The print industry is a custom manufacturing industry and my favorite unique characteristic of this industry is that the customer provides the key component required for the manufacturing process (the artwork) during the procurement process. When people ask me what makes printing unique, that’s where I always go. It is the characteristic that stops an overconfident ecommerce developer in their tracks. They might know everything about an ecommerce checkout process, but they don’t have a clue about press-ready artwork, color separations, and file formats.

Because we’re a manufacturing industry, it makes a lot of sense that so much focus is on the manufacturing floor. Of course, the business is focusing on the “making of the product.” So, the focus is on the presses, the finishing equipment, and of course the labor that makes the whole production floor work. This is where profits are created and lost. Then we turn to sales because in all business segments sales is the driver of growth, it feeds the manufacturing engine. Sales keeps the manufacturing process humming. There is nothing more uncomfortable to a print owner than quiet presses.

The focus on these two areas is similar. The print business invests a lot of capital into the equipment on the production floor, so the optimization of that capital is a worthy area of focus. Salespeople earn a piece of the revenues in the form of commission so there is an investment in the human capital to keep growing the business. The focus is also in optimizing both key labor areas, production floor and sales.