I've been doing professional print setups for over 10 years and I know what it takes to succeed in this business. Unless you know people or have connections with businesses then I'm not seeing a need to invest just yet. I really am trying to not kick over your sand castle. I just see flaws and have questions.
Thanks for your questions. TO be honest, compared to your level of experience, I don't know what I am doing. However i'd like to touch on what you've said and explain to you what my plan is right now. Of course, I'm always open to good advice.
First off it seems that many of your concerns revolve around us operating as a general-purpose print shop. I think that isn't quite accurate. I am mainly concerned with producing for the schools I already produce for, and expanding from there into the production of our own educational materials. I would like to pick up additional business from local schools, but there's no "large" profit potential in that. maybe another couple of hundred dollars a month with the odd pop from a textbook job. The plan now is to branch out into "mass" producing our own stuff.
For this reason, stepping up from the LaserJet 1020 and OfficeJet 4620 models we have now into an Enterprise-class printer is a big win for us. Our future expansion plans (wrt machinery) are for an 806dn given that 90% of what we will do is going to be monochrome. Otherwise I would get a 651dn next, and then possibly look at other classes of printers. I hope this answers your first question.
For software, I use Microsoft word. Having written books using LaTeX and LibreOffice, I can tell you that Microsoft Word is better suited to general layout and (especially) handling the layout of Asian Text.
We have had a full subscription to Adobe Creative Suite. What you said about Photoshop is interesting. Pixel control vs. (font) point control might be useful to me, but I can't see any other clear benefits. For example, I am not overly concerned with perfect color matching (i.e. no spectrophotometer). The DesignJet series includes a spectrophotometer, but again we are going with LaserJet to expand what we're already focused on. Branching out into advertising copy is not really what I want KPS to be about. That being said, the m551dn is an ImageREt 3600 class printer ("Professional Quality" according to HP). You can read more about it's color capabilities in
this ImageREt pdf. Many of the technical terms are beyond me but it is in fact capable of several different color modes including two different CMYK modes, and including professional press ink modes such as "SWOP, Euroscale, and DIC"
(Disclaimer: I don't know what that means, but apparently my printer can handle it). Reading through that pdf I linked seems to address many of the concerns you've raised about the printer in your second question. But for what we plan to do with the printer I am am very happy with the color and image quality.
3. Do you create the files to be printed or is the customer creating them? If the customer creates the file then I don't see why they would continue to use your printer once they find out they could just as well buy it themselves. Business are not stupid and if they think printing in-house is cheaper then that is what they will do. Print shops are not the only business I visit with large volume machines. People come to print shops for professional prints and because they lack the equipment to print what they need in a timely manner.Both (we create and they create). Based on what the schools are telling me, I can undercut the local print shop by 40% and still make money. Part of the reason for this is that the m551dn can handle small paper sizes like 2x3 and 3x5 that the larger Ricoh models cannot handle. Sharp is the other major seller around here, everyone and their brother has a Sharp photocopier, and they can't do it either. So in terms of index cards, I have the right setup or close to it. For our other major source of income (doing textbooks for independent schools) I'll give you an example. One customer came to me with a 110 page book. It was going to cost them $30 per book for 100 books at the local shop. It was so expensive they decided to print the last 1/3rd of the book in black and white greyscale, to cut the cost down to $23 per book. I could do the whole thing in color for perhaps $15 (two full sets of toner cartriges and paper cost). All my other research seems to confirm I can sell at around half the cost of the local print shop and still make money. I'm not sure if it's their margins or if they don't order paper in bulk or what, but I am happy with our costing right now.
Edit: We also just spoke to another school who buys the Oxford Reading Tree series. The workbooks are $2.99. They charge the students cost for the workbooks. I can reproduce the same workbook in the same staple-bound format for just under half of what they pay. The catch? The ORT series is copyrighted so they need their own material. Great, I have an artist working on images for their new textbook right now. I'll link you some of the images in a moment (I will post them below). So you see, not only will we make ~25% profit every time they come to us for a reprint, the customer saves ~30% and they're happy going with us. Plus they get a book suited exactly to their school which is better for them anyway.
Assuming the design is incidental (we treat in-house design as incidental if we expect a lot of repeat orders) If they wanted to do this in-house, they would need the setup I have. It is possible but unlikely for an independant school to do this. If a school needed ~1,000 books a year and saved a dollar a book, it would take more than 3 years to justify the cost of the printer, toner, paper, and so forth.
4. Here is one more thing about flashcards I'm skeptical on and that is tablets. Schools are adopting tablets at insanely fast rate. Some schools have completely forgone the textbook in light of having a cheap android tablet. Sure tablets can get lost or broken, but I have schools that decided the cost isn't much different than buying a lost or damage textbook. The tablet also teaches the student on the adoption of technology for skill building. Even now office copiers use tablets as a screen when selecting a function. They even have apps and a web browser to surf the internet on.What's worse, there are apps like AnkiDroid (or Anki for iPad) which also run on your desktop which are SRS flashcard programs. They're also more advanced than simple flashcards. I have used these programs myself and they're great. The problem with them is that you have to have your device with you (which can be a problem sometimes), you have to log in, and (the big one) you have to design the sets yourself. I'm aware of several existing sets but I could never find one which suited my needs. For some people, inputting the amount of data it takes to beat simple flashcards is daunting.
The main problem I see with tablets is the
kids. As a teacher myself, I can tell you that tablets will never
work in a classroom in Asia, not for a hundred and fifty years. Kids' attention span is already horrendously bad. It's the effect of western and modern sponegbob culture (no offense, I love the show, but facts are facts). Parents are generally horrified. Many parents believe that if you let your child use a tablet it will ruin their eyes and scramble their brains. I know from experience that a simple set of flashcards is often simply much more useful than a tablet app. Many will disagree and I'm not saying programs like Anki aren't useful. They are.
The flashcards fit a niche. I am learning Japanese and Chinese myself and compared to Anki on a tablet, I prefer the cards. They give you something to touch and hold onto and there is something special about that. I feel those cards have helped me in ways Anki couldn't.
I've been doing professional print setups for over 10 years and I know what it takes to succeed in this business. Unless you know people or have connections with businesses then I'm not seeing a need to invest just yet. I really am trying to not kick over your sand castle. I just see flaws and have questions.
I like how you've made me think about the printing business.
I think that we are good to go for now, we have stepped up our production capacity, our image quality, and added color. There should be plenty of organic profit growth in the future to allow us to expand with things like a DesignJet printer or a proper perfect binding machine. Right now I am looking at desktop perfect binders under $1,000. We just have a new textbook order and I've decided we're going to bind it ourselves this time. But that is a subject for another post.
For now our problems of print capacity and office space have been solved or will be solved with our current investments. Future investments will be placed into bulk orders and a desktop perfect binder.
So I was discussing bulk orders with my wife and she dropped the bomb that there is a paper mill on the outskirts of town. I can't believe it. We are going to be able to get margin on A4 paper, too. Preliminary cost estimates tell me I can get 80gsm for +50% off retail. I will need to order several tons (maybe 1000 packs or 500,000 sheets). I am sure it will fit in the new office space, but I'll cram it into my living room if I have to. I never would have believed I could get so excited about plain white sheets of paper.
