How Small $500,000/yr. Printers Earn an Additional $16,000/yr. With Price Consistency

A small $500,000/yr. print shop can add $16000 or more in profit by eliminating the occasional job priced too low, or priced too high, and eliminating requotes of the same jobs to customers who are fishing for a lower price.

Win more jobs with accurate prices.
With PowerQuote you can consider the increased productivity of longer run jobs with our “sliding scale discount”. Longer run jobs allow more billable hours as compared to payroll hours. Press speed tends to increase with longer run jobs too. Since larger jobs tend to be more competitive, this feature helps you win jobs while protecting profit.

Ex: You are doing $2000/day, and 20% of this work is quoted ($400) and the other 80% comes from reorders that don’t require a quote. Winning 25% of your quotes then you are quoting an average of $1600 per day. By getting your high quantity job prices in line you could win a larger percentage of the big jobs. If you increased your quote success to just 30% instead of 25% with PowerQuote’s sliding scale discount and win $80 in sales per day or $20,320 per year. (a gross profit gain of $6600). Shops selling more than $500,000/yr. stand to gain proportionately more.

Consistent cost-based estimating protects profit.
If your system is not methodical, repeatable or cost based, you lose money on jobs quoted incorrectly. PowerQuote gives you all of these qualities and many checks to insure the price is correct.

Some managers believe they are pricing some jobs below cost. In a small $500,000/yr. shop, consider the average job to be $800, but the more complicated jobs are more subject to estimating errors and they average $1000. If you price at cost you lose the normal 30% markup or $300 on the average complex job. If an accurate methodical estimating system stops this just twice a month, you add $7200/yr in bottom line profit.

Stop inconsistent pricing that damages customer relationships.
Customers can become upset the same job was priced higher one time and lower another time.

Some customers ask for several estimates on the same job so they can choose the lowest price. If you talk to this customer and quote his job 3 times instead of once, and each quote takes 15 minutes of your time you waste 30 minutes. If this happens only once a week and we value your time at only $50/hour this is costing you $1300 per year.

Accurate repeatable estimating stops the problem and earns you the difference between the price he would have paid and the lowball price that came from the poor estimating system. If difference is only 5% and customer is a key account in a $500,000/yr. shop, you could boost the account from $20,000/yr. to $21,000.. and the extra $1000 is all profit!