A Western Sydney franchise printer has grown revenue more than 70 per cent in the past two years by maintaining customer loyalty with super-fast turnaround.
Mail Boxes Etc (MBE) Parramatta owner Charles Batt says clients increasingly demand jobs be done the next day or sooner, leading him to upgrade his equipment and build partnerships with trade printers.
“A lot of the customers seem to want printing done immediately. They expect that they can walk in at five in the afternoon and have 10,000 pages printed by 9am the next day, so you need to be able to handle those kinds of things when it comes up,” he says.
Despite being a small business, the franchise installed a Fuji Xerox Color 1000 Press two years ago so it could quickly produce high quality, glossy products quickly. Batt says the big investment has paid off.
“It runs at a speed of 100-pages per minute and if you can run it for 10 hours a day, then you can do huge amounts of business. We also have a back-up machine that runs 80-pages a minute as well as a few other machines that help with offline finishing,” Batt says.
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Batt says the big investment has paid off, as two years ago the company boosted sales 50 per cent in one year and 20 per cent last year.
However, saying yes to increasingly short turnarounds has trained clients to expect it, putting pressure on the company to keep delivering on challenging requests.
“It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because every time a customer comes and says ‘look this is a really ridiculous question, but can you print this by this time, and you say yep we can do that,’ you kind of train them that it can be something they can do next time,” he says.
“So in one hand you are doing yourself a disservice by saying yes but you want to the business, so you can’t really say no to train the customer’s behaviour.”
However, he says while saying yes creates a challenge, he is proud of delivering on time and charging a fair price, which ensures a return customer.
“The reason people keep coming back is because they trust us. If you do what you said you were going to do when you said you will do it then the customer says ‘well they stuck to their word’ and they will come back,” Batt says.
“The only reason they would go somewhere else is because they would feel unloved and ripped off and you have not done what you said you were going to do.”
Batt also maintains client loyalty by using trade printers to produce offset and wide format work instead of having them go elsewhere.
He also prints free samples for some of his big clients, who are in marketing and sales sector, and once they win the job they come and get the printing done with MBE.
“I know that there is a boom in wide format market. So there is a couple of things you can do; you either invest in the equipment, or get the knowledge and service your clients by outsourcing the jobs to big printers,” he says.
“The idea is that you bring the ability to your customers where you print the product yourself or you will have the knowledge to essentially connect them to what they need, which will ensure the customer is happy and they will refer you to other businesses for printing jobs.”
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