Label Printing
Label Printing – Business Tip #16
Court your banker. Never has your relationship with your banker been more important. There are all kind of examples out there right now of companies whose lines of credit have been reduced, called or denied. For small business owners, that’s akin to cutting off an arm and having no way of stopping the bleeding. Some of these cases may have turned out differently if the banker had been more informed of what was going down at the company. A banker friend of mine (who has been considering an ‘alias’ career given the popularity of bankers right now!) told me bankers hate surprises more than anything else. He’d rather know things are getting rocky and work through it early on than get the call that things are in dire straights. If he’s in early, he can act as an advisor and help get you resources to turn things around. If he’s in late, he has to play the heavy.
Label printing, like most manufacturing, is a capital intensive business because of the equipment and inventory requirements. We have a goal of sitting down with our banker quarterly, at a minimum, to run through our numbers. We want to do two things in those meetings: educate our banker on the custom label printing industry and ’sell’ them on how great a company and owners we are. If ever we hit a rough patch, we want them to understand how our business has grown, to know us as business owners and to understand how our business works. We’re not afraid of letting them buy lunch, either!
Steps to take: *Pull your numbers together, including projections for 2010 and capital needs based on those projections. *Schedule quarterly meetings with your banker to run through your numbers *Prepare your ‘pitch’ and ‘education’ pieces so you can hit the goal of teaching them about your business and industry and selling them on you and your company.
Label Printing – Business Tip #17 next time!
