Where can you find the cheapest color copies in Miami?

We’ll tell you in a moment, and the answer may surprise you.  You know that color copies generally are less impressive than actual printing.  That’s common knowledge.  What you don’t know is that you can make a better impression without breaking the bank.

There are only a few good reasons to use color copies in Miami.

The first, of course, is the obvious: If you’re going overseas, for example, a color copy of your passport and similar documents stored safely can help you replace them should it become necessary.  The other is if you truly only need five or so copies of something, and it’s for internal use.

Outside of those circumstances, who would pay what color copies in Miami cost -a  buck or so a page – to get something that looks… well…  copied?

Print Farm understands that there are many reasons you’d need a small run of digital printing.  Maybe you’re offering  a coupon to the first 50 people in the door one day.  Maybe you’re testing a new marketing campaign and don’t want to commit to 10,000 copies until it works.  Miami color copies are just not the answer in those situations, however.  They cost too much, and they look less than professional.

Print Farm, a Miami printing firm, has the answer.

Short run digital printing does everything you need and more.

Chances are that whatever you need copies of is already in a digital format.  That’s probably how you designed it in the first place.   You send that file to Print Farm, and we use short run digital printing to make the Miami color copies you need, at a reasonable price.  Just because you only need a few of something does not preclude you from using professional digital printing!  Print Farm has designed a service around

high-availability, low-turnaround short run digital printing that puts you in control!

No more ridiculous minimum orders.  No more waiting weeks for the printer.  Short run digital printing can actually be faster than running down to the office store and having color copies run!

The best way to find out if this solution is a good fit for you is to inquire!  You can call or submit your request online and we’ll help you determine your needs and the best way to meet them.

Why choose digital printing from Print Farm?

Many people don’t understand the advantages of Miami digital printing, so we’d like to take a few posts and discuss them briefly, to help clear up some misunderstandings.  One of the things that makes Print Farm an excellent partner for your commercial printing in Miami is our access to all types of printing technologies and our expert assistance in choosing the right ones for your needs.  Sometimes, the latest and coolest concepts in printing are appropriate to save you money, get a better response rate, or otherwise improve your ROI.  Other times, you just need something printed as quickly and efficiently as possible, and there are solutions for that as well.

These have to look professional, but I only need a few!

What do you do when you only need a small quantity printed, but you need so many that the cost of ink and glossy paper for your inkjet would be insane?  Too many to print on an inkjet, too few to have professionally printed?  Print Farm has a solution.  By making available same day digital printing short runs in Miami,

we’ve given businesses a solution they’ve never had before.

That solution is short run digital printing.  What does short run printing entail?  You get us the art, and we turn it around the same day, regardless of how small your quantity needs may be.  It’s sort of the equivalent of shared office space – you’re only paying for the portion of the printing you use, even if the press is running all day.   You don’t have to buy unnecessary quantities anymore, and with a low minimum printing quantity of  ”reasonable,”

Short Run Digital Printing Is Accessible to Every Business!

Do you need overnight posters?  Do you need table tents or door hangers?  Or something entirely different?  Since we mentioned it, table tents are a perfect example of short run digital printing.  Say an average restaurant has fifty tables and changes their specials posted on the table on a monthly basis.  During that month, customers steal, damage, or otherwise render unusable one per week, per table.  So we’ll take the fifty tables times four weeks in a month, and we find the restaurant needs 200 table tents.  That’s not much to most printers.  Print Farm enable you to purchase only the quantity you need, on a just in time basis.

How Can  Digital Printing Advantages Like Short Run Make Your Business More Efficient?

Why choose digital printing from Print Farm?

Many people don’t understand the advantages of Miami digital printing, so we’d like to take a few posts and discuss them briefly, to help clear up some misunderstandings.

One of the things that makes Print Farm an excellent partner for your commercial printing in Miami is our access to all types of printing technologies and our expert assistance in choosing the right ones for your needs.  Sometimes, the latest and coolest concepts in printing are appropriate to save you money, get a better response rate, or otherwise improve your ROI.  Other times, you just need something printed as quickly and efficiently as possible, and there are solutions for that as well.

