Ask Jerry Hoyler anything you want about his two FASTSIGNS locations; just don’t ask to see his printer.

Hoyler’s C9650hn color signage printer from OKI Printing Solutions is so small, efficient and effective, he’s afraid if others lay eyes on it, they’ll want one for themselves — and, as a result, stop coming to him for smaller-format work. Not bad for a product he originally bought solely for use on his own in-house marketing pieces.

“Now, a $5,000 printer is not going to supersede one that’s half a million dollars,” he says. “But it sure can be a benefit to a company like ours.” In addition to the traditional banners, building signs, vehicle graphics and tradeshow displays/exhibits that have been a hallmark of the franchise, Hoyler has discovered that he’s now able to offer items like counter cards, table tents, bottleneck hangers and customized postcards without having to outsource — and without having to make them in large quantities.

“When you can help existing clients with large-format needs that also require small specialty printing, you’ve added a bonus,” says Hoyler, whose two Arizona stores bring in $2 million in revenue annually. “You’re not changing your core competency, you’re enhancing it.”

Terry Cruikshank, senior manager of industry marketing for OKI Printing Solutions, says the C9650hn is a customized version of the C9650 model that handles jobs ranging from standard sizes up to 47 inches in length.

What else can it do?
Hoyler received an e-mail about the printer last fall and purchased it through Foothill Ranch, Calif.-based solution provider TMS. He was the first FASTSIGNS franchisee to give the product a try, but didn’t really think about its use beyond the production of in-house materials.

“At that point, we were spending about $3,000 a month on marketing materials,” he says. “It was a lot of money. It’s a family-owned business, and my mother has always been adamant about marketing, marketing, marketing. But the more we talked about it, the more I just researched it, the more we starting thinking about what else it could do.”

One thing the company has used it for is to create business cards that are the depth of a shirt pocket — with a little extra sticking out on top. The cards act “almost like a name badge,” as well as offer blank space for jotting a note before the card is handed to a client.

“We’ve had several customers requesting those since seeing them,” Hoyler says. “We’re also doing a lot of customized, full-color postcards now. Those have been a great benefit for us, and the turnaround is so much faster than before.”

Not having to rely on outsourcing means something else, too: Hoyler’s stores in Glendale and Goodyear, Ariz., can give clients faster, more accurate proofs. “The client can see exactly what it’s going to look like when it’s done,” he says.

And, while it generally took 48 hours to turn around a job that would be outsourced to a sub-contractor, Hoyler can now “do it in a day. And that’s important. The majority of postcards we do are for people who came into town for a tradeshow and forgot everything. [They] don’t want 10,000, because they’ve got that many already sitting back at their office. They just want 1,000, and we can get that out really quickly.”

Hoyler admits that he’s still trying to learn everything the printer can do — and to train his staff to “think outside the box” in using the machine, as well.

“It’s really started to kick into play over the last couple of months,” he says. “We’ve gotten more into brochures, tri-folds, you name it. Before, when someone wanted a tri-fold, we turned them down immediately; we wouldn’t even do it. We’re not an offset printer, and they’d just go out the door and down the street … to get it done.

“So we’ve started playing around, learning what we can do with it,” he says. “We’re still getting a lot of, ‘Can it do this?’ And I keep coming back with, ‘I don’t know, but let me figure it out.’”

Rapid ROI
Hoyler says the printer has already paid for itself by greatly reducing the cost of marketing materials for his shops — savings he’s happy to pass on to customers (and the environment) by printing jobs in smaller batches.

“If someone’s holding a specialty event and needs just 25 or 30 pieces, they will still want the per-piece pricing as if they were having 5,000 made,” he says. “I may not be able to do that, but I can give them a competitive rate, especially if we’re already doing a banner for them, too.”

Hoyler views the addition of the color signage printer “as a great benefit to our organization. It never will be a part of our core business dollar-wise, but it sure does add a lot more flair to it.”