By John Roche, Haybrooke CEO So, you know your cost rates to the last penny. You have clocked your machines performance levels and plotted the running speed curves to the ‘nth degree. You have meticulously fed this information into your estimating system and can now produce estimates for your customers […]

The Problem with Print

By John Roche, Haybrooke CEO Pile them high and sell them cheap (‘PTHSTC’). Everyone has heard the business mantra, but what would it mean for the printing industry if all printers began to run their businesses this way? Let’s find out. TheFreeDictionary.com sums up the PTHSTC idiom, thus: Pile them […]

The Cheapening of Print

By John Roche, Haybrooke CEO The printing industry today is dominated by the need for speed; faster admin processes, faster printing presses and faster job turnarounds. It’s a seemingly never ending round of business process and efficiency improvements with printers under constant pressure to keep up with the pace of […]

Speed Demons

By John Roche, Haybrooke CEO There was once a small principality, called Candytown. The residents of Candytown each had a very sweet tooth and, to accommodate the demand for sweets in the province, there were four confectionery manufacturers. The confectionery manufacturers each had a 25% share of the sweet market […]

Price wars in Candytown

By John Roche, Haybrooke CEO It’s one of the toughest decisions a printer has to make: how to price its products in the marketplace. It’s tough, because there is generally no universally agreed benchmark price for any given printed product. This makes assessing what is a ‘good’ price for print […]

Suicidal Pricing

By John Roche, Haybrooke CEO Whatever industry you happen to be in, the price that customers are willing to pay for your goods and services is rarely the same as the cost of producing them. Market pricing is an economic concept with commonplace familiarity in the printing industry. It is […]

Cost Rates vs Market Pricing

By John Roche, Haybrooke CEO How does becoming more efficient improve the profitability of a printing company? Before we try and answer this question, the notion of ‘efficiency’ must first be understood in a context that is relevant to its greater application. A typical dictionary definition of efficiency will include: well […]

Efficiency: the new way to profit

By John Roche, Haybrooke CEO Hardly anyone in printing really understands just how important cost rates are. Most printers, when they think or talk about costs, tend to think about the overall cost of running their businesses – and not its unit or hourly cost rates. They unconsciously expand the […]

Cost Rates That Lead to Extinction

By John Roche, Haybrooke CEO There is value in agreeing prices in advance with your suppliers; buyers know that. It can speed up the end-to-end procurement process and help deliver savings to customers, too. In sectors where it is easy to calculate pricing for products and services – the ‘widget’ […]

Contract Margins vs Contract Pricing