Power-packed Print Production

A small-sized shop’s path to playing with the big guys.

There are over 45,000 commercial printers in the United States as of 2022, and once you extract the Top 500 players, you’ll find that the field is bursting with shops that are under $2,000,000 in annual revenue—with the greatest percent of those in the sub-$1M category. It’s fair to assume that most of these locations are operating in limited space with little bandwidth to take on multiple large jobs simultaneously.

With real estate at a premium and margins a primary concern for any business leader, the question we must ask ourselves: “How do I pack the most production capacity into the smallest physical footprint possible?”

When we launched our studio, SpeedPro Chicago Loop in 2015 (and before we even got our business cards), we traveled the country coast to coast for two straight months meeting with Top Ten producers as well as struggling shops within our franchise system. We wanted to see both sides— how they built their businesses and what made them great or why they were failing.

The general commonality we found amongst the overachievers was that they had invested in their business—tightly packing a vast array of equipment and presenting like manufacturers.

Meanwhile fledgling studios boasted pretty-looking showrooms yet were staring at outdated eco-solvent roll-to-roll printers that had been set up for them years prior.

Given our close proximity to McCormick Place and all of the Chicago’s major venues, real estate leasing costs meant we had to determine how to pack the greatest throughput into our miniscule 3,468-square-foot studio. We knew that we couldn’t be a competitive player with just a single sixty-four-inch eco-solvent roll-to-roll machine.

We drastically diverged from the prototype set-up for a new studio, opting to be the first one to include a roll-to-roll latex, an eight-foot hybrid flatbed, and a CNC cutter-router (a configuration the million-dollar studios eventually morphed into—after several years in business).

We started with the Esko XN-24 CNC cutter-router, which allowed us to complete a recurring job that had taken us eight days the first time, cutting hundreds of pieces by hand, to less than two days on the second round.

Yet as our business began to boom, any showroom aspirations gave way to revenue-generating function.

Poising ourselves for continued advancement, desperate to increase gross margin, and unwilling to lease more space to accommodate a reception and display area, we searched for power-packed technology that could fit within our physical confines and enable at least three-times more production.

After extensive analysis of both soft media and substrate production, it was clear that the quickest return-on-investment (ROI) would be found in replacing the roll-to-roll.

Adopting a cost-analysis (ROI) matrix provided to us by one of the many courting manufacturer’s knocking on our door, we plugged in a host of figures to include leasing, service, and ink costs; speeds at varying production quality; labor (or, reduction in); historical production levels; projected production needs; percent of outsourcing; estimated lost/unbid business; capabilities, etc. We matched each contending printer against the machine we were using.

Indeed there’s a viable debate to be made for unique product offerings at higher margins; however concentrating on moving core business faster, taking on more of it, and hopefully reducing operational costs was our driving force.

We early adopted the Canon Océ Colorado 1650. In its first week online, we accepted a 3,000-plus-square-foot job with a one-day turn time, which we would have had to pass on had we opted for only a slightly faster printer.

The formula worked! In the first twelve months, our average monthly rolled media production increased by 75 percent and overall percent of outsourcing decreased by 16 percent.

The onset of COVID in 2020 meant further equipment investment be damned; we were holding on for dear life—until late 2021.

As conventions and exhibits slowly returned to favor, we took on print work for a large tradeshow management company that had laid-off most of its team and temporarily sunset its equipment.

Work here consisted mostly of rigid substrates and ten-foot banners. The volume was unlike anything we have ever imagined, much less known. We went from buying by the sheet to boxes to palates overnight—and we still couldn’t produce a large bulk of what we were tasked to do with a one- to three-day lead time.

SHOP LAYOUT BY ERIC LAZAR

This had the opportunity to be our golden ticket, if we could take it all inhouse. But emerging from the pandemic made us extremely gun-shy about any additional investments. Our “build it and they will come” philosophy was clouded by “save it for a rainy day.”

This was going to be a far more substantial investment than we had ever made previously, and there was no room for error in our analysis. We needed the biggest, most powerful punch-per-square-foot of production to fit within a small footprint, minding that our previous three-times throughput increase expectation wasn’t going to be nearly sufficient.

To maximize our fullest potential, we were rumored to have been the first in the country last April to take possession of the EFI Pro30H ten-foot hybrid flatbed. It was rated to push over 2,700-square-feet per hour and only required a single 240V outlet.

The volume of work and pressure it placed on our primary outsourcing partner was becoming increasingly difficult to navigate, as we had relinquished control on ensuring delivery dates. And while the top-line revenue looked great, the cost of wholesaling to a wholesaler was proving to be an expensive and unsustainable proposition for us.

From January through June, we had been outsourcing 27.2 percent of our production revenue, but the back half fell to a mere 6.1 percent with our net margin climbing by a full 20 points. Our remaining outsourcing was devoted almost exclusively for products that we have no desire to fabricate ourselves.

We achieved a 73 percent revenue increase from our previous best—all without expanding our space or taking on a