Talking Profits
(l to r) Steve Sogan and Michael Jacobs of Sepialine discuss profit-making ideas with Clint Murchison of Hub City Blueprint at the 2015 ERA/IRgA Convention in Atlanta.
By Ed Avis
The 160 people attending the 2015 ERA/IRgA Convention over the weekend heard a lot of valuable tips for improving their businesses and increasing margins. Full articles on the sessions will be published in coming weeks, but here are five top tips I picked up during the convention:
1) Don’t Be Vague – When you’re writing the bullet points about your business for your website or advertisements, skip the clichés like “Focused on Quality” or “Customer-Centric.” Keynote speaker Jaynie Smith told the audience that research repeatedly shows that such language is considered “blah, blah, blah” and does not motivate new customers. Instead, figure out facts about your business and tout those, such as “98% on-time delivery” or “Used by more architects than any other reprographer in the county” or “90 percent of our customers from five years ago still use us.” Such facts get attention and motivate buyers, research shows.
2) Charge for Everything – Raising prices on printing might be hard to do, but several smart reprographers at the convention mentioned that they have started charging for things that they didn’t previously charge for, including binding, delivery, “first-page-out” fee, etc. These all add to the bottom line, and customers hardly notice.
3) Get a Seat at the Table – It’s time to start considering your reprographics firm to be a serious professional services provider, not just a print shop. Elmer Rhodes, president of Cross Rhodes Reprographics, showed how he profitably sells complete document management packages for major construction projects by working with contractors as a subcontractor on par with other major players, not as minor service provider.
4) Incentivize Your Employees to Properly Charge – When an audience member asked during a panel discussion how she could get her graphic designer to properly keep track of his billable hours, panelist Gary Wilbur, president of R.S. Knapp, suggested offering $1 extra pay for every billable hour the designer records. That small incentive should push the designer to make sure every billable minute is properly recorded. The same concept can be applied to any billable service that is not being currently properly recorded. “A small monetary payment will greatly increase their bookkeeping ability,” Wilbur said.
5) Charge for the Next Biggest Size – Andreas Haltmeyer, president of Haltmeyer GmbH in Austria, said that one of his businesses sells prints by the sheet size rather than square meter. When a customer brings in a sheet that falls between standard sheet sizes, he charges the appropriate fee for the next largest size. This increases his bottom line, and makes it simple for customers to predict costs (since they don’t have to calculate square meterage).
Stay tuned for details on all of the above in the coming weeks.