Mike Seidle ...notes from the road

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I’m tired of business cards. They’re dull, they’re boring, they haven’t changed in nearly 100 years.

Oh sure, you get the occasional creative type that has a uniquely die-cut card, like a round card, a thin half-size card, or even the double-sized card that’s folded over to normal size (although to be honest, I tear off the half that doesn’t have the person’s name on it).

But these cards all look the same. They’re on white stock, have different colored inks, and have the same information on it.

Yawn.

Look people, we live in an amazing technological age: we’ve put a man on the moon, we can transplant hearts and livers into people, and we have special printers that will actually print photographs inexpensively. Why do you insist on printing one-sided, two-color business cards on white stock when you can print double-sided full-color cards for the same price?

Why not print a card with a photo on the back, full-color logo and color background on the front? All you need is the right kind of printer, like the Legend 72HUV UV curable inkjet printer. We have one of these in our shop here in Indianapolis. I’m always amazed by what it can do.

This printer is basically a huge version of your typical desktop inkjet printer. Think of all the color documents, fancy graphs, and even photographs you’re able to print on something the size of a VCR. Now imagine being able to do that on a 4 foot wide substrate. Although the Legend 72HUV is often used by sign shops and poster printers, it can also be used as a way for cut sheet printers to save costs and increase revenue. And it can be used to print some of the coolest business cards I’ve seen in a looooong time.

For one thing, UV printing just looks better. It’s smooth, doesn’t run or smudge, and dries immediately so you don’t get “ghost images” from wet ink on the back of your card.

Put your face on a business card. For example, if you’re a realtor, print your photo on your business card. You’ve got your face plastered everywhere else — your home listings, your websites, and for some of you, your For Sale signs, so why not on your cards?

Put photos on the cards. If you sell a particular product

Print short run business cards. Are you going to a trade show that needs a special offer or show discount? Print out 100 regular business cards with an offer on the back — “Special offer for the 2009 International Poultry Expo: Buy two feed bins, and the third one is free!” Or maybe you’re a car dealer, selling different kinds of cars. Print cards with your most popular models on the back. When a customer looks at that model, give them the card with that model on it, and make yourself more memorable.

Do variable data printing. Think of this a full-color mail merge — each card has a different piece of information on it. Print cards with special messages for a certain individual. Do you have a special meeting with an important client? Put a “Thanks for meeting with me, Bob” message on the back. Do you have a number of favorite quotes or authors? Put different quotes on the backs of the cards, and hand them out at random. As you hand out cards at networking events, people will see you have different quotes, and may even try to collect them.

Photo: PhotoOneGang

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Did you know you can get a wide format printer, like the Wide Format Legend 72HUV, for $55,000 instead of $85,000? With the 2009 rollover of the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, it’s possible. Here’s how it works:

According to Section 179 of the Act, if a print shop purchases a wide format printer like the Legend 72HUV, they can deduct up to the full purchase amount in the first year - $85,000. In fact, those businesses investing less than $800,000 in qualifying equipment can immediately deduct up to $250,000 (that’s way up from the previous amount of $128,000). Spend over $250,000 that year on equipment and you get an additional 50% deprecation bonus.

That’s big news and the kind of tax incentive that equals real, tangible savings. Based on an average print shop tax rate of about 30%, that $85,000 deduction on a wide format printer works out to a total, real dollar tax savings of $30,000. And guess what? That brings your financing price down to $55,000.

You can use our free Do the Math tax calculator spreadsheet to figure out exactly how much you’ll be able to deduct on your taxes and what you’ll save, in real dollars, on a wide format printer purchase. Click here [link: http://sugar.lloydsofindiana.com/2009_Tax_Incentive_Worksheet.xls] to download the worksheet.

These types of generous government tax incentives don’t stay around forever, they usually dry up and disappear as the economy improves, the budget changes or the government moves in a new direction. So, if you’ve been thinking about going wide or investing in a new piece of equipment, now is the time to do it.

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Here in Indianapolis, we have a vibrant, thriving independent theatre community (so vibrant, in fact, that I spelled “theatre” the fancy way, with “re” at the end).

Each summer is the Indy Fringe Festival, an independent theatre festival, held just a couple miles from our office is Massachusetts Avenue. Mass Ave, as it’s known to the locals, has a cluster of independent theaters, and for 10 days, it’s overrun with theatre goers, buskers, and the actors themselves who visit each others’ shows and hang out at the bars and restaurants along 5-block district northeast of downtown Indy.

