Peter Muir, President, Bizucate (and MC of the congress) is talking about opportunities for printers to help customers succeed.

Print service providers can no longer ask Do you have anything for me to print? Printers need to help customers develop communication strategies that will enable growth in their customer's business.

3 Factors That Enable Future Success

Peter presents three factors that enable future success for the print service provider:

• Buy in from top to bottom, bottom to top and left to right - Everyone needs to agree with, and understand organization change.

• An efficient and organic workflow - The entire workflow: people, processes, technology must be efficient.

• A commitment to grow their customers businesses. Again, Do you have anything for me to print? won't cut it anymore. We need to be asking How can I help you grow your business?

PrintingForLess.com Case Study

Andy Field founded PrintingForLess.com in 1996 to cater to the Livingston, MT region. In his first year he had 10 employees and no profits. In 1998, Andy went global by developing a system that enabled the company to use the internet to sell print.

PrintingForLess.com now has a 4 year average annual sales growth of 186.5%. In 2005 they had $15 million dollars in revenue. And they've made Inc Magazine's Inc. 500 3 years in a row.

Andy and his company didn't achieve this success just putting ink on paper. They targeted small growing companies and helped them communicate.

Business Development Mindset

It all boils down to developing a business development mindset. Printers need to help their customers convert ideas to opportunities, create plans of action and strategies from those opportunities, and then help them act on the strategies.

The greatest opportunity for printers is for them to educate their customers on how they can grow their business using a mix of printed and electronic communication.