Hey everyone, I hope this is posted in an acceptable place. I wasn't sure exactly where to put it.
So I'm in a worker owner in an almost two year old printshop. We are a worker owned shop, and to be honest, I didn't know anything about printing when I got involved in the project. I was fresh in nyc for occupy wall street, and we were discussing starting worker owned businesses. We chose printing. Since then, I've fallen in love with the work. From learning to use an abdick 360 with nothing but the operators manual (lots of long nights and wasted paper) to constantly dealing with pos copiers, it's been a long and thankless startup phase.
We started with virtually no capital or equipment. We have been putting all our money into the shop this whole time, living off of part time night jobs on the side, which aint easy in new york city unless you're living on your parents dime, which we aint. One of us has a kid to feed, and we really need some advice to make it over what feels like the last hump before we are making a wage off this thing.
We have a bizhub pro c5501, and abdick 360 with a crestline watering system and surefoot sucker feet, a ryobi (forgot the number, I don't work on this press at all yet, it's a two color press from the late 80's or early 90's I think) an old champion hydraulic cutter, a collator, a martin yale 959 table top folder, a manual die press and some button machines.
Onto the questions:
How the hell do you set your prices? We try to be competitive, but we can't pay ourselves yet, and don't really know how to go about setting prices that work for us and are competitive. There is a guy about a half mile away that does 5000 b&w copies for $90. How the hell does he do that?
How should we go about getting new customers? We have a pretty consistent customer base, and it's slowly growing, but we really need to double our current volume, if not triple it. We mostly do postcards and business cards for other businesses and nonprofits, some booklet jobs, a rare wedding invite here or there. I'm wondering if you have any advice on a piece of the market we might be missing out on, or any advice in general about marketing. We currently plan on using the fact that we are a union worker owned print shop to try to get some business from unions and non profits in nyc by calling them up and telling them what we do, followed with a mailer, followed with a follow up call.
Any other advice would be greatly appreciated, and if you know anyone in NYC who would be interested in working with us, don't hesitate to send em my way. Thanks.