Now Is The Perfect Time To Assess Your Print Business

This video above is not about survival, for that check out this video here on how your print business can survive the Corona Virus. This video is about what you can do now in your downtime to put the seeds down to grow if you can make it through this.

The Last Few Weeks Isn’t What Your Business Is About

The last few weeks with a drop of is not what your business is about. If you did get a massive drop as you are tied into 1 or 2 segments that got hit the worst, then you need to assess.

But if you need to look at the last 12 months and compare it to the previous 1-2 years. Were you trending Pp? Down? Or Neutral?

Trending Up

If your business was trending upwards, then your key concern is solidifying your business and surviving this. However based on our experiences with a lot of the trade partners we work with, then this is definitely not the case.

If you are one of these businesses, some of the things you can do are look at your segments, and possibly see if there are new segments to diversify a little more with.

Trending Neutral

For us this is a dangerous position to be in. A lot of owners fall into the trap of thinking of marketing more and this will sort their problems.

But they really do not know if their business model and segments are solid enough. At the next road bump they may actually start trending downward.

Trending Down

If Your business was trending down for the last 12 months, then it is clear that something needs to change. If it wasn’t the current Pandemic that would affect your business then it would have been another bump that could have knocked out your business.

What We Did In This Situation

It was the GFC in 2008, we were trending Neutral. We were small and turning over under $1 million as we started in 2006. We knew our model was not working.

So what did we do?

We assessed our top 20 customers and we found that 19 of them were trade customers and represented 70% of our revenue. We had over 1000 customers in the previous 12 months that represented 30% of our revenue.

So what did we do?

We changed our business and our offering to become trade only. Because of it:

• Our Processes became easier
• We had fewer departments to manage
• Our marketing became clear and a lot cheaper
• We became focussed

This Is An Opportunity To Reset

I know how much the current market sucks. I hope that you can survive it. If you can it can also be a great time to lay the seeds to new markets, customers and minimizing future risk.