Advice to a Quick-Print Franchisee

Struggle seems to come hand in hand with human existance. There's no escaping, particularly for those in quick-print franchising. I should know. I cut my franchise teeth here, in an industry with a fairly mature market, surprisingly nice margins, and yet a technology and marketplace changing so quickly that it is hard for a store to keep up.

As franchisor executives and franchise owners recently wrestled with how to turn around drooping profits, they sought my advice. There was discussion of complex long-term trends and strategy but that is for another post. First, let's cover the fundamentals for the immediacy of now. Here are recommendations to quick print owners in eight short points to consider in creating your upcoming business plan...

In this incredibly dynamic market, customers are trending towards demand-print, distribute-then-print, shorter run lengths, shorter product cycles, and buyer proliferation. The market has been soft the past few years and as a consequence many shops with less robust systems in place are hurting. I would recommend the following fundamentals in order to strengthen market share now and gird up profits:

1. In tough times, aggressively seek your competitor’s business and to expand business with existing clients.
2. Most importantly, commit to a strong (but affordable) sales team with owner involvement and a robust target marketing effort, one that emphasizes outside sales, continual prospecting, and direct mail. Take more affordable but high potential candidates and train, train, train.
3. Review financial statements on a monthly basis and share them with the franchisor so they'll know where best to support you
4. Commit to strong operating systems that create consistency in results in order to keep your customer coming back for more. You must be a maniac about quality and on-time delivery. Such efforts will lower your costs compared to the competition. One way to monitor rates is by implementing metrics on re-do's with the goal of improving it monthly. It takes roughly 5 jobs to make up what you lost in a botched job. A real re-do rate (no deflated figures, thank you) that is less than 2% will be hard for the competition to match. If you cannot hit that, then see point 5 below. It is doubtful that your competition will even know their re-do rate.
5. Invest heavily in training and retaining good people.
6. Draw closely on head office expertise and systems to improve operating profits through increased sales, marketing and operational efficiency through better vendor negotiating, understanding contribution margin, and continual improvement of standards.
7. Keep on top of trends. Invest wisely in the latest technology, particularly in digital customer computer-to-print-shop capability to ease the pain of customers in solving their document needs.
8. The benefits of being associated with a strong, well-integrated network have become far less theoretical and much more tangible.