One of the primary advantages of digital printing is its speed.

24 hour digital printing is something you just can’t make happen with any other printing technology.  This speed comes from the ability to go directly from image file to press, with no intermediate steps.  By doing so, you ensure that the file you submit is exactly what gets printed, and what you expect to receive is what you actually receive.

By way of example, digital printing enables 24 hour turnaround on posters,

allowing you to plan an event in a short timeframe, or to quickly spin up a new promotion for your business.  It’s not limited to posters, though.  Anything can be printed with digital printing, in nearly any size, quantity, or color scheme.  Have you been paying for traditional offset printing with additional steps between your design and the final product?  While that may be an appropriate service for some needs, it’s generally better for gigantic runs of the exact same piece.  If, for example, your business has two locations and you want flyers or brochures for both, offset printing isn’t the ideal solution because you need two smaller runs with a different address and phone printed on each, rather than one large run.  Digital printing enables you to do this cost-effectively without sacrificing quality!

Many businesses are franchised or licensed in some way – everything from fast food to insurance agencies.

The home office generally encourages those business owners to purchase supplied through them or their preferred vendor, but it’s often not mandatory.

If the home office has a preferred vendor for your franchise printing, they’re probably preferred because the company wrote the biggest check to advertise with your home office, and for no other reason. That’s good for them, and bad for you. You need the highest quality and the lowest cost, especially when there is direct competition within your industry and even with other franchisees or licensees. Take a drive through a town of any size in the midwest, and you’ll see a State Farm agent on nearly every corner. When there are ten other agents in town selling the same product at the same prices, your service and your promotional materials are literally the only distinguishing factors that drive your business.

In a situation like this, you could order the same calendars and brochures that the other ten agents in town have ordered.

That makes you exactly the same as they are. What you need to do is to engage Print Farm to create unique materials and the best quality and best prices. Your calendar doesn’t need to have pictures of cute kittens, for example. It could have pictures of historical buildings in town, or a photo of a risk or hazard for each month of the year.

Print Farm knows that growing your business is important to you.

By helping you differentiate yourself from the other businesses in town which appear to the customer to be quite similar, Print Farm can help increase your revenue, decrease your costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

The only way to find out how Print Farm can help you claim your niche and increase your revenue is to ask! Reach out to Print Farm today for a consultation on how we can help you meet your needs and reduce your costs!

But We’ve Always Done It That Way! Words that make us cringe.

Just because your business has always done it that way does not mean you should continue, especially if the business is not generating the revenue it could and should.

Just because you’ve always used MS SQL Server does not mean that’s the best way to handle your mission-critical customer data.

MySQL or even Cassandra might be a better solution – Facebook obviously believes Cassandra is superior, and made a significant change in their production systems because of it.

Until now, you’ve handled your printing one of two ways. You’ve either sent everything out in small batches, or short runs, or you’ve waited until you have zero on hand and sent huge orders to whomever bids the lowest. Neither of these are efficient.

Short run digital printing is great for emergencies, or unexpected situations.

It can be a lifesaver. It’s not, however, appropriate for day to day printing needs. Quantity always saves money, whether you’re buying widgets from a factory in China or printing services.

Bidding every print job because you work with companies that only do one aspect of printing well, and taking the lowest price every time, also is inefficient. Cost is never the primary reason to choose someone to handle your printing. It can be relevant, but it’s not the absolute. Quality, speed, and reputation are more important overall.

Using multiple companies results in visual inconsistency, problems with quality, problems with not receiving materials timely, and problems with cost control.

What’s the answer? Print Farm handles all aspects of printing and fulfillment under one roof. This creates consistency. It also ensures quality, with one individual responsible overall for your account who can make sure that everything produced is of the highest quality. Quantity of one particular item printed can certainly reduce costs, but with one company responsible for all your printing needs, the total quantity of printing drives costs and prices down significantly.

