Starting a Business - What I've Learned...Part 3

The third thing I learned about when I decided to start my own business, was to how to keep production/product cost down. After I figured out what all I could do myself, I needed to figure how to get my cards and other products produced without spending a lot of money. And the best way to do this is to shop around; I searched online, around town, and asked everyone I knew about places to get supplies, printing, and equipment at. Bargain shopping is a must when you don’t have enough overhead. But you also got to keep in mind that spending too little might undermined your quality; it’s a fine line to walk. But in my research, I found that people and the internet were the best place to find new or almost new and usually priced high supplies at a good price or for free (people are really good for free stuff or a trade, you just have to ask). Any bargain shopper will tell you that you have look and look and look for good deals, but to be honest I’m can be quite inpatient so looking and looking can be a little too time consuming for me. So, I usually price compare the things I wanted the easy quick way.

For instant, I needed a cutter, something that would give me a straight cut, something that had a brace and a pretty large surface, but it couldn’t be too big as I was working out of my very small (but cute) apartment and space is limited, which meant that one of those heavy duty guillotine cutters was out of the question as they are big, bulky, and really hard to move around. (But someday, I will have one). I found one that would work for me for under $60, it’s not as great as the on nice sliver ones with all the really fancy stuff and I can only cut one sheet at a time. Still, it has a top brace that acts as an extra hand holding the paper in place and it has a magnetic stopper to brace the edge of the paper at a right-angle, all things that just a plain cutter for $25 doesn’t have and this can speed up the cutting time of a sheet of paper a lot, cause you don’t have to stop and take that minute or so to make sure that each new sheet of paper is align. And this I found by doing a Google search and once I got the name of the cutter, I looked it up on Ebay.com and YahooShopping to compare price, once I found the lowest price for it, I was set. And this is how I went about buying everything from plastic sleeves to computer software.

Finding a print shop, was little different, but as I had time constraints to worry about as I figured out that it would save me money if I only printed the bare minimum for samples and small displays, I would print cards for orders once I got the order in, saving me on overhead. Which means that my turn around time needs to be as short as possible, which also means that sending to some online printer in New York wouldn’t do. So, I called up all the local printers I could find in the phone book asking for quotes. I was able to narrow down my list by crossing out all the printers that couldn’t do small orders of one or two sheets. I then figured out that printing on 11x17 sheet of paper didn’t cost much more than a Letter sized sheet. This meant that if I could figure out how to get 2 or more cards on a single 11x17 sheet, it would cost less than getting 1 or more on 2 sheets of Letter size paper, thus saving me money.

I was then able to narrow it down to 2 printers, one cost a little more than the other; but the one that cost that little extra was located closer to where I lived making it easier for me to pickup my finished order. But, still I needed to know who printed better so, I sent both printers my files. The result were that the printer that cost more used a thicker cardstock, which I liked, but the cheaper printers printed my designs with very soft edges better and for some of my design the color was a lot brighter. Still the paper thickness and location, and the fact that the more costlier printers were a lot nicer to me, made them the place were I get most of my products printed. I tend to send the products with the soft edges and the brighter colors to the other printers. It works out.