Save Money on Your Printing 12 ways

 1.Never Rush the Printer, it Costs You Lots of Money. Give him adequate time to print your material. Waiting to the last minute to get printing done costs companies tens of thousands of dollars every year. Here’s why; Design Errors:

When a brochure or a form has to be designed or corrections made on an existing printed piece, the person designing or making the corrections doesn’t have adequate time to take a second and a third look over the art before it goes to the press. If mistakes are made here, they will probably be printed that way and you will probably have to reprint the piece or make due with an unsatisfactory printing job.

Having adequate time to proof a printing job will save thousands of dollars.The Printer:

Printers have schedules of when they will print each job that comes in. To put your rush job before other client’s jobs disrupts the printing schedule and cost the printer money to make the adjustments. Guess who pays for those extra charges? That’s right, you do. Even if a printer says he isn’t charging for the rush, the added charges will be burred in the cost of the job somewhere. You won’t see it on the invoice.

When you rush the printer to get your job finished fast, time the probability of errors goes way up dramatically. Again, the printer doesn’t have time to review your design work before it goes to press. In addition, even if your art does not have mistakes, the printer can forget to do certain things in the printing process. In the prepress department, the technicians may forget to do critical steps to your art’s electronic files. Thus, when it gets on press, you see the error. At that point, you either have to go ahead and print the piece, or pull it off the press and have the prepress department fix their error and they put the job back on the press. Even if the printer made the error, it still puts the delivery time back later and everyone freaks out.The Paralysis of AnalysisI can’t tell you how many times I have had printing clients who can’t get the art work finished on time because the proposed art sits on an executives desk for days waiting for the executive to approve it. In addition, some executive or the president of the company keeps to making small changes in the art resulting in getting the printing project to the printer late requiring a rush. The interesting thing about this is that most of the time the executive who made the project late still expects the printing to deliver on the same deadline date as before. Again, rushing the printer costs you thousands of dollars.Rush Printing often results in using a higher priced Printer:

Let’s say your vice president of marketing has had the final approval of the art on his desk for several days unapproved because he is busy dealing with other important issues. You finally get his approval and dash off to the printer. Guess what? When you get to the printer he says he couldn’t hold your press time and put another customer’s job in your jobs spot. Further more the printer tells you he can’t meet your deadline because of getting your art late.Well, no problem. There are hundreds of other printers in the market and you know you can find one that can meet your deadline. After calling five, or six, or ten different printers you find that the printers that can meet your deadline are charging you 40% more than your regular printer was going to charge you. Well, there you go again. Paying 40% more just because you were late getting to your printer. This scenario happens thousands of times every day throughout this country. And who gets blamed for the increased cost, or for missing the deadline? You do. Not the executive who made the project late.Here is where you need to have a heart to heart talk with your supervisor, on even with the person who made the project last and explain than in order to meet the deadline next time you must have ten or seven days and it has to have his approval by a certain time or you can’t make sure the project will deliver on time. Good Luck!

Well, now you can see why rushing printing jobs is the biggest factor causing the most unnecessary increases in a company’s marketing budget.

Negotiate everything: Price, overs, storage, prepress work, delivery, and more. Examples: There are too many printers in almost every market. This result in fierce competition between them and the thing they all compete on is price. Printing has become a commodity. Most printers can print satisfactory work and they are pretty much the same.This is good for you because everything becomes negotiable; price, delivery time, additional service, etc. For example, get a price for the printing project from three or more printers. You will be surprised how much difference there is between the highest printer and the lowest price printer. Lowest price isn’t always the way to go, but we will cover that later in this lesson. After you get the printing bids pick the one you prefer to do business with and tell them if they will beat the price of the lowest printer you will give the job to them. Most of the time the printer will agree to a lower price. If he doesn’t make the same offer to the printer you would choose as your second choice. Even if they don’t meet your target price, you will get a killer price. Congratulations, you just saved the company thousands of dollars.In addition to negotiating the price, you can require the printer to through in some additional services. For example, store all your printing in his warehouse, adding an additional color on your brochure, or scanning your photos for free, or even lunch.  Be creative and you’ll come up with some good spiffs.3. Which is Better, a Smaller or Higher Unit Price?It depends! Most printing sales reps will try to get you to print a larger amount to get the unit price per printed piece down. There are several problems with that concept that will cost you thousands of dollars over a year’s time.
First, do you really need the larger amount? If you only need 30,000 brochures and the per piece price is .10 cents each, but if you print 50,000 your unit price drops to .07 cents are you saving money? Let’s see, 30,000 X .10 = $3,000, and 
50,000 X .07 = $3,500. You just spent $500 more than you needed to. If you reprint the same brochure three times during the year, you will have over spent by $1,500. It is true that the more of a printed item you print the lower the per unit price drops, except there is always a certain quantity at which the unit price no longer drops. Take a look at the price curve below. You will see that the unite price drops dramatically from one amount to the next, but the larger the quantity is the less dramatic the reduced per unit price becomes. For example, if you do a price curve on the different quantities and unit price you find that in this case the unit price levels out at the 10,000 quantity and no matter how many more pieces you order, the unit price will not drop.

