Full colour estate agent boards

[Mike D]

deleted

[Natasha Thomas]

Cheers for that. It is pretty negative and its really just the printing I’m interested in. We’d be supplying 200 boards at a time – no putting up or taking down.
Any advice?

[Robert Lambie]

you will get flatbeds from around £35k upwards Natasha. These tend to be very slow though, no white ink and various other drawbacks. to venture into this line of work ide look more around the £60-£70k mark… this is exactly what we did and still managed to get stung! was a great machine, did everything it promised and some. but kept breaking down continually, every time a different trivial thing. but stopped production for days/weeks at a time.
the higher end £90k upwards seems to be the safest area for tried and tested reputable machines. that said… you could look at HP… i heard they have a good one around £75k…

please note, direct printing to almost anything is pure sales p1sh… i mean pitch! 😉 not everything is just as simple as we are led to believe. 😀

[Natasha Thomas]

Hmmm very interesting, the sales stuff does make out that you could print on anything. We’ve got no blooming room for a flat bed anyway! We had to build an extension to take the AJ and everything else.
I think I’ll just quote this digital and see how we get on, if we do enough of them all together we can get the cost down.
Thanks for your advice.

[Luke s Bremner]

I would sub it out, with those numbers you could get a good deal and make more money by not making it your self.

[Peter Normington]

just google "estate agents boards,"
and you can get them for £5.75 each, double sided, and full colour with photos
so it really is a no brainer trying to compete….
your customer can do the same search

Peter

[Gert du Preez]

Natasha,

I’ll swim against the stream here…

I print tons of these, also on vinyl then apply to correx. I use a completely different price structure for them. Basically I supply correx with digital vinyl for about 30% less than my normal price for unlaminated vinyl alone……

It still makes money. I charge about 5 Euro for a 600 x 400mm single sided, 9Euro for Double sided. (15% VAT included)

BUT our market is completely different: Labour costs are about 4x lower, and volumes are relatively small – typically 24 – 96 signs at a time. At those volumes digital/vinyl still beats screen printing. (and quality is better as well. I doubt if there are 2 companies in the whole Namibia who can supply good quality halftone screenprint)

I started doing these to limit "down time" on the printer. It ended with me having to buy a second, faster printer to cope with the volumes!

I print these on a Versa Art 640, standard quality. It prints 20 minutes on 12 signs, ie 36 per hour. A full day of printing has me producing 300 of these. Not bad at all.

[Glenn Sharp]

How long does it take to apply 300 stickers to the correx Gert ?

[Gert du Preez]

quote Glenn Sharp:

How long does it take to apply 300 stickers to the correx Gert ?

I dont have to apply 300 stickers – only 25 printed 12 up. (2400 x 1200mm)

It takes one of the applicators about 1 hour to do 7. So total, about 3,5 hours. And as much time to cut the sheets down after application.

Lets factor in a bit of Tea, Toilet, and Telephone, and it takes 1 guy a full day. At N$ 2500 per month (250 Euro…..) labour is about Euro 11.50 cost to me. ( Less than 4 Euro per 100 signs)

My total cost, Correx + Vinyl + Labour + Ink (average) works out at about 25% of my selling price, i.e. about E 1,25 per unit. A E 3-75 profit (N$ 38.00) is good money over here. You can buy 5 beers with it !! Or, for the profit of just 2,5 signs, I can have a 500g T-bone with Chips at a restaurant. Obviously, several hundred signs per month pays a lot of bills.

Machine time I dont charge by the hour. It is no "work" for me when the printer is chugging along hour after hour. I keep 2 printers occupied, do the quotes, talk to clients etc. – and still only spend about 3 hours per day actually "working". The rest of the time I supervise the workshop, troll the web, drink beer at the Brauhaus..(But I do spend 12+ hours per day at the shop, mostly to babysit the printers. That is not work. I enjoy the "me time" alone in the shop – like now – when I can build a roofrack for my 4×4, or a camping trailer, or surf the net etc.)

Costing a job is after all more about HOW you crunch the numbers than the actual numbers getting crunched. For this type of thing, I ignore costs like capital costs etc. – simply because I already have the printers, and estate signs or not, I need 2 printers. Other (more profitable) jobs deal with capital expenditure, expansion etc. My "model" has been criticised by many, including my business partner, employees, accountant and bank manager. But the simple truth is, I am in a town of less than 50 000 people, and have just signed the employment contract for our 14th employee. The business is only 22 months old. We have new printers, new vehicles, a nice new shop, and any given moment there is about 50 jobs on the book, from small, to those of tens and even 100+ thousand dollars. My mothly turn-over now exceeds my initial capital investment. And profits are reasonable.

Maybe I have some Jewish blood in me!!