You might need some short run digital printing today, to fix a situation, but you also need large quantities of brochures or posters, for day to day operations. By combining all of these things within one company, you ensure that you’re getting quantity discounts for the totality of your printing rather than just for the number of any one item that you print.

How much money can Print Farm save your organization by consolidating your printing operations? How much time can Print Farm save you by consolidating your printing operations? How much of a quality improvement will you see by consolidating your printing operations with Print Farm? How much of a cost savings will you see by consolidating your printing operations, resulting in a drastic reduction of administrative overhead? The only way to find out is to reach out to Print Farm for a no obligation consultation!

Large corporations are often good at many things. Usually, things pertaining to their business.

Niagara Mohawk does a pretty fair job of delivering electricity in Upstate NY.  They’re good about making repairs quickly and doing proactive infrastructure maintenance. They’re even tolerably decent at resolving issues, though customer service is not the business they’re in. What they’re terrible at, however, we hear from an employee who relocated from Albany, is sending out bills and billing documents.

Because they provide a regulated service, and the regulations determine when and why they can involuntarily terminate service,

the need to not only send the usual bills, past due notices, and customer communications, but they’re obligated to send certain types of additional notices and warnings at certain times in the billing process. Further, these notices vary based on the municipality, state, county, Medicaid recipient status of household members, disability status of the household members, the presence of medical equipment requiring power, and many other factors. This results in a billing and communication nightmare.

Many businesses have equally complex billing requirements and regulations.

Companies are always trying to save money, especially in this economic climate. But the requirements for customer communication and billing don’t change based on the status of the economy. The law is still the law, and your company still needs to comply with it. What’s the solution?

Outsource your billing. It’s that simple.

We’re not talking about sending your bill printing to Mumbai or Manila.

We’re talking about sending your bill generation, collation, mailing, return mail management, glossy insert production and insertion, and all the associated functions to Miami.

What’s in Miami, you ask? The foremost experts in Variable Data Printing in the country, that’s what. Print Farm has extensive experience in variable information printing. Here’s how the process works: The basic format of the bill, communication, letter, etc. is determined. You push a database to Print Farm at whatever interval is appropriate for your business. Print Farm then handles producing the bills or communications in one single printing run.  Some companies will print the underlying document and then print the customer information on top of it. That’s often wasteful and impractical, as well as increasing the necessary time to produce the document.

Print Farm has a better way.

By using variable information printing and variable data printing in the proper way, the customer information and the underlying document are merged into a single file before being sent to press. Single-run variable information printing is the most efficient way to print bills, print billing notices, and print customer communications.

What happens after the printing is completed? Some companies will ship you a stack of documents and expect you to collate, insert, and mail. This is the least efficient way to handle it.

The Print Farm Way is to have everything handled in one place.

Once the variable data printing for bills is completed, the bill is collated with any necessary inserts, return envelopes, and the like, sealed in an envelope, and mailed in bulk. The process is streamlined and entirely hands-off for your company.

By having Print Farm take care of printing and mailing customer communications and printing and mailing bills, you gain several benefits:

• Accuracy – Page three of someone’s bill won’t end up on top of page one of the next person’s bill
• Cost savings – Often drastic, these cost savings enable your business to focus on what you do best
• Efficiency – With a single point of contact for printing and mailing customer communications and billing notices, you ensure that the final product is accurate and exactly as expected, and is mailed when and how you expect.
• Control – By engaging Print Farm to print customer bills, you gain more control over the process. You explain your needs to the experts, and they make it happen. There’s no question of whether your employee is doing the things they should, or whether you have enough employees that particular day.
• Time – Print Farm takes care of everything, allowing you to focus on what’s important.
• True Bulk Mail Rates – You may be getting bulk mail rates, but these are quite dependent on quantity. Because Print Farm handles printing and mailing customer bills for multiple companies, the volume of mailing is high enough to secure additional discounts from the postal service.

Ultimately, only a conversation with Print Farm can help you determine if outsourcing customer billing is the correct solution for your organization. Reach out to Print Farm today to start the conversation, with no obligation.

