By Milt Vine
I'm in the mind of an old adage today, the one that goes: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again," or the more recent version: "try it, fix it, try it fix it."
Neither are my favorite sayings because they presume some measure of deficiency has already occurred (never fun). But I do like how they recognize the positive nature of learning curves and promises of eventual success.
So, you ask, what have we wrestled with in the past and are we ready to try it and fix it again. My answer to you is pricing lists or guides or grids or schedules or whatever you want to call those tables of products and prices that spell out at a glance what a certain something costs.
I guess a pizzeria menu offers us one of the most common examples. You slide in the booth, take a quick look and instantly know that a 12" pizza with one topping is $11.95, a 14" with one topping is $14.25 and so on. Plus, each additional topping is 75 cents. Pretty easy. So easy, in fact, that I'm wondering once again how to make pricing lists work for us in our small sector of the graphic arts industry.
Now certainly, much of what we do is custom work, so client-specific that price lists would be unfeasible. No listing would ever be able to take into account the thousands of variables that would substantially affect pricing. I do believe, though, that while my attemps to develop price lists have been mostly unsuccessful in the past, the concept is a sound one, particularly given the increasing loud chorus of requests for faster estimates coming from clients. The idea has merit both from their standpoint and from ours, since it would free our estimators to concentrate on those custom quotes. I'm hoping you'll help me figure out how we can make it work.
First Attempt. More than a decade ago, we set up a pricing guide for our tabbing busines. The plan was to provide a straightforward chart of prices customers could use for quoting jobs.
Imagine a three-column chart labeled "Plain Tabbing." Tab options are 1/2", 3/8" and 1/4". Number of sheets, in thousands, is listed on the left. There are columns with corresponding prices for tabbing and tabbing with additional drilling. So far, so good.
But then there's an addition of a charge per position change, a charge for shingle tabs, a charge for certain paper sizes, a charge for half cuts, etc. Suddenly, our chart doesn't look so simple anymore.
And that doesn't take into account all the other options and combinations of options our clients came up with, many of them not on our chart no matter how many times we added asterisks, subsets, and the soon-to-be-many "Please Note:" messages.
To their credit, our clients gave this chart a noble try, but we finally had to admit that it often made pricing a job more difficult, the exact opposite of its proposed purpose. It turned out that our products weren't as standard as we'd thought. So, we returned to our regular methods of estimating, approaching each job as a unique operation, which our trained estimators are skilled at doing.
Other Options. Now, though, I'm thinking our mistake was in trying to cover every possible contingency on that one chart. I believe jobs must first be evaluated on the basis of their frequency and whether or not they are easily priceable. A chart of accounts, broken out by product and, ideally, by the products' profitability, we could answer the first question. The second question is harder to answer. It entails sitting down with your estimator and analyzing base pricing and identifying and pricing the most common add-ons to products.
Our own experience with Blake Letterpress, a recent Seattle Bindery acquisition I mentioned last month, is a case in point. We've had a couple of modest successes developing pricing lists for several finishing services. We've been able to get the most pertinent information on two sides of one sheet of paper, with a note that the list is a "general reference for pricing only." Jobs that don't explicitly fit are treated accordingly.
Of course, most printing jobs, like most bindery work, are too complex to fall into easy pricing categories. But I'll bet there are a number of products-like the common 2-color, tri-fold brochure or standard-sized posters and presentation folders-for which pricing grids could easily be developed. Stationery systems would be seem like great candidates as well.
I recently received a pricing brochure from a Pennsylvania-based printer. I know very little about this company overall, but I do know what they'd charge me to print a brochure in one of six sizes, catalog sheets in two sizes and booklets, either self-cover or plus cover, plus postcards or rack cards. Certainly, this is useful information, particularly in those frequent instances when clients need ballpark estimates fast.
Of course, we also must guard against using the pricing lists as a quick fix, giving clients inaccurate information because we were pressed for time and didn't get complete specifications for a job. In this case, everyone loses.
Any Suggestions? Of course, there are so many products which simply cannot fit into neat little molds. Still, I'm impressed that others are continuing to experiment with pricing schedules. I believe the pressure to simplify and speed up the estimating process will only increase. And with more printers now including clients-only commerce sections on their websites, adding methods to facilitate job tracking, file transmission and estimating seem to be a no-brainer.
So, here's where you come in. I'd love to hear of your successes and difficulties with developing pricing lists of any kind, perhaps to share in a future column. The goal here is to meet our clients' needs more efficiently and, through that, make our own lives a little easier as well.
Milt Vine is president of Seattle Bindery, a postpress house specializing in custom
tabs and presentation folders; folding and stitching; foil stamping, embossing and
diecutting; plastic spiral, Wire-O® and perfect binding. You can reach Milt at
206/682-2558.
© 1998, Seattle Bindery. Reprinted from Printing Journal, August 1998.