So what do theatre troupes have to do with a printing blog? A lot, actually.

As I travel up and down Mass Ave, there’s one theater — Theater on the Square — which has some of the best posters promoting their plays I’ve seen in town.

Sadly, I can’t walk anywhere without casting my printer’s eye on any printed material, so I’m always impressed by these posters. They’re bright, they’re colorful, they’re well-designed.

And they’re huge.

I would love to see more theaters (and theatres) use poster printing technology like TOTS uses. Most people have the mistaken belief that posters are expensive, or that you need to order thousands of posters to get a decent price break.

Not at all. Thanks to wide-format printing technology, like the Legend 72HUV UV curable ink jet printer. We have one of these in our shop, and I’m continually impressed by what it can do.

First, it prints to nearly any surface or substrate — we once printed to a full-size door, another time we printed to a 3′ x 6′ piece of 1/2″ plywood. Second, it’s like a giant inkjet printer (okay, it is a giant inkjet printer), which means it does full-color printing, including photos and funky poster designs. Third, it’s UV ink, which means it’s environmentally friendly and non-toxic. And fourth, you can print out short runs of full-color pages for a fraction of the cost of a traditional offset printer.

So what does that mean to theatre troupes?

Imagine printing giant posters promoting your play on vinyl, Gator board, or even a door. Imagine printing rehearsal photos, cast photos, and all kinds of great colors and backgrounds for your posters. Imagine printing only a few hundred full-color flyers on glossy paper, not several thousand.

Even if you’re not a theatre troupe in Central Indiana, there are still ways to find this technology in your area. Contact us at (877) 626-6848, and we’ll be happy to locate a Legend 72HUV sign shop in your area.

Photo: Kevin Burkett

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As a distributor and fan of wide format printers like the Legend 72HUV UV curable printer/a>, I can’t help but be excited about all the different things this printer can do.

For one thing, it can make a print shop more profitable. Not just because it’s a new piece of equipment with some great benefits and cool features, like printing with ultraviolet curable ink, or specialty sign printing.

We’re actually seeing a lot of cut sheet/sheet-fed printers switch to wide format printing, because they can offer their customers so much more.

For one thing, you can run small signs on the Legend 72HUV. Rather than turning away large print formats, you can now accept poster print jobs for theaters and bands, signs for special events, and even specialty projects like 11×17 brochures.

We have a customer in Ohio who said that as a sheet-fed printer, he has to run $10,000 of sheet fed paper just to make $1,000 in profit. That’s because his margins are already so low, and he’s losing a lot of profit in labor and production costs.

But if he were to switch over to a wide format printer, he would only need to do $2,000 in printing to make $1,000 profit.

Because the wide format printer is so new, and is very inexpensive compared to other printing equipment, if you can add a 20% - 30% margin, you can pay for the machine in a year. (And 40% margins are not unheard of with this printer either.)

If you’re interested in more information on the Legend 72HUV wide format printer, visit us at WideFormatRevolution.com, or call us at (877) 626-6848.

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Despite all of the doomsday reporting about our economy on the nightly news, some small business sectors are still doing well. Take, for example, trade printing. The trade printing industry is actually still growing (albeit slowly) as more printers and brokers start to outsource their printing.

On A Printing Office: A Blog for Small and Medium Printers, they sum up the phenomenon nicely along with a reference to the original research published in Print Solutions magazine. What’s interesting to note, and the blog entry mentions it too, is that 70% of the top 144 trade printing companies employed less than 100 people!

So, yes, small printers and small business can survive in what the media’s calling a cutthroat economy. In fact, small printers are usually better able to cut costs, be flexible, move quickly and weather the storm (provided they have the resources to get them through it).

But why trade printing specifically? I think it comes down to cash flow and equipment acquisition. A small, local printer may not have the reserves on hand to invest in a new piece of equipment or a down payment on a new lease, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to offer those services. Instead, he’ll broker a relationship with a trade printer. Because for some small businesses, it doesn’t make sense to have all that equipment on hand if you’re only running those kinds of jobs a few times a year. So, the demand for trade printing goes up.

After being inundated with end-of-the-world reporting about our supposedly collapsing economy, it’s nice to read some good news for once. Yes, small business can succeed. Yes, it can grow and yes, it can be innovative. So, kudos to Print Solutions and Printing Office for reminding us.

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