In today’s market for printers we are becoming used to hearing on almost a daily basis of companies going out of business or making major cuts in their operations. In the UK every week in the PrintWeek publication I hear of companies failing and these are often well-known, long established and previously successful companies. Yet at the same time in these difficult times I still hear of companies doing well and expanding.

One of the things we are always hearing is that the successful companies are more often than not diversifying their operations by adding new services. This is something I often speak about at seminars and conferences. In these I sometimes use a slide that I first saw used by Xerox that it is stated takes information from studies by IDC and Infotrends. This indicates that for every $1 a company spends on print another $6 is spent on content and fulfilment. It further indicates that up to 15% of a company’s overall revenue is spent on content. It is some of this area of content and fulfilment that are what we term value added services. This includes functions like repositories, data processing, design, composition, finishing, fulfilment, distribution and response tracking. Today I do see many of these companies that are still doing well are well established in adding work from this content and fulfilment area.

There are however many more things that a printer can do to make themselves more successful and easier for a buyer to deal with. I have been looking at a small UK printer that works predominantly with SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) offering all the print products they are likely to need on a day-to-day basis. They have largely switched to working online with their customers to cut down on costs and to make it easier for customers to work with them. They developed their web site and have constantly refined it to make it better and easier for customers to use. This is one of the first rules of keeping alive, that is make it easy for a customer to work with you. This online service is not just allowing a customer to order products from you but to allow them to easily track the progress of their work and to re-order previous products. The key factor of this however is making it easy for customers to pay for work via the online operation. This particular UK company, after one year of online working and receiving payments was doing around $3,600 per month, but a year later it was approaching $90.000 per month. Today it is approaching $200,000 of online business per month.