Pain Points

In a recent meeting of the SGIA Industry Development Committee, committee members had the opportunity to share and discuss the challenges they face as business people, and effectively illustrate some new realities faced by today's specialty imaging businesses. Here is short list of issues:

Sales and Pricing Strategies
How to get new customers, and how to price effectively, continues to be a challenge for specialty imagers. For many companies, these critical elements are deciding factors for long-term profitability and business success.

Understanding Costs
Whether controlling inventory or learning to capture the true, total cost of services rendered, understanding the costs of production is for many companies a significant source of stress and an ongoing barrier to profitability.

Avoiding Commoditization
Increasingly, imagers find themselves in pricing battles with companies that will low-ball a project just to get the work. In so doing, these companies serve to drive prices down for the entire industry, and leave once-certain profitability in question.

Accessing New Markets
Having found themselves in commoditized markets, many business owners are looking into new, different and less saturate markets. If these markets are accessed successfully, they can offer at least temporary relief from traditional, cost-focused markets.

Quality Control
Whether the challenge is creating formalized lean manufacturing processes or simply establishing reliable standard operating procedures, a focus on controlling quality and costs is critical for companies now doing more with less.

Understanding the New Workforce
As younger, tech-savvy and electronically-oriented employees continue to move into specialty imaging businesses, some business owners find themselves challenged to create workplaces that suit their needs.

While the technologies and materials used in our industry require a significant amount of expertise and care to produce a quality product, it is important to note that it was not technical expertise, but instead production and business management issues that weighed most heavily on committee members.

What are the current pain points for your business, and what efforts are you undertaking to address them?

Submitted by: Dan Marx, SGIA