Enhance Your Profits – Part 2

Without the right amount of sales you need, nothing else really matters. You’ve built your projections, hourly rates, staffing and the size of your facility to handle a certain level of business. If you’re not meeting those numbers, chances are you’ll be disappointed with your results.

When Enhance Your Profits was written, the focus was on understanding that a major focus for you and your team was to take a look at your business and determine what was in your way of higher levels of success. We highlighted stalled growth, eroding profits, employee engagement, underutilized technology and not meeting your client expectations. This update will be a bit more straightforward.

There’s an old saying that goes like this: the market sets the price, and you elect whether or not to play each day. With that, make sure that you can capitalize on the markets you are in and can capture enough work at the “market price” levels to consistently run a profitable business. Sure, you may get a premium price at times. You get this if you’ve created a highly efficient production machine, or your quality levels are ultra superior in a market that actually values that level of performance.

Make sure that you can capitalize on the markets you are in and can capture enough work at the “market price” levels to consistently run a profitable business.

Why aren’t you getting all the business that you need, or want? Is it pricing, is it the wrong market or is it that you haven’t given your customer a good enough reason to pay your price? Is it a marketing or sales problem or the fact that it takes 3+ days to get an estimate or a proof (yes, there are still those out there).

If you’re getting enough at-bats, or presentations and estimates with the kind of customers that you’d like to do business with, don’t let price become the obstacle to capturing that business. You can’t make money with the work that you don’t have, and remember, until you cover your fixed costs and fill the equipment utilization that you had projected, you’ll be short of your value-added break even and you’ll lose money that period–period.

Mike Philie can help validate what’s working and what may need to change in your business. Changing the trajectory of a business is difficult to do while simultaneously operating the core competencies. Mike provides strategy and insight to ambitious owners and CEOs in the Graphic Communications Industry by providing direct and realistic insight, not being afraid to voice the unpopular opinion and helping leaders navigate change through a common sense and practical approach. Learn more at www.philiegroup.com, LinkedIn or email at mphilie@philiegroup.com.

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with Printing Impressions. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of Printing Impressions.