for a decade but began to take a dip in profitability in the new millennium, as more media started becoming digitized. “Around 2006, we stopped doing direct mail, and then we developed an online, animated version of our books, called ‘Times Alive,’” says Liautaud. “The kids can log in and get progress reports, and take little quizzes and play little games.” In 2021, City Creek Press’s learning materials are widely used throughout the USA, and Online Times Alive has even been developed into an app for iPhone and Android devices.

How they use WooCommerce as their eCommerce platform

 

As City Creek Press’s learning materials moved online, so did the way Liautaud chose to conduct her business. “Using WooCommerce was quite different to what I had before,” she says. “What I loved about it is that we have a subscription model now, for Online Times Alive.

WooCommerce will automatically charge the customer; they can manage their own account, they can cancel any time they want.” When we asked how she was handling that process before, Liautaud tells us that she “was doing all of that by hand, so it’s a huge boon to have that feature.” Before her newest website, City Creek Press was already using QuickBooks Desktop, but as their website became updated, the team switched over to QuickBooks Online and connected it to WooCommerce with MyWorks Sync. An aspect of MyWorks that Liautaud finds particularly useful is how MyWorks can handle bundled packages as line items directly in the order in QuickBooks. “We sell products, kits, and books to teachers,” she tells us. “MyWorks brings the bundle over as a line item, keeping the detail of all the components. That way, my inventory stays accurate.” Liautaud is also a fan of just how speedy MyWorks Sync is. “This is the first time I’ve ever been able to just go to QuickBooks and see what happened on the website. Before, if I wanted to figure out what happened to a customer, I’d have to figure out ‘should I go to QuickBooks or should I go to my website?’ because I didn’t know if it would be synced yet.” But with MyWorks, “it syncs instantly, so I love that.”

MyWorks Review

 

How they use MyWorks Sync to sync WooCommerce and QuickBooks

 

When setting up MyWorks, Liautaud didn’t totally understand how to do the mapping. However, after contacting our support team, her experience was seamless. “Everytime I had a problem, they would step in,” she explains. “Instead of just saying ‘this is how you fix it,’ they would also help fix it for me.” When we asked Liautaud how MyWorks is working for her now, she tells us that “it’s just great.” It’s so great that over the last year and a half, due to the pandemic, she “was blown away at how many books City Creek Press was selling.” She explains that she was selling “tons” of books because “a lot of kids were at home, and teachers were looking for support materials.”

The core goal of City Creek Press has always been the same: “to provide all students a way to succeed in math so they can develop confidence and feel more capable and smarter overall.” The company has moved from a physical learning center to direct mail teaching materials, selling online products, and is now active in the app space. They have evolved consistently over three decades to stay market-relevant and chose MyWorks to help them achieve their most recent goals. Do you want to take the next step towards the future of your business? Schedule a demo call with us to learn more about how we can help automate the boring stuff so you can focus on growing your business.