There are proxy forms to print, presentation folders to print, agendas and addenda and reports to print…

In a business crisis large enough to call an extraordinary general meeting, or emergency shareholder meeting, you’ve obviously got plenty on your mind. There are proxy forms to print, presentation folders to print, agendas and addenda and reports to print, and a thousand other things to think of just to get the logistics of communications right. Not to mention, you also need to make sure that notices are sent to all stakeholders.

Variable Data Printing, or variable information printing, is an excellent way to handle the initial communications (often required by law, for publicly traded companies) to stakeholders about the meeting. Their individual information can be printed along with the standard data, with the entire notice completely customized. Need to softpedal something in the notifications going to your largest shareholders? Easy to update. Need to ensure that your smallest shareholders understand how important it is to show up to a meeting they normally wouldn’t bother with? Another easy update.

Once the notification is made, you have to worry about the things you’ll hand out to attendees. Print Farm can not only handle the presentation folders, as well as printing all the materials and reports that go into it, but Print Farm can collate and assemble the presentation folders for you as well. You’ll receive entire packages ready to give to meeting attendees, saving you time and money.

In this most crucial of times for your business, reach out to Print Farm today to see how we can reduce administrative load and help ensure compliance.

SWOT? Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

These are the things you need to evaluate when choosing a printing company, or even just choosing a company to do one mail campaign. Sure, sales reps will focus on the strengths, but a good one will answer the weakness question honestly and let you know if those weaknesses are applicable to you.

What Are The Threats In Printing?

Threats. What are the threats in printing? Error rate is crucial. Joe’s bill can’t be mailed to Bob, or bad things will happen. Even more importantly, how quickly can the company recover from a disaster that affects you and them both?

If you’re based in Houston, working with a company based in Miami, the same hurricane could impact both locations severely.

What’s the disaster recovery plan? Are they concerned with recovering their operations, or making sure that you can recover your operations as quickly as possible. Obviously, the latter is the right answer.

Opportunities. This is why you choose a full service printing company, rather than a direct mail house. With a full service printing company, you can make design changes with competent, local designers. You can adjust materials, sizes, and other factors.

You can even add services that will increase your return, but that might not have crossed your mind as being available to you.

You might even be able to do things that you thought were just entirely out of your price range. A good printing company like Print Farm will make sure that you’re aware of services that will increase your revenue and offer them to you without a hard sell.

Strengths. Being good at large runs or variable data printing is great. But can they do short run digital printing? Can they handle presentation folders for your shareholder meeting printing? Can they turn around posters overnight?

You need to ask the right questions, and you need to work with a printing company who understands your needs.

Print Farm can help you with both the questions and the answers, and is experienced enough to help you determine your needs and your wants, and to balance the two for your marketing campaign. Contact Print Farm today to see how we can increase your revenue and decrease your cost!

Some years back, there was a song with lyrics along the lines of

That was a few years ago – today, paying a quarter for graphic design will get you a stick figure with an extended finger to express the designer’s unhappiness with what you think the value of their work is.

Today, the price has gone up drastically. Today, you have to pay five whole dollars to get a graphic designer.

Nope, we’re not kidding.

While we suppose it’s better for the designer than working on spec, it’s not much better. At the end of the day, it’s much, much worse for you and your business. For five bucks, you get one shot at the logo or design, and maybe ten minutes of someone’s time. You get one email to communicate your needs, and one email back with the result. That’s it.

If you’re running a psychiatric practice like Dr. Lucy you might be able to get away with the results of five dollar graphic design. But in the real world, you’re just going to cause yourself problems. The design will be in a nonstandard format, forcing you to scan it or convert it and losing resolution. It will contain nonstandard colors. It will just generally not meet your expectations. But, for five bucks, well, your expectations probably aren’t that high.

We linked an example of a five dollar graphic designer above. Go ahead, hire him, see what you get in return. We’ll wait.

Back so soon? Yeah, that’s what we thought.

What’s the real answer to graphic design on a budget without sacrificing quality?

