You need to have a good idea about what you want your future to look like in order to chart a path to get there. It’s not enough to want to create a strategic plan or survey your customers; you need a reason as well.
Here are some Standard Operating Procedures from a shop I visited recently: No one leaves for the day until the white board is cleared and all jobs due that day are finished.
I just hung up from a conversation with an administrator at a major university in the Southwest. Background: This school closed its in-plant printing department—offset and digital—four or five years ago. That’s right, they outsourced everything.
Customers want more control of the production process. Frank Romano (I think) coined the term “ransom note typesetting” not long after the first Macintosh came out. The early Macs offered 30+ fonts. Suddenly fonts were available to everyone. Customers became typographers and graphic designers.
There is nothing wrong with failure if you learn something from it—especially if you use what you learned to fix a problem.
I had an experience several years ago that illustrates this point. It was a Saturday, and one of our press operators was running the program for an event at our performing arts facility. The pressman noticed a mistake—a photo had an incorrect caption, as I recall—so he shut down the press. And he went home, but that’s another story.
How do you know your print shop is not doing a good job? What we’re really talking about here are perceptions, that is, what do your customers and the managers in your organization think about you? Are you the guys they think of first—the "go-to" guys—or is your shop just someplace people have to go? There’s a big difference.
All too often we—in-plant managers—put our heads in the sand and hide from management. Here are two questions we should all be concerned about: "How do you know your print shop is doing a good job?" and "How do you know it’s not?"