How does this information save you money on your printing? If you print 50,000 brochures twice a year and you pay $3,000 each time, and a price curve shows that the unit price levels out at the 35,000, and costs $2,500 each time and does not drop from 35,000 to 50,000, you can print 35,000 three times a year rather than 50,000 twice a year and free up $1,500 to improve the cash flow. In addition to freeing up money that can be used to improve cash flow, printing a smaller quantity makes your company better able to change to meet the rapidly changing market. If you have 40,000 brochures in your warehouse and three months later the competition implements a new marketing strategy, you have to through out 40,000 obsolete brochures and print new updated brochures. Millions of dollars of obsolete printed materials are through out every year. Printing a smaller amount allow you to respond to market changes quickly.

4. Do you really need the item you are going to print? All over this country there are office managers, receptionist, and marketing people that just reprint form or sales brochures etc. without even checking to see if that printed piece is really needed. For example, the marketing manager called the purchasing department to order reprints of a sales brochure. Three months after the printing was delivered the marketing manager was in the sales office and noticed that none of the reprinted brochure boxes had been opened. Upon asking the salesperson there in the office why the boxes were not opened the salesperson said, “Oh we never use that version of the brochure any more. It doesn’t address the questions our customers ask.� It would make sense to ask the sales manager if they used the brochures before having them reprinted. That printing job cost $4,400. All wasted.

The same thing happens with office forms, letter head, envelops and business cards. I ask an office manager once why they printed three color forms. She didn’t know but that’s the way they had always been printed. After getting management’s approval we printed the forms with two colors. Just eliminating one color of ink saved the company $500 each time they reprinted the form (six times a year, $3,000). If they printed the form in only one color, they would save another $1,500 a year. After all, they are forms not brochures. To save more on your printing ask yourself and your associates, “Do you really need this printed piece? If so, do you really need three colors, or do you really need a four part form rather than a three part form?�

5. Never Run Out of Printing

Running out of printed materials you need costs you not only thousands of dollars, but it also costs you in administrative delays, poor customer service, handicapping the sales department and so on. As stated above, having to rush to get an item printed because you ran out causes you to either pay a rush charge, or go to a different printer that charges a higher prince. To prevent running out of critical printed materials, do a simple inventory count each month. It’s not that hard. Have the printer put the quality in the box on the outside. Count the boxes and you in good shape.

6. Pick the Right Printer for the Job:

All printers will say they can print your job. That’s far from true. Every printer has a certain kind of equipment that is best to print certain kinds of jobs. Presses come in different widths. A 26 inch press will print on a 26 inch wide sheet of paper. A 40 inch press (40 inches wide sheet) will print more images up on a sheet than on the 26 inch press. Ex.

If a printer has a 26 inch 4 color press and the customer’s job has a high quantity of units, (20,000 or more brochures), the 26 inch press cannot possibly print the job as efficiently as a 40 inch press can. A 26 inch press can only print 6 up while a 40 inch press can print 10 images up on a sheet. The 4 color press can print it faster, and at less cost, less press time, less labor, and at a better price than the 26 inch press.

 

If you are printing a one or two color job, the printer will print one side of the sheet, let it dry, and then print the other side. There are printers that have presses called a perfector. That means it will print on both sides of the paper on one pass through the press. No waiting to print a second side. Printing this kind of job on a perfector press will save you money over printing it on a 26 inch press.  Some printers will tell you they can print your         job but since they don’t really have the right kind of presses to do it, they send it out to another press to print it. Again, getting the right printer for the job will save you thousands of dollars. 7. Reduce Your Printing Costs by Choosing the Right Paper:

Unless you have been dealing with printers for years, you will probably think that most printing paper is pretty much the same. Sure, you know card stock when you see it, or glossy paper vs. regular paper, there are opportunities to save BIG by choosing the right stock. As a marketing director, when I first started working with graphic designers and printers I thought all white printing papers were  the same. In reality, there is a wide range of colors of white, and a variety of weights and finishes. White paper will range from a warm white to a bluish cool white and every shade in between.

