How To Grow Your Print Business

In this article, Jamie discusses his top tips for how to grow your print business.

We are constantly getting feedback from our customers and even our suppliers to how much we are growing. In the current market climate, it is not easy to grow your print business. But our formula over the last 13 years is below.

KNOW YOURSELF

The key thing we found which switched us from being just another print business to really surging, was knowing yourself. Several years ago, we realized our advantage was being a production house and most of our top customers were trade customers. So, we pivoted Mediapoint to be a trade-only printer.

GET LEAN IN THE RIGHT AREAS TO GROW YOUR PRINT BUSINESS

By knowing yourself it will allow you to get lean in 3 key areas which are your processes, people and products. By knowing your target area and your target customers you can tailor your setup towards them. It also allows you to focus and make decisions with a target market in mind.

PROCESSES

One of the biggest issues we see with a lot of our customers is they do not have time as they are working on unprofitable tasks. By knowing yourself you can drill down on your processes and cut anything out which is not relevant to your target market. When someone requests something outside of your processes you can say no to them as they are probably outside of your target market.

PEOPLE

By knowing yourself and having tight processes it makes it easier to bring in a good team. The reason being is your team will be given clear instructions as well as fewer areas to manage. One of the key issues a lot of print businesses face is being spread too thin and expecting a lot of their team.

PRODUCTS

With the above points working in synergy, it is important that the products that you offer, and the specifications reflect this. If you do not do this, your whole system will fall over. Also, by following the above system you can adequately price products knowing all of the true costs.

We use the above formula to cut a lot of waste and save a lot of time so we can give our print partners more margin. That is our distinct advantage. We have been refining the above for 13 years. Also, do you notice how in this post we have not talked about marketing and sales?

WORD OF MOUTH

Retaining your customers and getting customers via word of mouthis the first step you should get right before plastering the market. To grow your print business you need a solid base and reputation or else you will waste a lot of your marketing dollars. A lot of our customers that try to grow waste a lot of their budget in marketing as they do not have the points outlined above solid within their own business.