Each year, Printing News invites small commercial print business owners to participate in our Top 100 Shops Survey. The key word is “small”; we set an upper limit for participation at $25 million in annual revenues. Our Top Shop this year just barely made the cutoff at $24.99 million, although one suspects they’d have been perfectly happy to be over the limit!

In 2019, the shops included in our Top 100 list accounted for more than half a billion dollars in revenue— $549,411,144, an increase of 9.3% from 2018. However, sad to say, a certain mitigating factor will likely prevent most shops from seeing any kind of increase in 2020 revenues. If we look at revenues for our top shops, three out of 10 (31%) said 2019 saw a 10%+ increase over 2018—but, not unexpectedly, that same amount are expecting a 10%+ decrease in 2020 compared to 2019.

The theme of this year’s Top Shops survey was unfortunately, COVID-19. Our survey was being conducted in March and April, so the survey responses reflect an industry in the midst of the crisis. The Top 6 shops with whom I spoke (see later in this feature) were all coping with the crisis in different ways, all of them successfully. (This could very well be why they are “Top Shops.”) Although the crisis obviously doesn’t retroactively affect their 2019 revenues, some of the initiatives that made them this year’s Top Shops have contributed to their successful battling of the crisis, even if the crisis has forestalled initiatives and plans for 2020.