Every executive is tasked with reducing costs and increasing profit. We can forget. The press of managing the budget can get tied into just meeting the plan instead of achieving the underlying goals. An officer has a fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder equity. You can’t just “manage the budget”. It needs to improve impact on the bottom line.
Print services is one of those areas that just seems to take money and not give a return. That is a shame. Print services can be such a profit booster, when rightly implemented and attached to corporate initiatives.
Last week my partner and I reviewed two university in-plants. They were ivy league and state. In just a few hours we were able to isolate incredible opportunity to both reduce costs and expand profitable services. You just have to know where to look.
I’ve written quite a lot lately about business plans and new product development. Those were the subjects taught at GraphExpo and are being reviewed by hundreds of folks daily. Some of the feedback I get is a need to be able to assess a print services operation and come up with a viable action plan to improve impact on the bottom line. Too often managers and consultants are looking to survive. You need to thrive. There is no reason not to thrive. The opportunities are amazing. Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore how to thrive.
There is no reason to just get along. There is no reason to roll over to conventional strategy of limiting the benefit of your overall communications engine through bad sourcing decisions and coagulation of IT, marketing, and print services. Where you source your print and communication services is a growth decision not a cost cutting decision. You can throttle your progress engine by making this decision incorrectly. Done correctly, you will cut costs, improve service, increase access to effective communications and be a hero. Done incorrectly, you will cut short term costs and produce blockages in your growth and communications engine and frustrations for marketing and sales and the data miners. You cannot grow using yesterday’s wisdom in a thriving world of interactive print, direct, indirect, social, online, mobile, and mass virile and viral communications.
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SOLUM SERVICES 