Everything You Need to Start a Printing Business

Printing is a great business model because the tools and equipment needed to bring those big designs to life are not common. Businesses don’t want to spend their money on state-of-the-art printers that they’ll never be able to use often enough to warrant the cost. This applies even to large brands!

While digital is a huge portion of any marketing and branding strategy, OOH (out of home) marketing (banners, flags, billboards and signs) is not going anywhere. Opening up a local printing business means getting all the orders for your area. You can get in touch directly with the businesses in your area, and you can even open up your services to appeal to the general public as well.

Printing is a particularly great business model if you also have a background in design since you can approach your business as a marketing hybrid and use those sets of services to attract new customers.

Before you get ahead of yourself, however, you’ll need these top essentials to get your company off the ground:

The Business Plan

Every business needs a solid business plan. This plan needs to outline your business, the business model you plan on using, the products and your supply chain, the services you’re going to offer, operation outlines like internal structure, and of course, it must include the results of in-depth market research. While a business plan itself should be relatively short, that’s only because it contains a summary of a lot of work and analysis.

The Equipment

There’s a lot of essential equipment needed to start a printing business. From printers and materials like ink, printing medium, and hemming tools, cutting tools, and more to the printers themselves, the cost and list can grow before your very eyes. Due to the high cost of printers, it’s important to streamline your focus at the start. In general, you’ll need printers that work with various sizes of paper and an option that can, at the very least, handle things like banners.

As you grow you can add new technologies and, as a result, expand your product offerings. Create a list of all the printers and printing technologies available and order them in a list of priority with the most common and popularly used options at the top, and the more niche options at the bottom. Every quarter you can review the demand and your revenue to see if expanding operations with a new printing type is worthwhile.

The Services

Printing is all about service, and just like the printers, you’ll want to continue to expand your service offerings as you grow. Here are just a few of the ways you can better serve your customers and grow as a result:

• Offer print design services
• Offer a full marketing package from design to print
• Have a special deal for art poster printing
• Offer a special price for print and binding near the end of the school year
• Run special seasonal decal and banner marketing specials (Christmas, Valentine’s Day, etc.)
• Have self-serve printers and copy machines

These are just a few ideas. The options you should focus on always need to be catered to your customers and what they need.

About This Author

Hopes Hopes is a renowned author and social media enthusiast. Joined: March 1st, 2019