Behind the Printshop Business' Location and Opportunity

Its final. I have decided to stick with the location along Timog Avenue, Quezon City. I admit I was too enamored with the business space in Robinson's Pioneer complex that I overlooked how costly it would be to renovate the place. It was only then that I realized when the contractor sent to us the quotation of the renovation! So right there and then, I politely turned down their offer and also asked the Lessor that I would be withdrawing my reservation even if that means losing the non-refundable reservation payment(Ouch!). Good attitude dictates good business, or so I thought. Anyway, I was also informed by our printers' supplier that good thing we have decided to stay away from the place since they too have clients, which are similar to our nature of business, operating on the other side of the complex, inside the mall which we would inevitably compete with should we have decided to operate there. Never thought finding a location would be this hard. As days gone by, the more I have to keep my act together and move on. And now that we have already found our second home, we are more than happy to be along Timog Avenue, Quezon City. For those of you who are not familiar, Timog Avenue is home to a lot of businesses and it won't hurt much to have another print shop especially near the Timog/Morato circle or aptly called the boy scout circle. So there are two established printshops located on the intersection of Timog Avenue and EDSA. The advantage we have is we are not near them. The way I see it, we can take advantage of the residentials and businesses near our domain, if thats the proper way to put it. My dilemma now is we are located on the second floor of the building without visibility from the road! This will require more aggresive marketing strategy I said to myself. Its worth take the risk anyway since on the medium rise building we are located in, there are also other new small businesses, like a pasta resto, dental clinic, eyelash/nail spa, and an auditing/accounting firm. Our very first client is the auditing/accounting firm. They had to process tax and income returns so I beg in even if we are not really fully operational to begin with. Opportunity is already presenting itself. I grabbed it. Off to work, I printed quite a number of papers. Then on the last set of what I printed, I made a terrible mistake on the printout. So they have to be redone as what the owner has asked which I readily obliged to do. I didn't asked or even got payment for the wrongly printed documents even if the owner was already paying me up for my own mistake. I am going to build a business built on trust and satisfaction of the customer. These are what we are going to standby with and where we want to be known for. As much as we can provide, under reasonable demands, we are willing to give in. I believe what Stephen R. Covey has to say about effective people, "Effective people are not problem-minded; they're opportunity minded. They feed opportunities and feed problems." As we are starting small, we are more than willing to grow personally and professionally. I wouldn't know for sure what the owner would think had I accepted his payment for my print mistakes but I guess he liked what he has seen as he was already asking us to print them a lot more of their documents. The numbers are astonishing, far from my expectations! And today, he came into our shop and asked what else we can do and we fit the bill as he also needed someone to do logo, brochures and flyers. I told him that we will be more than glad to be of service to him and his partners' endeavors. Me and brother are excited what the next days hold for us. We are ready. May God help us.
For your viewing, here are some pictures of our still "un-signage" print shop:

My brother on his workstation:

That's me:

Basic Training for our Printing Machines

I believe that training is one of the most fundamental aspect of running a printshop business. Trainings basically provide new learnings, inspire creativity, give fresh insights and trigger inspiration. Today, me and my brother had the benefit of basic hands-on training that Copylandia, the distributor of our printing machines, Risograph MZ-770 and Laser Multifunction Printer Develop Ineo +253, have laid out for us to get up, run and operate our printing machines.

There were two persons from Copylandia that came, one person each for the said machines. First off, we tackled the Risograph. The MZ-770 can print, scan and copy upto A3 size paper and print on one- or two-color spot printing jobs. The MZ-770 has a small touch screen interface alongwith the various buttons on the front panel. We had a black and bright red color ink. The copying functionality went out smoothly. We were able to scan a 2-color document and produce a one-color output. Scanning the document doesn't necessarily provide the expected output. The dark colors on the original document will be printed out black while the lighter colors will be printed out bright red. Printing from the PC provided more consistent results. In order to take advantage of the 2-color output, the proper way of preparing the document, be it in some graphic image editing software, is to put the area in orange that is, if you want this area to be printed out red while the darker areas be put in black, to be printed black. Since this Risograph can print 2-colors in one pass, there are some minor misalingments that can be corrected with the setting of the print area which can be found on the front panel, one for each drum. You can always check first with the "proof" button if the misalignment have been corrected, prior to full scale printing. Each color on the Riso is a set of drum unit and ink. Using different color for the drum unit is not possible. The first drum is usually the black color. Me and my brother took turns trying to familiarize ourselves with the operation while the trainor guided us on how to perform simple checks as well.

Then we proceeded with the hands-on training of the Ineo +253. We first tried how to explore photocopying, one side copies and then back-to-back copies. It has a fairly intuitive touch screen interface which makes it easy to operate. There are three trays on the Ineo +253, one and two for plain paper while bypass tray for thick papers or boards. Printing from the PC is easy. We just need to figure out the orientation of the paper inside the trays to match with the orientation on the PC. That is, if you want to print in landscape mode, one of the trays should have paper put ala landscape. The printing/copying is set by the trainor to print black in default, in order to minimize mistakes like printing a grayscale document using all the inks. Take note that black ink is formed with cyan, magenta and yellow combined, but not necessarily in that order. We were able to print a color document and it is really a treat to see it and hold it. The output is WYSIWYG.

The trainor provided us tips on how to make the most of our machines. Though everything tackled are just basic stuffs, they are still, after all the fundamental ones. Soon after the trainors left, someone entered our print shop and asked us to photocopy their business documents, all 12 pages of them. One of the pages is beyond A4 size and can fit into a long bond paper, but since we don't have yet long bond papers on stock, we reduced the document in order to print it on A4 sheet. We were able to make clear copies and our first customer was more than happy to thank us. What a great way to start. We will be working on more testing to prepare our marketing collaterals in time. Thanks for reading!

Let there be light!

Finally we already have electricity in our shop! Our machines had already been cold started and I feel good that there were no problems whatsoever! We have availed our machines from Copylandia, the leading provider of Digital Printing equipments here in the Philippines. They are number 1 for nothing so that's why I have put my trust in partnership with them to be there for us in the long haul. The machines that I have procured by the way  for now is one Riso MZ-770, for up to 2-color spot printing and one Ineo +253 for full color copying and printing. Me and my brother look forward for more intensive training on the said machines soon!