Our first day open was Thursday, January 14th – two days off schedule – but finally on track to make this idea happen. We’re located in a space formerly occupied by a web development firm. The space is small but highly functional for us. It’s key in order for us to keep our overhead down, and if we need to expand there is space next door currently open and available. I don’t anticipate the landlord filling the space soon – vacancies in San Diego are pretty high and all around our industrial park are empty storefronts.
Next door to us is a commercial printing shop, with minimal digital print capabilities. They’ve been using a Xerox 700 for proofing and non-critical color applications, and then outsourcing the rest of their work to a shop with a Xerox 6060. They are our first customer for the week, and brought in almost enough money to pay the rent for the month in our first two days of business.
Keeping everyone on task is a challenge. Ken was busy tweaking the quality of the press and running our first few production jobs through it. Sometimes it was hard to tell if Ken was having fun or not – he was sporting a grumpy face but rumor has it he rarely smiles. And Andrew came up with more genius ideas, but we need to keep him on task. If you’ve ever met him, he’s super energetic and knows his stuff when it comes to digital print and marketing. (He also only sleeps 3 hours a night, from 2am to 5am.) He’s our visionary and is also the guy that came up with the Social Print Experiment.
We also made the decision to produce four videos a month of about 15 minutes each, rather than 2 longer ones each month. I’m anticipating we’ll be releasing our first video a week from Monday, and we should be able to keep up a production schedule for each week’s video thereafter.
Overall, a very exciting week for us. We’re open!
Related posts:
{ 4 comments }
Congratulations and thanks for sharing.
I was most impressed by the MGI Press when I saw it at Print ’09 in Chicago. Very versatile.
It would be great if you could post some photos of your operation so folks could get a sense of the facilities.
You have a lofty business goal – did you craft a business plan for how you’re going to achieve it?
You don’t list salaries as an expense – are you taking out any salaries?
You don’t list utilities as an expense – are they included in your $500 a month rent?
I assume that the EFI Digital Store Front and Print Firm Software expenses ($29K) are being spread out over a time period – i.e. they represent a monthly expense to pay off. Perhaps that should be included in your ongoing monthly expenses.
What I’m trying to understand is the dollar amount that you have to net each month just to cover expenses. Simplistically speaking – if you double your revenues this month you will go into February carrying a debt of at least $6500. That will get added to the February projected hard cost of business of at least $6500 (not including salaries).
Sorry for all the questions.
Thanks, Gordon. We did craft a business plan of sorts, more like a roadmap of how we’re going to get where we’re going. At this point, since there is not enough cashflow to cover salaries, we are deferring that cost. Our numbers will reflect that; I’m trying to get our bookkeeping part put together but it ties into the widget that Outright is providing to us, and that won’t be done until February 15th.
Regarding the web to print solutions, we haven’t decided on any of them yet. We are still evaluating each of those products and determining which one will be the best fit for us. I don’t want us to just settle for one, and then find out down the road it’s not quite what we need. I’ll edit that text block to make it more clear these are technologies are being evaluated. Once we select one of them, the cost will be amortized over a 60 month period.
Utilities are included in our monthly rent, and only running the press an hour a day wouldn’t have a huge impact on our daily cost at this point. Our landlord says that they will evaluate our energy usage after 90 days to see if we need to separate out our utilities.
Going into February, we will be running in the red. I don’t anticipate we’ll start turning that around until March or April, which means that we’re going to have to hit some significant numbers to reach our goal. Today it needs to be $83,000 a month. But January is set as our implementation month, of getting our technology in place. February we’ll start with our marketing roll-out.
We’ll have photos, plus video. We’ve shot about 10 hours of video so far, and every day we are documenting our time there. Hopefully we can release our first video a week from Monday, and get into the groove for the weekly episodes.
Feel free to ask questions; everything we are doing is open book. Including our books. And please invite others to participate through tweets, linkedin and your own blogs. The more, the merrier
Sounds like great fun, just one thing though. Here in Tasmania, setting up any sort of business generally requires expenditure on legal/accounting necessities, establishing phone accounts etc. What sort of expenditure have you had in these other areas?
Also, how have you financed the start-up, owners injection of working capital or have you borrowed on commercial terms?
For our startup costs, we’re using personal capital where necessary. Unfortunately, in this economy and the tightened credit controls, obtaining credit is near impossible and even more difficult when you’re a startup company.
Aside from our legal structure, we have kept our admin costs to a minimum. We use Google Voice for our primary phone number 760-870-1738, which forwards to the number of our choice (typically, the person who handles sales gets those direct calls). The cost for Google Voice is free for incoming calls. We’re also utilizing Web 2.0 tools where we can, which is also helping us keep the monthly expenditures to a minimum.
Comments on this entry are closed.