What if you could make more money? There may be unseen opportunities you could be missing… In this video I reveal how people in the print on demand industry could find a way to easily get more volume and try to even up the demand during the rest of the year.
I also explain why it just makes sense to use your underutilized floorspace and machinery more efficiently.
I’m curious… What great ideas do you have for improving profitability in your industry? And are you willing to share these ideas more widely (potentially even with your competitors)?
Transcript
Have you explored the option of working with one of the ordering portals? And could this make you more money? If you’ve worked in print-on-demand B2C for a while, you’ll know that 30% of the revenue that you write in a typical year will be written in just eight weeks in the run-up to the festive season. And while the rest of the world is thinking about turkey, gifts and holiday plans, you’re all super busy. Your machines and your people are working absolutely flat out 24-7. But for the other 44 weeks of the year, you’re not with a couple of brief spikes and brief exceptions. And if your equipment’s only been used part of the day during the rest of the year, you have both floor space and lease expense that’s costing you money. So what if you could find a way to easily get more volume and even up-demand during the other parts of the year? There are options. One is to take in work from order aggregators. Because your brand is hidden from the market, you have more pricing freedom. During peak, you could go on bypass from these aggregators. During non-peak, you’ve got the option of taking in other work. It might be a lower margin, but it’s still profit maximising. The bottom line is you can be more flexible towards your margin if you have a spare plant capacity, which could be used better. And as long as it’s additive to your gross profit, and since you’ve already incurred the fixed machinery and rental costs, you might as well take on the extra work. It may not make you the 50% to 60% margin you’re used to, but if you can even only get 30%, then isn’t that still a value? So what’s your opinion? Does this sort of strategy make sense, or not?
