Choose your partner and make more profit
If your operation truly a "full service"
operation, or do you find yourself saying no to customers too often? If
customers hear you say "no" too often, they'll find another place
to take their money - and they will probably stay with the vendor that tells
them yes.
In today's market "full service" covers a
lot of territory:
- Develop and print
- Photos and digital cameras to CD
- Passport photos
- Print to print
- Restoration
- Wide format printing
- Slide development and printing
- Greeting cards
- Photo mugs
- Calendars
- Holiday ornaments
- Group photos
- Package prints
- Photo business cards
- Photo plates
- Photo tee shirts
- Video transfer
 The
first item on the list - simple developing and printing - is the one item
that is both highly price-competitive and low in profit potential. Unless
you've got a lot of expensive lab equipment, however, it's one of the few
things you can do on-site. But it won't put enough money in your piggy bank.
(In a little while I'll tell you how to sell piggy banks and make a few more
dollars.)
Here's how you can do some of the others with little
or no capital investment:
Passport and ID photos are profitable. Here's how.
You can get into print-to-print for about
$1,200 starting from scratch. Hook up a computer, a scanner and a computer -
add Adobe Elements - and you're there. Learn about it in my article The
$2,000 Digital Imaging Station and note that prices have plummeted since
I wrote that article! You can also use that same equipment to copy
customer memory cards to CD if you include a CD burner.
If you can't retouch and restore photos
yourself in PhotoShop, scan them and e-mail them to a source like Hollywood
Fotofix. Their artists will retouch your picture files and e-mail them
back to you for printing.
 Even
if your lab isn't equipped to make all those profitable little Christmas
products, you can find a partner lab to do so.
If you currently use a wholesale lab such as Qualex or
Fuji you'll find they offer a wide selection of gift products. There are
also other retailers, such as Allen Showalter of King Photo in Harrisonburg,
Virginia, who have wholesale photo finishing labs. That's the source I use
for ornaments like the one shown here.
Allen is a frequent speaker at PMA conventions and
conferences and has developed sales of ancillary products into a major
business. He's got great promotional ideas to grow his business using photo
mugs.
Until we got our own digital lab, we had him make our photo
greeting cards for us. He uses the stylish Phototidings masks, gives you
a great catalog, and provides excellent service with quick turnaround time.
Often we would scan photos and e-mail the photo file to the lab, speeding up
delivery.
His address:
Harrisonburg Photo Finishing
889A E. Market Street
Harrisonburg, VA 22801
800 434-0680
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