Thursday 14 January 2010

I bumped into my hippophilic friend Norm last week outside the refreshment tent at Kempton Park racetrack. He was rather mournfully examining the print quality of a Tote ticket before tearing it up.

"Why the Tote, and not the bookmakers?" I asked.

"It's to do with minimising risk" he replied. "Not that it made much difference in this case" he added bitterly, nodding towards a horse that was limping slowly back to the unsaddling enclosure.

"Printers are usually pretty bad at assessing risk, too", he continued. "They think that any added value left after paying the external costs must be all bunce. What they never remember is that any job can go wrong, and any customer can go bankrupt. So if you have to lay out 40 per cent of a job to buy the stock and outwork, you are risking that 40 per cent on the chance of gaining the remaining 60 per cent. In horseracing terms the odds are 3 to 2 on."

"But when you include your internal costs, if 10 per cent of the total is net profit, that gives you 10 per cent return for 90 per cent layout, which is precious little. If just one job like that goes belly up, you've got to do another 9 to pay for it. Yet some printers will even discount jobs just to keep the presses rolling'."

"It's a very a sobering thought", I said. "How about a beer to compensate?". He agreed.

Its a funny old game, printing, isn't it?

(To keep an eye on the added value, net profit and risk of your print jobs, why not download a free copy from http://www.printpak.com/.)