ProPrint ran a poll recently where more than three-quarters of the respondents claimed they had experienced a trade supplier calling on one of their customers. Glad it’s not just me.

Trade suppliers can be your best friends or your worst enemies. They know your business. They know your customers and have an idea of the work you do for them. They know that they can always beat your prices. And they can tell if you are struggling cash-wise. These are things you do not want your competition knowing.

So who do you trust with this kind of information? You want a good partner – someone who’ll do good work quickly, at a consistent quality and price and who you can trust. Sounds pretty basic, but it is surprising how many companies seemingly go out of their way to prove themselves bad partners.

For things like business cards and stationery, we now use a leading nationwide trade printer. I won’t embarrass them by naming them but they print in CMYK at their network of nationwide hubs. We went through four other suppliers before we got there. We had poor quality printing from one, another who was trade only but ran a sister company selling direct using trade prices; one who took three weeks to print some business cards and one who asked you to pick up your jobs by browsing through all the jobs on their floor, where it sat with jobs from every other printer in Sydney.

Those are bad partners.

It will take a lot to get me away from my current supplier, mainly because they have never let me down where the others have, but also because they have no retail arm. I can trust them with my work without worrying about their sales reps.

But sometimes you have to deal with print companies that have reps. That’s when it gets tricky. I have been lucky – most of the printers I have partnered with have done the right thing. I say “lucky”, but really I have found that whether you can trust a partner or not largely comes down to the owners. A good owner recognises trade work is off limits. Why cannibalise work that is already on the job board anyway? It’s a bad owner who pushes their sales rep too much so they start scavenging in the trade job bags.

Bad owners or good owners, sometimes you just come across a scoundrel. Like the rep at a print partner who jokingly threatened to take all my customers if I didn’t send sign up to a crazy plan he had. I didn’t like that.

Or the envelope manufacturer and trade printer who lifted its prices 20% the day Australian Envelopes went bust, not caring that we had quoted a lot of work out of their month-old price book. I didn’t like that either.

Or the mailing house whose new owners trawled through their trade list, inviting all of my customers to tour their factory and pointing out the machines where their work had actually been done. I really didn’t like that. So much so that I put my own mailers in – but I needn’t have worried too much as that mob is gone now.

[Related: More Industry Insider columns]

Baden Kirgan is the MD of Jeffries Printing Services and Black House Comics

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