As a smaller printer, how do you set your prices? Just % over cost? Or do you pricematch the market set by the big guys?

How do you price things like folding, collating, saddle stitching, and other services -- how many jobs do you figure you'll do to pay off each piece of equipment? Sometimes I wonder if I'm just working all these hours to pay off the equipment and I'll end up with more dept for equipment than profit in the printing business...

This is a tough question as it depends on market, location, size of the job, and value of the customer to your business.

On any job, you have to take into account:

1. your cost of the print
2. cost of the machine / number of prints you will run during its life (possibly a tricky one if you estimate it wrong)
3. cost of the paper
4. overhead for any overrun / misprints / mis-finished pieces that you have to eat
5. cost of your office/shop space, labor, electricity, and time to bill and account for the business, taxes, etc., etc.
6. your liability for the equipment you've purchased to do this and future jobs if something goes wrong
7. and the amount of profit per print you need to make to stay in business and grow!

Now some customers, if the job is big enough, warrant better deals as you can consider getting that customer via price as an offset to your marketing expense for ads, etc.

Buying big equipment as a small print shop can be tricky though... I don't have an answer for you on this one. You don't have to take every specialty job, but if it's something you'd like to do, only you can decide whether buying equipment that will only pay itself off in 3 or 5 years is worth it to you.

yea it depend on job price or client requirments.

__________________
Regards,
Abraham
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With all the over capacity...don't do any jobs that are not profitable. Not worth it in my opinion. Only exception may be a weekly or monthly run that's consistent and can cover the O/H to keep the lights on.