Know Your Numbers: This Game of Inches

Running a printing company isn’t about luck, it’s about precision (although being lucky doesn't hurt). It’s about knowing where you stand every single day. The best-run print company leaders know their numbers. They know their productivity numbers. They know their financial numbers. They know their sales numbers. And they don’t just look at them, but compiled with their instinct, they act on them.

This business is a game of inches. Companies don’t win by making one big move, but by making a thousand small, consistent and disciplined moves that add up over time. Yes, they are consistent and disciplined. Print is detailed work. It’s about trying to get things right all the time with many variables that are outside of your control. Because when you miss, you feel it. The job runs late. The margin disappears. The client calls. And your staff feels overwhelmed.

Why It Matters

When leaders and teams know their numbers, they gain clarity. Clarity on what’s working. Clarity on where things are slipping. Clarity on what levers to pull and buttons to push to change the outcome. Without it, you’re flying blind and making decisions on gut feel instead of your intuitions validated by data.

Knowing your numbers doesn’t just tell you what happened. It helps you see what’s coming. If you’re interested in reading more about this, there’s a great book written by Rita McGrath, Seeing Around Corners. She writes about “anticipating and capitalizing on disruptive inflection points shaping the marketplace” – something that all printing company leaders work on.

Great companies separate themselves by using their data to anticipate, not just to react.

What to Measure

The specific numbers will vary from shop to shop, but a few key ones never change:

• Productivity metrics: throughput, machine uptime, waste %, job cycle time and on-time delivery.
• Financial metrics: value-added %, labor %, contribution margin, EBITDA.
• Sales metrics: retention vs. acquisition mix, hit rates, revenue per rep, average order value, new business cycle time.

These aren’t just accounting stats, they’re indicators of behavior, process health, and leadership effectiveness.

From Numbers to Action

Here’s where many companies stall: they gather numbers, but they don’t use them. Dashboards are nice, but behavior is what changes results. The key is turning data into conversation, asking why, not just what. Why did that device slow down? Why did margin slip? Why did a customer reorder faster (or not) than usual?

Once you start connecting the dots, you move from being a good printer to being a performance business.

Bottom Line

This industry rewards those who know their numbers, understand their story, and act with precision. The print business will always be a game of inches, and the inches belong to those who measure them.

Mike Philie helps owners and CEOs in the Graphic Communications Industry validate what’s working, identify what needs to change, and create a practical path forward.

PhilieGroup | mphilie@philiegroup.com | LinkedIn

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with Printing Impressions. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of Printing Impressions. Artificial Intelligence may have been used in part to create or edit this content.