Now don’t get me wrong – I love our print outsourcer (PrintThree). They do a fantastic job and when we need a big job done quickly – there is no one better…

In the last years, though, what I’ve found is a need for professional looking small print runs that need to be done quickly. That means colour. That means variable data (i.e. the client’s name and information appearing on their copy). That means printing 100s of copies at a time.

So off we went to find the right tool. After much research, we purchased the HP 2840. It is perfect niche for the micro-business: colour laser, auto doc feed, multi-size paper handling. And it’s cheap – we got ours for under $1,500. And it’s a tank – it just keeps on going and going.

Pretty boring stuff, huh? But think about what you could do if you could crank out high quality printing and do it quickly and on the cheap by doing it yourself:

• Print personalized postcard mailers. We get blank postcards printed up on mass with a graphic of our choice (check out modernpostcard.com) and then run it through our printer when we have an event to announce or want to send out coupons or tickets or whatever. Each copy is personalized, looks super-professional and is cheap to produce.
• Print marketing labels. Running a particular marketing campaign? Crank out sticky labels with your message and then stick it onto every envelope that leaves your office. You can’t afford a big custom envelope print run every time but printing big professional-looking mailing labels is easy.
• Print pictures. As I’ve said before, the more of a personal connection you have with your clients, the more you will sell. Every letter that goes to our coaching program members has a picture of Colleen on it somewhere.
• Etc…

Now – the printer is slooooow. Four colour pages per minute is pretty poky but heck, if we’ve got a big job we just let it fly and go home for the night.

I can’t think of anything more boring than talking (or listening) about our printer. But keep in mind: if you don’t have something like this, I can guarantee you that you’ve compromised on costs or turn-around time or quality of customer communication. Or all three.

Once you have this capability, I guarantee you that you’ll start subconsciously inject it into your marketing and customer communication. You’ll be sitting around, thinking about a new product or promotion, and you’ll decide that you need to send out a personalized invitation postcard to your clients that afternoon. And you’ll do it. Cheaply and with a minimum of sweat.

C.

If you recall – I’m a big believer in having tight control over stuff that goes to the customer. And I’m cheap. We have several pieces of technology that we use in the office that have allowed us to bring work back into the company from an outsourcer and in the process be more responsive to the customer. Oh yeah, and save money.

Colleen records a fair number of web classes and teleconferences. Customers receive copies of these on CD. We used to send out master copies to a disk duplicator service – one of those firms that will basically reproduce disks and print labels on them. Typically our quantities for duplication range from 10 – 200.

For smaller runs (that disk duplicating services won’t do), Casey in our office would have to sit there and manually copy and label each CD. Painful!

For larger runs, we had to send them out. It wasn’t that inconvenient but usually took a few days and cost ~$2 per disk. Not too expensive, but it added up over the year…

To make a long story short, we went looking at CD/DVD duplicators and came across a unit perfect for our needs. From Primera (and OEM’ed by Imation), it replicates CDs and DVDs, and ink-jet print the labels – all in batches of 20. They had larger machines (ie. could handle more disks) but at a substantial premium.

So for $1,500 (maybe less now), we purchased a unit. Now we crank out CD/DVD runs quickly – we just update the label, pop in the master disc, hit “Go” and go do something useful. It’s been working smoothly for almost a year now.

Now customers get their disks days sooner, we save a lot of time and it’s already paid for itself.

The moral of the story: for a microbusiness outsourcing is often not the answer. There are tools that allow you to do it in-house, reducing costs while providing better service to the customer.

We have several other pieces of technology that we’ve used to do likewise. More on those later…

C.