INDUSTRY TIPS | THE ONLINE PRINT COACH Your Quoting Process Is Bleeding More Profit Than You Think I have spent over 25 years working with print businesses, and I can tell you that the single most common scene I walk into looks something like this: The owner is sitting at their desk, or more often standing at the counter, working out a price on whatever’s closest to hand. It’s usually a scrap of paper like the back of a delivery note. Sometimes literally the back of a cigarette packet. They’re pulling numbers from memory, adjusting on gut feel, and giving the customer a price before anyone’s had a chance to check whether it actually makes the business any money. The figures might be close. They might even be right some of the time. But here’s the thing. Nobody knows. There’s no record of how the price was built. No way to check the margin after the job’s done, and when three different people in the business quote the same job three different ways, you’ve dumped your pricing strategy and replaced it with a lucky dip. The Real Cost of Winging It Most owners I speak to think their biggest challenge is speed. Getting quotes out fast enough, turning jobs around quickly, keeping the workflow moving, and yes, speed matters. But it’s not where the real money is leaking. The biggest profit leak in most print businesses isn’t speed, it's accuracy, repeatability, and the jobs that simply fall through the cracks. The quote that never got followed up. The finishing costs that weren’t included. The job that got invoiced at the wrong price because someone remembered the rate from six months ago, or worse, the job that never got invoiced at all. I see it more often than you’d think. A Colin Sinclair McDermott encourages business owners to stop letting profit slip through the cracks of a manual process and start leading with data-driven accuracy business running flat out, the team working long hours, the owner convinced they should be doing better than they are, and when we dig into it, the answer isn’t about working harder. It’s about plugging the holes in a process that was never really a process in the first place. This is cigarette-packet pricing, and it’s a dangerous way to run a company. What a Grown-up Quoting Process Actually Looks Like Let me walk you through what changes when a business moves from guessing to knowing. First, you build standard product templates. Your top 20 products, the bread-and-butter work that makes up the bulk of your orders, should each have a pre-built quote template. That template captures every variable: stock, size, quantity breaks, finishing options, machine time, and labour. When a customer rings up for 5,000 flyers on Having been in the print industry since the mid-late 90s, Colin Sinclair McDermott entered the world of self-employment in 2004 and over the years that followed, experienced a number of highs and lows running his own print company, learning what does and doesn’t work. In 2022, he trained with The Business Coaching Academy to become a fully certified corporate coach with the Worldwide Association of Business Coaches. Through The Online Print Coach, industry members can access an online training platform, Print Mastermind and private 1-to-1 coaching with Sinclair McDermott. www.theonlineprintcoach.com 26 email: editor@printmonthly.co.uk Issue 360 - May | June 2026
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