***Advertisement: Ascent Partners 14 July 2010***
New FREE Benchmarking Service for Commercial and Digital Printers with five-40 employees. Struggling to find the real hard industry data about your market? Concerned about the direction and trends your market faces in FY 11? You’re not alone. Many printers in this market are feeling the same. Richard Rasmussen has some advice.
Being a printing proprietor can be a lonely job. Which information do you rely on? - The trade press, the paper reps who tell you about how tough things are, machinery vendors spruiking about the need to invest in technology to get ahead, or your accountant who is usually on the conservative side? It’s not easy.
One way to take out the guesswork is to benchmark your business against others in your peer group. What are the best practices? What improvements can you make? What can you do to work smarter, not harder? How are you really doing in the industry?
Ascent Partners are currently seeking commercial and digital printers with between five and 40 employees to participate. We’ve developed a simple XL spread sheet which has an input sheet, which ask you to provide some key about your business, a sample of a completed form, and a sample of the data you will receive back in the benchmarking report. We can send this out for you to view / evaluate - just get on our web site at www.ascentpartners.com.au and complete the enquiry form on the contact page, or ring Richard Rasmussen on 0402 021 101.
Note, we need to have completed forms back by July 31st. We’ll have the completed benchmark report back to you by mid-August.
Confidentiality
We understand and respect the confidential nature of the data you provide - As industry business agents and consultants (nine years), we deal with client’s confidential data on a daily basis and we’re bound by law to protect it. Your firm’s name or data will never be shared with others. It’s a small industry, and we’d like to keep our good name intact.
What we measure
A good example of what we measure is the key performance indicator of “sales per employee”. We’ll provide you what your ratio is, and compare that to best in group, worst in group, and median in group. If you find out, for example, that each employee in your business provides $150,000 of revenue and the best in group provides $200,000 per employee, then you may question how efficiently you are operating.
Another example of what we measure is debtor days – again if you’re averaging 63 days, and the group’s median (the middle result of the group) is 53 days, there may be an issue that could be addressed. – i.e it will help identify areas of strength and weakness.
Apart from just benchmarking, we will also survey printers about their performance in FY10 and what they expect from FY 11. Will sales and GP rise? What are the key concerns? How many will exit? What capital equipment purchases, new or used will they make? How much of the pie are print managers getting?
What we’re aiming to do is to provide a real picture of this market - important / vital data about your market, from which you can make informed decisions (not just rely on “gut feel”).
The service is Free for those that participate. Our aim is to this quarterly, so you can monitor your performance throughout the year/s. Fees will apply for non participants for the provision of the consolidated data (starting price $995 plus GST).
Why this segment of the market?
We chose this segment because it’s where we generally provide our services (appraisals, business strategy and planning and business sales services), and also because of the state of play of this market – competition for print managers, digital printers, new on line business models, market consolidation, technology developments, and competition from other media (web, PDF, email marketing etc). This market has never had to face this many issues.
Want to know more / want to participate?
Simply go to our web site at www.ascentpartners.com.au and complete the enquiry form, or ring Richard Rasmussen 0n 0402 021 101.
