There are several battles being fought today by printing business owners and more looming on the horizon. The first battle is already underway. It is about remaining successful during periods of great change. Print shop owners are going to have to deal with never ending waves of change coming from both internal and external sources.

Communication
Owners often see a change in status quo as something bad—something might be taken away or unnecessarily added to obligation. Yet change is how a printing business adapts and grows.

Because of their outlook, owners usually see change coming and brace themselves. However, they often fail to do a good job of communicating change successfully to the rest of the people in the organization.

Your hourly employees deal with whatever comes their way. They might not be happy about the change or the method that it was communicated. But they do what is necessary to survive; to stay on the payroll. Your salaried managers often see change as unnecessary. These people may have their heads in the sand and may have evolved to have serious entitlement attitudes. Managers who deal well with change survive. Managers who initiate positive change and sell it will thrive. Managers fighting change usually end up working somewhere else.

Resources
The second battle is executing with fewer resources: people, time, and money. Layers of management and payroll counts have been shrinking throughout the printing industry. This will continue. Yet there will be no reduction in expected results from our customers. Doing more with less is now how it is.

Cash
Related to the first two battles is the third battle: the battle for cash. While it could be said that banks aren’t lending anymore, don’t blame the bank or the banking industry. The bank is doing what every company should be doing: focusing internally because that is where the tide of this battle will turn.

Where should the internal focus be? Every employee has an impact on whether your printing company is losing or winning the battle for cash. The challenge is for you, as the print shop owner, to explain this concept to your employees and manage the appropriate change in attitude and behavior.

Cash comes into your print shop when you sell to the right kind of customer. When your marketing sends the wrong message to the wrong target market and when the sales department chases the wrong kind of customer, getting cash into the business becomes that much harder. The right kind of customer is one who can afford to buy the products or services being sold. The best of these customers are the ones that buy on a regular basis.