Different Quality of Paper

All printers have what is called their “house� sheet. A house sheet is a certain kind of printing paper that the printer can buy from the distributor much cheaper than the other sheets available. Asking the printer to use their house sheet can lower the cost of your printing job by as much as 25%. Another way to save money on your printing is to request a number two or a number three sheet. Most printing papers come in different qualities. A number one sheet is the nicest and has the best finish and brightness. A number two sheet is a little less quality but still a very good sheet. A number three sheet is a little less quality than the number two but again it is generally a good printing paper. Just as you figured, the number one sheet costs more than the number two, and the number three is less than the number two. If you are printing a large quantity of brochures, mailers, postcard, etc, a number three sheet will save lots of money over a more expensive sheet. You need to ask to see samples of each of the three grades of paper and if the three papers don’t look much different to you, use the number three sheet. You will save bookoo bucks.Picking the Right Weight of Paper Can Cut your Costs:

Paper comes in a variety of weights or thicknesses. The standard copy paper is usually a 20# (20 pound) text weight. Nice letterhead paper is often a 60, or 70# text weight. Brochures and mailers are usually 70, 80, or 100# text weight paper. As you know there is also cover weight, or card stock weight papers. Cover weight papers come in 60, 80, and 100# weights. There are lots of variations on these papers above, but these are the basic weights. Look to see if the item you are going to print will look just as nice if you pick a lighter weight paper. For example, if you have a brochure that has always been printed on 100# text weight gloss paper, you can probably save money by switching to a lighter sheet like a 70 or 80# text weight paper. The larger the quality you are going to print, the paper costs make up a greater and greater percent of the total cost of the printing job. For example, if you print 5,000 pieces the paper costs could be 10% of the total cost of the job. On a printing job of 50,000 units, the paper costs would be as much as 30% of the total cost of the job. More paper, more costs. The larger the quality printed, the more important it is to pick an economically priced paper. Just that one technique can save many thousands of dollars on a large printing job.Buying the paper yourself is another way to reduce printing costs. Printers put a markup on as much as 25% on the paper they use to print your job. You can buy the paper for your job directly from the paper distributor and save that extra cost. Here’s the catch though; the paper distributor will want you to buy a sizable amount in order to get the discount. Some companies will buy a large amount of paper and store it in their warehouse and when they print a job, they deliver the paper to the press. The other issue to consider is cash flow. Buying a large amount of paper to save on paper costs needs to save you more money than it will cost you to tie up a large amount of money in paper inventory and storage costs. For large users of printing, this can be a big money saver.Leaving Your Electronic Files of your printed piece at the Printer can cost you big time:

Get all your electronic art files back from the printer. Don’t let him store them. As long as a printer has your files, he has control, and many customers are afraid to ask for their disks because they don’t want the people at the press getting mad at them for taking the next job to a different printer. Thus they leave the disks with the current printer and don’t look for another economical printer. Possession is very powerful. In most cases, when a printer has a customer’s disk, the customer will continue to reprint that job with the printer. So ask for your files to be delivered with samples of the printing after every job.Often customers print with so many different printers they can’t remember which printer has certain files so they have to call all of them and spend valuable time searching. Many times the files can’t be found and they have to be recreated. This can cost quite a bit to replace lost disks. In addition, if the printer goes bankrupt the court locks the doors and you cannot get your files back for months or even years until the bankruptcy is settled. If the printer is destroyed by fire or other disaster, your files can be destroyed. You need control of your files. When you have them, you can make updated changes in the art quickly, and you won’t have to pay a graphic designer to recreate them preventing additional costs.8. Check Your Proofs Carefully or You Are in for Trouble:Guess what? It is not the printer’s job to proof your art. The printer may catch a typo or some other error, but it is not his responsibility. It is yours. Before sending a job to the printer, check it, read it, and check it again. Then have two other people look it over. It is so easy to miss spelling, grammar, and other errors. Never let the printer print your job without seeing a proof and signing it. The proof should appear very close to how the final printed piece will be. Once you sign the proof, any errors or problems that show up on the printed piece are your responsibility and you pay to reprint it. In spite of thorough proofing, sometimes mistakes are made. In those rare, I hope, cases when you have to reprint a job, ask the printer to reprint it for his cost to help you out. The printer wants to make sure you are a happy customer so you will continue to do more printing with him. More often than not, the printer will agree. Again you will save large dollars on reprinting the job.The Magic of Two Color Printing:

