Hi,

I was wondering if there's any of us who are involved in printing business (i.e. business card, brochures, flyers, newsletters, posters, etc).

I've been thinking of offering print design as well as printer (own the printing machine, etc) as part of business expansion.

Pls help with some questions below:
1. Would you say, it's better for us to focus initially only on the design, and outsource the printing job to other printing company (who own all those big machines) since we're only going to be just getting started.

2. What's your choice of software for print design (brochure, business card, flyers, posters, booklets, and similar stuff).

3. Any other major/minor things that we'd need to pay attention to in advance? I.e. The budget we need to do to fund the starting and running of this business in the next few months or so after establishing it.

Thanks very much in advance for your answers/thoughts/opinions/etc.

First thing before you should start a business is do a business plan. Remember the saying "Fail to plan is planning to fail".

Are you going to run a shop or do it solely online and mail order? If your doing it online or get mail to mail in thier orders then it would probably be best to get another business already set up and that has a good reputation to print the cards, brochures, etc for you. You may even get them to do the designs for you as that is what I have done with most of my web design businesses.

You can also get templates which will help you get high quality designs fast and cheaply so then you can spend more time on marketing and sales contact.
Good place for brochure templates is www.stocklayouts.com.

I used photoshop to do my business card design, I also bought word doc templates for pricing brochures, but haven't had time to finish that yet. Photoshop is well used worldwide and there is never a shortage of tutorials on how to do a certain something.

My word of advice would be start small BUT think big. Don't start a business that is too large as you will find it difficult to keep up but at the same time, don't make yourself look small.

If you start out small and gradually grow then you will have less chance of having a failed business but I guess its also a slow money maker as well.

Anyway I hope that helps you out somewhat.

Shane

Why not just design and than get a relationship with a printer and than get them to do all your printing? Sounds cheaper/better to me?

Hi mate,

We do have abit of experience in this since we also have a pre press studio inhouse. That we dont advertise because we already have too much work

Number one thing you should do is outsource the printing to a proper printer. You will have to spend a good 10K on a printer just to proof your jobs out and to show it to clients if jobs need colour corrections etc.

Really depends if your going to digital or OFFSET printing. a Colour digital printer say like the Xerox we have here will cost you around 75k plus 2cent per print for service fees/rent to xerox. Thats a DocuColour printer.

OFFSet printer your looking at alot of man hours, creating plates etc. Where digital you can use computer to plate software (CTP)

We use Adobe Creative Suite 2 on the G5s here. We also have Quark Express and Corel due to some clients not upgrading there softwares for many years.

Your budget for a small studio would start somewhere at 100k. Most importantly you will need the proof printer, light bence, Printer rip, PC, Mac then software for both. You can use the proof printer to do some flyers poster work. Lets not forget a cutting bench so you can glue card board to the back of your posters.

Good luck

Regards
Phillip

I was wondering if there's any of us who are involved in printing business (i.e. business card, brochures, flyers, newsletters, posters, etc).

We do a little printing but the actual printing is outsourced.

1. Would you say, it's better for us to focus initially only on the design, and outsource the printing job to other printing company (who own all those big machines) since we're only going to be just getting started.

Yes, the printing process can be time consuming but I would suggest spending money on items that will allow you to colour match first, ie monitors and dare I say it maybe a `Mac` If you can get the colours right before sending to the printer it will be a great advantage and a nice printer that can reproduce pantone colours. This way you can give a proof before sending it off.

2. What's your choice of software for print design (brochure, business card, flyers, posters, booklets, and similar stuff).
Firstly Illustrator for most of the stuff above, then either Indesign or Quark Express for bookets/multiple page stuff. Also Adobe Acrobat Professional if you are going to outsource.

3. Any other major/minor things that we'd need to pay attention to in advance? I.e. The budget we need to do to fund the starting and running of this business in the next few months or so after establishing it.

Being able to see proofs is a big plus, and getting the client to sign off before doing big runs, this will reduce your risk. Making sure what you provide the client is spot on for colours is also a huge plus, this way they cannot come back and say the colours are not the same as I saw.
Set your designs apart from that of the local printers, to justify the price difference, as most printers will charge little for the design, though the quality can vary greatly.

It takes a lot of skill to run a proper printer, so unless hiring an experienced printer is aprt of your business plan and you will be generating enough revenue from the service to justify the extra costs involved, I'd leave it to the pro's.

We offer printing services for our customers, as a valued added service.

Wow! I didn't expect that everyone would be so helpful and prompt in responding to this thread. Hopefully someone else like me would benefit from this thread in the future. Thank you very much everyone...

Everything is well said, and carefully noted down, and oh yeah Shane, thanks very much for that link www.stocklayouts.com.


After reading all your (everyone's) helpful thoughts/posts, I'm now assured that's the ideal way to do it, thanks for that Brenden.

Hmm $100K, maybe with that much funds I can find and buy an already established local print business?
Thanks very much for sharing your real-life experience Phillip.

2dev, same there, thanks for sharing your experience and ideas. They're really helpful.

And big_al, you're so right. I'm now much more aware of the technicality and the costs of operating/running and maintaining the printers/machines.

As one of our local printers recently discovered, when I sent back 3k leaflets they did for us and found another one who was more up to the task.

Printing is one of those things that just has to be spot on. We had a full page article+advert in yesterday's Examiner, so we're not going to put an amateurish looking advert for our store in to people's letterboxes.

I'm loving this retail game.

Gary

Try sending back 50,000 bus timetables. One printer messed up and put another agency's number on them. Back they went.

Printing is a wide sphere - a good idea would be to ensure that you know which areas of printing you can deal with, which usually means outsourcing. Watch out for bargain printers with low quality runs, though.

Bugga off Gaz.

This is WHT-AU damn it, you have to be working 18hrs/day to be allowed to speak.

Stuart