中文A customer calls needing a sign. Nothing complicated, maybe a 24 by 36 inch PVC board, a piece of coroplast, or a simple poster mounted to a rigid substrate. “Sure, we can do that,” says the shop. The selling price is seventy-five dollars. The material costs twelve, the ink a few more. Looks like a tidy profit. Not so fast.
Follow that little sign through the printing company and you discover it may be getting more attention than some of the staff. First, sales gets involved. What size, what material, how many, single or double sided, indoor or outdoor, when is it needed, do you have artwork. Of course they have artwork, emailed over from a website that looks like it was built around 2007. Time invested: fifteen to thirty minutes.
Then customer service takes the order, confirms specs and due date, talks to the customer, enters the job, sends art to prepress. Then come the emails. Can we change the phone number. Can you make the logo a little bigger. Can you send a proof before you print it. Of course, it is only a seventy-five dollar sign. Time invested: another fifteen to thirty minutes.
Prepress opens the “print-ready” artwork and finds it is not. Fonts are missing, resolution is questionable, the logo is RGB, there is not enough bleed, and the tiny mark needs enlarging to eighteen inches without looking constructed from toy blocks. Prepress fixes what it can, generates a proof, sends it back, waits for approval. The customer replies: “Looks great, one little change.” A correction, another proof, approval. Time invested: another twenty to forty-five minutes.
Only now can the sign be produced. Production pulls the material, RIPs the file, loads the substrate, prints, removes the piece and sends it to finishing, maybe cutting, routing, laminating, trimming, mounting, grommets, Velcro or tape. Someone checks quality. Hopefully it is right; if not, some steps repeat. Time invested: twenty to thirty minutes or more.
The job is still not finished. If it ships, someone packages it, creates a label and processes the shipment. If delivered, it joins the delivery schedule. If collected, someone still retrieves it. Accounting invoices, processes payment, reconciles and closes the job. Time invested: another twenty to thirty minutes or more.
Our simple seventy-five dollar sign has travelled through sales, customer service, prepress, production, finishing, quality control, packaging or shipping, and accounting. Potentially eight different functions touched one small order. None of those steps looks expensive on its own, but stacked together the sign begins to look very different. Do the math on fully loaded labour and the apparent margin evaporates.
Put numbers to it and the illusion dissolves. If the combined non-production and production labour across those eight functions totals even ninety minutes at a loaded cost of forty dollars an hour, the labour alone is sixty dollars against a twelve-dollar material cost and a seventy-five-dollar sale. Add overhead, finance and the opportunity cost of deferring a larger job, and a “profitable” sign can quietly lose money. The fix is not to refuse small work but to price it honestly: a minimum charge that covers the cost of opening a job, and clear policies that bill change orders and extra proofs rather than swallowing them.
That should prompt a basic question every printing company should be able to answer: what does it cost simply to open a job? Before one square foot of material is produced, the company has already incurred cost. Which leads to harder questions. Do we need a minimum order charge? Should artwork changes be billed separately as a change order? Should there be a prepress minimum? Are extra proofs charged? Should rush jobs carry a surcharge, absolutely. Are packaging, shipping and delivery labour truly captured? Are sales and customer service empowered to tell customers when a request creates an additional charge? Most worrying of all, did we push a larger, more profitable project to the side to produce this sign?
There is nothing wrong with exceptional customer service. There is something wrong with providing services that cost the company money without anyone knowing it. The discipline that fixes this is job costing: knowing the true fully loaded cost of touching an order, then pricing accordingly. A minimum charge, a prepress minimum, billed proofs and change orders are not hostile to customers; they are how a shop stays in business while still saying yes.
The thing to remember is simple: revenue does not determine profitability, knowing your true costs does. A seventy-five dollar sign is not the enemy, but treating it as free to administer is how shops lose money they never knew they were spending. The shops that thrive are the ones that price the unseen labour, protect their capacity for bigger work, and treat every order, however small, as a real cost centre.
Source: American Printer (by Debbie Nicholson), published 3 September 2026.
