"Most printers get 60 to 80 percent of their business from less than 25 customers.
Online print services and 'big box stores' such as Staples and Office Max are filling that void left by quick printers.
There are still successful printing niches available to printers if they focus on their business and quit trying to be all things to all people. Most printers are job shops that produce custom printing for local customers. Online print services typically offer commodity work that has been standardized for production efficiencies. Want a special paper? It isn't available. Want different specifications from those provided? Go somewhere else. Custom job shops can't compete with the specialty printers because they are organized to produce a wide variety of custom work with special services.
Traditional quick and small commercial print companies should have nothing to fear from online services if they are focused on their current top customers' needs. The fact is that most printers get 60 to 80 percent of their business from less than 25 customers. The only difference between the gross sales of one printing company and another is the amount of printing purchased by the top 25 customers. The bigger the shop, the more printing a top 25 customer buys. The amount of work purchased by the rest of the customers is usually not that significant."
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John Giles is an industry consultant who specializes in digital issues for quick and small commercial printers. He is the author of Digital Directions: a digital workflow guide for customer-created files and the Digital Original, a CD which focuses on teaching customers to create Postscript files as well as the other functions required to get a file to print properly. Giles has developed a customer training programs that he presents for printers and does onsite training for printing companies to establish standards and procedures for dealing with customer-created files. He is also the director of CPrint (tm) (Certified Printers International), an alliance of more than 100 independent printers from throughout North America who have joined together to create a competitive advantage for their companies in their local printing community.. He can be reached at 304.586.3548 or john@johngiles.com .
