Hi there again,
Just when you think things are just fine, another real cracker appears on the horizon.
This time it looks like a real showstopper and the show that is going to stop is your business. If you are in a small business, you will probably have one of these moments. The trials and woes of employees seem easy compared to what you have to deal with and the shocks always come out of the blue. Otherwise you would have know what was coming and would have prepared.
This week’s one for us was tied in with buying a new printer. The old ones that we have used for years, HPBusiness Inkjet 1200, have done terrific service but the print was steadily deteriorating. A new printer was called for so I duly ordered one from the local PC repair company.
The shock was that instead of paying £2-6 for a HP black cartridge that would print out 1,000 pages, the new printer needs cartridges that cost £28 each and print @ 300 pages.
That means that the price per page has gone from 0.005p per sheet to @ 10p per sheet. I have estimated that instead of spending about £10 a month, the cartridge bill will be over £100 per month, perhaps even £2-300 per month.
So what can I do about it?
The new printer is great-very good print. But very expensive. The first thing I have done is to do nothing, i.e. print as little as possible. Before when it was amazingly cheap, prints were made of almost every email and document. That’s all been cut out. Next is to repair the old printer an reconnect it so that we have a high quality and a draft printer.
Now I’m off to find a better source of cartridges-more on this when I have some news. There must be lost of other users of the same expensive cartridge printer that could do with paying less too.
This whole scenario is played out throughout businesses every day of the year. Things are jogging along fine until either a big price increase occurs or the owners come across an issue that is so frustrating that they go out and produce a solution that they can then sell to others in the same situation. Only then does something happen. A good number of the new ideas and products that I have ended up selling have come from just these situations. No doubt there will be others and those too will lead to another business revenue stream.
Fine weather coming-have a good weekend. Kind regards, Roy Lewis