In 2010 I was doing print sales in a white shirt for a small digital printing company my dad had bought out of somebody else’s garage and moved into his own. It came with old established agency style clients with extremely high service expectations, the kind who want it printed and on an urgent courier across town the same day. There were a lot of printers around Auckland with fancier machines than ours, so really we could only compete on service or location. The average job was something like $130 with average payment terms, most customers on account, and some of the big customers had like awful terms, and everything was always in a rush. Trying to get new customers for the printing business was really quite hard.
The rest of this essay is in Marketing Curious.
