Farm Out Printing and Mailing, Oh My!

In an increasingly competitive business climate, efficiency, accuracy, and excellence are demanded more than ever to satisfy discriminating clients. When choices are endless in almost any type of business products and services, truly extraordinary businesses must strive every day to compete for resources including excellent staff, dedicated partners, and clients in order to increase financial stability for the organization. What kinds of things seem to be present in some businesses that excel in setting themselves apart from the rest?

The most successful business models include the strategic management tactic of outsourcing goods and services to like-minded specialists that can become partners in serving clients and helping to maximize profits. Outsourcing is not only gaining in popularity; it is essential for helping any business to get rid of cluttered business practices to open up time and energy for crucial expansion that grows it. There are some businesses that try to handle everything in-house and in doing so, spend too much time focusing on services that are not even their specialties. In these cases, valuable resources are wasted and the business inevitably suffers.

How can an organization benefit from outsourcing printing and mailing services? Let’s first look at some of the dynamics involved in handling printing and mailing services in-house rather than outsourcing them.

The High Cost Of In-House Printing and Mailing

Imagine a retail shop that sells sporting goods, clothing, and farm and feed supplies. The shop employs forty workers, is open from 8am-8pm daily, and provides locals with not only winter garb and pet supplies, but also supplies local larger farms with feed and farm equipment. In the spring they sell baby chicks, in the fall they sell more ammunition and hunting gear.

The inventory is huge. Their 5,000 square foot facility has a giant back room for extra stock along with a couple of offices for the management and staff break room, two restrooms, and a back loading dock entrance for commercial use. They are locally owned and operated, but have the feel of a big box store such as Costco or Target.

Each customer is added to a mailing list daily. Each commercial account has orders tracked, and is billed monthly when they put things on their credit account with the store. There are employees to hire and train, large inventories to manage, sales to promote, and orders to place. It’s a complicated business.

Each week they send out a sales flyer to loyal customers on their mailing list. Each month, they send statements and invoices to their farm and feed commercial accounts. Not to mention they have bi-weekly payroll to process along with daily banking and monthly inventory to do. It’s a paper-laden operation. Now imagine them trying to do all of that work in-house.

There would need to be a huge room in the back dedicated to computers, printers, paper storage, ink, toner, envelopes, and postage machines. All of that inventory and technology would need to be serviced and maintained. And technology is constantly changing, so the equipment and styles of printing would require staying on top of trends and the newest innovations.

Then there are the employees needed to do all of these tasks, all of which do not fall in the core competencies of the large majority of staff members, who are sales oriented and trained. There are human resources specialists and computer specialists to hire and train. To manage all the paperwork such as designing, printing and mailing the weekly flyers and monthly statements, the organization would need 3-5 full-time employees working only on those tasks and another 2 handling payroll. That adds up to a huge cost monthly in labor that is not really related to the main function of the store to provide farm and feed items. From the large amount of printing supplies, to the huge number of employee hours, this business is spending tens of thousands of dollars each month on printing and mailing and payroll services.

The Benefits of Outsourcing Printing and Mailing

Now imagine that same business choosing to outsource their payroll with their local bank so that all they have to do is turn in time card summaries every other week. And then imagine they partner with Towne Mailer for their printing and mailing needs as well. Let’s go over some of the ways in which the business would benefit immediately from making these two changes.

Firstly, valuable real estate would open up in the backroom that previously housed multiple computer work areas, printing equipment, and a back storeroom filled to the brim with paper and printing supplies. And as we know, real estate costs are on the rise, so adding an extra thousand square footage to the back room leaves more space for stock.

Next, the half a dozen employees needed to manage, maintain, produce, print, stuff envelopes, affix postage, and mail all the statements and flyers could be utilized to do tasks that inspire them, instead of being chained to a desk doing mind numbing repetitive tasks. All the time it takes to handle the mailings could be used for restocking, organizing the shelves, interfacing with customers, training in new areas such as management opportunities or moving up from the back room to sales or cash register. These hours that were previously spent on paperwork are opened up for those same employees to help the business and the employees to grow, to evolve, to challenge, and to change.

One of the most difficult aspects of employee management is tracking employee morale. Low morale leads to employee burnout and high turnover. Mundane and repetitive work tasks are boring, unchallenging, and create a dread-filled environment that is palpable. As a customer, you can really feel it in the air when employees are underutilized, burned out, or bored. And no one wants to shop where the people working seem unhappy. Going back to how competitive business is in today’s economy, a business cannot afford the immeasurable affect of low morale on profits, not to mention level of happiness.

How Does The Process Work?

Now that we’ve discussed the good, the bad, and the ugly regarding outsourcing, let’s discuss how the process works when you choose to outsource your printing and mailing services with a company like Towne Mailer. First, just give us a call. We’d like to hear from you about your type of business, your weekly or monthly printing and mailing needs, and what kind of print material you generate now. After we’ve determined how we could benefit you the most, we will ask you to prepare a test file to upload to our server.

We at Towne Mailer will take your files, format and structure them and will post proofs to review and approve before we send anything to your clients. Once you’ve approved the document for printing, it will be sent within about 24 hours. If you are not completely satisfied with the proof we’ll work to satisfy you; there is no obligation to print. You’ve lost nothing to try our services.

However, once you see the high quality of work that we do, you’ll realize that your old printer taking up space in the backroom could never compare to the quality you will see in our prints. Not only that, we can manage your data in such a way that regular updating of billing and invoicing no longer has to be handled in-house. We take over all the drudgery, all the mundane tasks and free you up for creativity, innovation, and doing what you love the most. Turning your printing and mailing services over to a dedicated, company like Towne Mailer will save you time, money, employee hours, and will surely lift the spirits of all who work for you. For the small investment of outsourcing your printing and mailing, you reap myriad rewards of time, money, and higher morale back in your business. And those will directly affect your competitive edge in the world of business.

Towne Mailer

Towne Mailer is a specialty business printing and mailing service thriving in Missoula, MT. With over a dozen employees and a huge 7,000 square foot state-of-the-art printing and mailing facility, Town Mailer excels at being the number one choice for the outsourcing of printing and mailing services in the country. Having business clients all over the US from small to large, Towne Mailer has perfected the art of proving world class printing and mailing for every client we serve. There is no order too small or large for us.

Using the highest quality technological equipment, Towne Mailer creates excellent invoices, statements, bills, etc. every time. And the service at Towne Mailer is unmatched. With a strong focus on customer relations and delivering timely, perfectly formatted and printed material guaranteed, Towne Mailer is the leader in the field.

Just try using Towne Mailer for the first time, and you’ll be a customer for life. We guarantee it. We look forward to showing you all that we can bring to your business venture with the most excellent printing and mailing services that you deserve.