What printer wouldn’t love a shortcut that would expand their profit on every order? Many shop owners think that the obvious way to accomplish this is to raise their prices.
Although that can be done, there are unpleasant side effects to simply raising prices. Customers who are price sensitive may leave and go elsewhere if you don’t communicate the price increase properly. If that happens, whatever extra profit is gained from raising prices will likely be lost with a drop in future business.
While it is true there are times and good reasons to increase your prices, that isn’t what this article is about. The ideas covered here focus on managing the costs, as well as using a variety of ideas to increase each order’s potential value.
The simple truth is you can grow your profits on your orders, and in many cases, without a tremendous amount of pain. It takes a combination of objectivity, curiosity, out-of-box thinking, and a dose of old-school frugality. A good way to start is to review pricing and cost reduction options, then look at efficiency systems that include some integrated marketing to boost potential profits.
Pricing
Before you get creative with expanding profits, it is critical to make sure you understand your “true” costs for your decoration methods to ensure you are pricing your services correctly and making profit in the first place.
As an example of computing your true costs, let’s consider direct-to-film (DTF) pricing. Although this example is specific to DTF, there are similar variables to other styles of decoration. The key point is to include all of the elements that contribute to your costs.
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