If you are on a tight budget, and who’s not, using two color printing rather than three or four colors can reduce your costs substantially. Using two colors of ink can be made to look like a three or four color printing job. How is this possible you ask? Let’s say you are printing a two color postcard, black and red ink. You can use different shads, or screens of black and red to give the appearance of two or three colors of red, and three or four different shades of black. In this example, you could have a 100% black, and a 50% shade of black that looks gray. You can also have 100% red ink, and a shade of 20% up to 80% shades of red. Use this technique and you   will not only save your company money, but you will wow your boss by your genius.Overs and Unders:

10. A standard practice in the printing industry is the concept of unders and overs. When you order any quantity of printing, say 1,000, it is the printers prerogative to deliver either up to 10% extra units, in this case 100 more, or he can deliver up to 10% less than you  ordered resulting in getting 900 rather than a thousand. Printers like to deliver as many overs as possible because they sell more and it increases their sale amount. You do pay for the extra 100 units. Of course, if they are short 100 units, you only pay for the amount you receive. Selling customers overs is a very good way for printers to increase their net profit.If you don’t want any extra overs, tell the printer when you place the order. Not accepting overs can save a little cash. Sometimes if you are doing a mailing or need a minimum of a certain quantity of a printed piece, you need to tell the printer you must have at least that quantity. One more money saving tip; if you are OK with accepting overs, tell the printer you want them at no charge. At least you should get them for 50% off the unit price. Bingo! More cash for you. Have a party. Brother-in-laws can cost you.Relationships with vendors, customers, and other printers are good, but don’t let them control your business. “So you need some printing done? My brother-in-law Morris is a printer and I can get you a great deal.� The Chief Executive Officer of the company has a friend or neighbor who has a printing business. He wants you to send the business to him. Don’t Do It! OK, sometimes you have no choice if the boss insists or you have to keep your wife happy, but avoid it at all costs. Why? For all the reasons above. He probably won’t have the right equipment, his printing may be poor quality, and he may take advantage of you since he is friends with your boss or your wife’s sister.Take my word for it. Avoid those situations like the plague. It will cost you dearly.Your Sales Rep, Friend or Foe:

Good printing sales reps are hard to find. If you do find one, he can be a valuable resource. When you have a printing job coming up, involve him in planning stage. He will be able to make suggestions in the design of the item to be printed that will both save you money and prevent big problems. Often a graphic designer will design a piece to be printed and will use some special effects that either can’ be done on press, or are just a huge production problem. For example, let’s say the   designer is designing a brochure. He will have a black background totally covering the entire piece and also using photos, and copy (the words on the brochure). The sales rep can tell the designer that the black background need to  have support colors of yellow, red, and blue in order to get a deep black. Black ink by itself will not look very good. The sales rep can also tell the designer that a large coverage of solid dark ink will scratch easily after printed and that it needs some kind of varnish or aqueous clear coating to prevent the scratching. These kinds of production ideas brought up in the early stages of the design will help the designer avoid problems when the piece gets on press. It costs a ton to stop a job and pull it off the press because of design problems. Involving the sales rep in the design stage can keep you out of the dog house.Partnering; Advantage or Disadvantage:

Partnering with a printer can have great advantages. If you agree to bring all your printing or a substantial amount of printing to the printer over the year, he can give you great prices, and preferential treatment. He will cut you more slack when you make errors, and he will do favors for you when you are in a bind. He will go the extra mile by getting you paper samples, ideas, and many other services. There are disadvantages to partnering also. Sometimes the printer and the customer don’t see eye to eye on issues and there is friction and struggles for power.Conclusion:

There are other issues I have not covered in this lesson that are also very important, deadlines for instance. Printers could not hit a deadline if they had a smart bomb. Always tell the printer you need the job finished two or three days before you really need it. If he misses your deadline, it won’t kill you. And believe me, he will miss deadlines.

If you follow the 12 ways to save thousands of dollars on your printing, you will not only be a hero at your company, but you will have more knowledge about printing, than 99% of all printing customers.