Printing Services

Offset Printing Services

Local printers come in several types depending upon the type of printing they provide. Most small businesses contract offset printing, because offset allows the greatest flexibility for a wide range of applications. Offset print shops tend to be small, with a single owner employing three to 15 employees. Most shops offer some sort of delivery service for established customers, along with typesetting and subcontracted graphics design. It’s fairly safe to take advantage of referrals from printers, because they won’t refer you to any professional service provider unless they ae absolutely sure that that professional can perform. The printing business lives or dies by word of mouth advertising, and all printers go to great lengths to protect their reputations, for they know the standard rule of customer service. One satisfied customer will refer business to them, while a disgruntled customer will tell up to 16 others about the bad experience he or she had.

Each individual printing services shop will offer standard printing on several different kinds of stock at set rates per thousand. Generally, the longer the print run, or larger the order in terms of thousands of printed images, the lower the costs. That’s because of set up time. Set up time is the time it takes for a printer to “burn” a metal plate from typeset originals provided by a customer or in-house typesetter, and adjust his press so that the paper accurately feeds through press rollers. Once this is done, a standard ink color is applied to the feed rollers and ink is stamped into paper and stacked in a tray. Once the run for that color is completed, then the plate is changed, and the process repeated for additional colors until the entire job is done.

Web Press Printing Services

Larger printers have web presses that can handle huge and complex multi-color printing operations. Runs of 100,000 to 1,000,000 impressions are common.

Customer Service

Most printing services provide quality customer service, but all printers share a universal trait; they almost never admit to a mistake, claiming miscommunication on the part of the customer. Printers tend to be strong-willed, resulting from years of dealing with customers who frequently don’t have a clue as to what they want in a print job, or see no difficulty to make “small” changes while the print job is being run. After years of dealing with confused customers who cannot understand why its costs money to make changes, nor haven’t any clue as to what is involved the in the process, printers tend to become a little defensive. But if proven wrong, most will relent and run the job over again. To get this kind of reversal, a customer has to clearly know what they want in a job and spell it out clearly beforehand. Mistakes happen in any business, but for a printer, mistakes can be costly, since to correct them requires more down time and set up time taken away from other pressing jobs, that may be larger runs providing more revenue to the printer,

What many small business people many not realize is that in a smaller print shop, the size of the run dictates who comes first. For a smaller run of 1000 two-color business cards, this job will be scheduled as time permits. Bigger customers come first. This is why estimates of job completion are somewhat inflated, in case something urgent comes in from a larger customer that has to be run right away. But even then, a small job should only take a few days, and sometimes can be ready on the same day, depending upon scheduled press time. All printers have press downtime which they would all like to fill. But the ebb and flow of the business makes this impossible.

Ordering Print Services

When ordering a print job, expect to pay a deposit which the printer will mean in case you never darkens his doorway again, which frequently happens, especially with small businesses startups that appear and disappear with great rapidity. The printer will expect you to pay for the job upon completion, unless you establish a credit account, unlikely if you are a new business and the printer doesn’t know who you are.