Opening your doors to change will prepare your operation for the future of print
by Sandy Hubbard
In the past you competed with other print shops for jobs.
Today you compete with traditional and online marketers, your own customers who are outputting jobs in various ways, in-house printing operations, online discount printers, your local office supply mega store, and many other types of businesses that are expanding into print.
You’ll notice that I said “today.” I’m not advising you to sell against those types of competitors; you should already be doing that.
Instead we are going to talk about The Future.
One of the things about being a Print Futurist is that people expect me to recommend the next robotic piece of equipment or the next mind-blowing technology. Of course I am always interested in those things and researching them on your behalf. Ultimately, though, preparing yourself for the future involves a lot more than buying the latest gimmick.
Your next wave of competitors will be very young, very creative entrepreneurs who can bring technologies to market so quickly you can’t plan how to outwit them.
These competitors are charismatic people with little hands-on business experience but strong networks of collaborators and angel investors. They often open their businesses sooner than they should because they want to gain market share and be bought by a bigger company. They offer customers, partners and investors heavy discounts or stock options as compensation for participating in their research and development. These energetic start ups work around the clock, often funded out of their own pockets. And they often by-pass the traditional new product debut process and jump straight to product delivery.
Despite product bugs, new customers climb on board with these entrepreneurs to get ahead in their own market sectors, using the collaboration as an opportunity to experiment with new technologies with little financial investment.
If this sounds wacky and out of the realm of your company or customers, take a deep breath and put on your creative hat. These types of arrangements are being made all around you.
Even though my specialties are print and publishing, my professional networks know that I am interested in new technologies. I am invited on a regular basis to preview, review, beta test, and partner in developments across the board, and many of these ideas could be game changers for their particular industries. Often they never make it to fruition, due to funding or inexperienced business owners, but during their innovation and testing phases they are pseudo-viable products.
As a printing company or print producer, you can safely participate in this wave a few ways.
1. Approach the manufacturer of your favorite piece of equipment or software and offer to be a beta tester. For software, this process can be as easy as going to a website and agreeing to hold them harmless if the beta product messes up your computer or a job, etc. Read the fine print to find out if you will be required to report on results or join in group meetings with other beta users.
2. Offer to participate in the beta tests of your own suppliers. You will earn their gratitude, you will see what they are working on, and they will work hard to shield you from any negative impacts of the test process. You might be able to benefit from having a new piece of equipment in your shop for a while, and sometimes you can have the cost of supplies paid for by the supplier as well. Be sure to run the paperwork past your legal team to be sure you are not agreeing to automatically buy the equipment after the testing phase.
3. Offer to beta test a technology that is not directly related to print. You might test a customer relations management (CRM) upgrade or an app that integrates your smart phone to the shipping and receiving department. Testing technologies that improve your relationship with your customers could give you an incremental edge over your competition.
4. Offer to bring one of your open-minded customers into the loop and allow them to benefit from the arrangement as well.
It all sounds dangerous and out of control, doesn’t it? It seems as though the benefits could never outweigh the negative impacts to your operation and your workflow.
But here are a couple of considerations:
We tend to use equipment and software long past its usefulness, both mechanically and market-wise. While your competitors and start ups are embracing the newest versions, we make do with what we have because it’s still in good condition, makes financial sense, integrates smoothly into our workflow, and postpones that distruptive time when we finally do install or upgrade.
But what if, by participating in beta testing, we trained our organization to be more responsive to change, to be more creative about handling disruption, and to be eager to learn about the newest advances in our field?
Trust me 100 percent when I say that the benefits of having an organization that can graciously, nimbly and cleverly address and incorporate change will more than make up for the disadvanges you might foresee.
And for all the grumbling that will go on, you will see your staff change, become more positive, and evolve into a more strategic organization. If you are a print producer or one-person operation, you will look at yourself a few months into the process and hardly recognize yourself.
There are consultants dedicated to helping your company embrace change, and it might be worth it to involve them as you start this journey.
The future of print is going to involve more and more change — some that you can control and much of it that you cannot. Helping your organization position itself for migrations in technology and business will be one of the greatest strategies you can employ today.
Sandy Hubbard is Print Futurist for Print Media Centr. For 22 years she published a regional printing magazine, advising printers of all sizes and specialties on how to maximize their operations in the face of our quickly evolving industry.