Work with a printing company that has designers in house. They’re paid properly, motivated with a nice comfy cubicle and a top of the line Mac, and they’re experienced. They also know the capabilities of the printing company, which means they can design something that meets and exceeds your requirements and is compatible with the products you’re trying to create as well as the equipment on which it will be printed.

Will it cost more than five bucks? Maybe just a hair. But the value in it is overwhelming. Proper design is the difference between success and failure in business, and you’ve only got about three and a half seconds before your potential customer moves on and decides they don’t want to do business with you because your marketing materials are ugly. If you stand to lose more than five dollars in business because of a poor design, it’s important that you work with a competent designer who’s in communication with the people actually running the presses and the people responsible for putting the whole project together.

Print Farm, a Miami Printing Solutions Provider, has all of that under one roof, at a reasonable cost. Reach out today to see how we can help you!

There are tens of thousands of small printing houses in this country.  Any of them can churn out a church bulletin or a menu for an ethnic restaurant.  Many of them even specialize in such things.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that every Chinese takeout menu in America looks exactly the same.

If you’re dealing in high volume, low margin food that’s cut from exactly the same mold as everyone else’s version of it, that’ s acceptable.  But you, sir, are a business owner.  You were not made from a cookie cutter, and you need to differentiate yourself from the seventy-five other businesses in your town working in the same industry.

You’ve made a concerted effort to build your buisness from the ground up, and you likely started with nothing.

You still qualify legally as a small business, but the SBA doesn’t want to help.

You need printing, certainly, but more importantly, you need design services and marketing.  You need brilliance.  You need a designer.  Most of all, you need someone you can trust for printing and design, to ensure that your campaign succeeds and draws in business.  You need someone in the same time zone as you to help you build your image, your reputation, and your brand.

Designers from oDesk or designers from eLance are great, up to a certain point.

They work for a comparatively small amount of money, and they generally produce pretty good work.  Here’s the rub, though.  Gary Larson (yes, that Gary Larson, for those of us of a certain age) once famously said that you ‘can’t tell a cartoon.

Do you remember that comic where the kid is trying to get into the school for smart people and he pushes when the door has a sign that say pull?’

Yeah, so do we.  It’s hilarious if you see it, but not quite so funny after you’ve spent twenty minutes trying to explain a one-frame comic to someone who doesn’t get it.  We’ve all been there – you see the funniest thing, but then when you try to convey it in words, it just doesn’t work.

Half a page later, what in the world does this have to do with marketing your small business?  Plenty.

It turns out that the American public has extrapolated that when businesses look and feel substantially similar, they don’t need to know or care who’s behind them or which one they choose.

Sure, McDonald’s and Rally’s have nearly zero crossover, and fans of one are generally loyal, but what about McDonald’s and Wendy’s?  Other than a few die-hard Big Mac fans, not one person gives even a tenth of a care where they cram down lunch on the interstate, so long as it’s fast and easily accessible for the on-ramp.

You can’t afford to be tied up in a brand war with another business that does what you do in the way that you do it.  You need to be different.  Different is not only good, it’s necessary.   In Miami Beach alone, there are 482 companies selling widgets, and that’s a product that doesn’t per se exist.

How do you brand your small business in a way that makes you stand out and drives business, without spending a fortune?

The answer is to not use offshore designers who don’t understand the way people in your market think.  The answer is Print Farm.  We have designers in-house, and when those designers clock out for the night, they buy groceries, beer, and oil changes just like you do in the same economic and social conditions as you.  They know what works and what doesn’t, and how to create a small business brand identity that will make an impact.

Using a graphic designer who isn’t directly connected with your printing company can result in disaster.

If the person designing your brochures, flyers, posters, and other marketing materials doesn’t understand your market, success is implausible.  Print Farm has designers in house who understand the market and your needs.  Whether you need a digital printing short run, cheap presentation folders in 48 hours, or an marketing and mailing campaign managed from end to end, you need Print Farm.  Reach out today to see how we can help you with printing and marketing, while reducing expenses and increasing ROI.