How to Bankrupt Your Screen Printing Shop in 5 Easy Steps

Running a successful screen printing business can be complicated.

You have customers to manage, employees to keep productive, equipment to maintain, jobs to schedule, garments to order, artwork to approve, deadlines to hit, and—somewhere in all of that—you’re supposed to make money.

Sounds exhausting.

Fortunately, there’s an easier path.

If your goal is to slowly drain the profit out of your screen printing shop, frustrate your employees, work ridiculous hours, and eventually wonder where all the money went, just follow these five easy steps.

The best part?

You may already be doing some of them.

Step 1: Price Everything Based on What the Other Guy Charges

Why bother figuring out what it actually costs your shop to produce a job when you can just look at what everybody else charges?

If the shop across town prints 100 shirts for $8 each, then $8 must be the right price.

Never mind that they may have different equipment.

Different labor costs.

Different overhead.

Different production speeds.

Different purchasing power.

Or absolutely no idea what they're doing either.

Just match the price.

Better yet, beat it.

If they charge $8, charge $7.50.

When they drop to $7, go to $6.75.

Keep going until everybody is working really hard and nobody is making any money.

Congratulations. You've discovered the race to the bottom.

The problem with competitor-based pricing is that your competitors don't pay your bills.

Your pricing needs to account for the actual cost of producing the job—including garments, ink, screens, labor, overhead, spoilage, equipment, and all the little expenses that are easy to overlook.

Then you need to add something many shops occasionally forget:

Profit.

Revenue isn't profit.

Being cheaper isn't necessarily better.

And winning a job that loses money isn't really winning anything.

Knowing your true costs is one of the reasons we've put more emphasis on job costing and profitability. Understanding your overhead and comparing estimated costs with actual production costs gives you a much better foundation for pricing than simply trying to beat the shop down the street.

Step 2: Say Yes to Every Job

A customer needs six shirts tomorrow?

Absolutely.

Someone wants 14 different shirt styles, nine colors, individual personalization, and delivery by Friday?

No problem.

A customer needs a rush order that completely disrupts your production schedule?

Of course you can squeeze it in.

Never say no.

Never charge enough for the inconvenience.

And definitely don't ask whether the job is actually worth doing.

After all, sales are sales, right?

Not exactly.

Some jobs consume far more resources than their invoice total suggests.

Small orders can require almost as much administrative work as large ones. Complicated jobs create additional artwork, purchasing, setup, communication, and production time. Rush orders can delay other jobs and create overtime.

And difficult customers can consume hours of staff time that never appears on an invoice.

The question isn't simply:

“Can we do this job?”

The better question is:

“Should we do this job at this price?”

Sometimes the most profitable job is the one you politely decline—or quote high enough to make the disruption worthwhile.

And when you do accept rush work, having a real production scheduling system makes it much easier to see what squeezing another job into the schedule will actually affect.

Step 3: Run the Entire Shop From Your Head

This one is particularly effective.

Don't bother creating reliable systems.

You know what's going on.

When an employee needs to know whether artwork was approved, they can ask you.

When someone wants to know if the shirts arrived, they can ask you.

When production wants to know which job is due next, they can ask you.

When a customer calls asking where their order is...

Everybody can ask you.

Eventually, you'll become the most important person in the company.

You'll also become the biggest bottleneck.

Information scattered across emails, sticky notes, whiteboards, spreadsheets, text messages, and people's memories creates an enormous hidden cost.

Employees spend time looking for information instead of producing work.

Jobs get interrupted because someone needs an answer.

Purchasing mistakes happen.

Deadlines get missed.

Artwork gets printed before approval.

And the owner ends up spending the entire day answering questions instead of running the business.

A growing print shop can't depend on one person knowing everything.

The information needs to live in a system where the people who need it can find it.

That means being able to see jobs in progress, production status, deadlines, artwork, purchasing information, and other important job details without having to hunt someone down and ask.

Step 4: Assume That Being Busy Means You're Making Money

This might be the easiest mistake of all.

The presses are running.

The embroidery machines are humming.

Boxes are stacked everywhere.

Employees are working overtime.

The phone won't stop ringing.

You're booked three weeks out.

Business must be fantastic.

Except your bank account doesn't seem to agree.

A busy shop and a profitable shop are two very different things.

In fact, an unprofitable shop can be incredibly busy.

We recently went deeper into this exact problem in Why Being Busy Doesn’t Mean Your Print Shop Is Profitable.

If you're underpricing work, every additional job can actually make the problem worse.

More orders mean more garments.

More payroll.

More overtime.

More ink.

More screens.

More shipping.

More mistakes.

More wear on equipment.

More everything.

Except profit.

This is why revenue alone doesn't tell you whether your shop is healthy.

You need to understand what it actually costs to produce the work you're selling.

Otherwise, you can build a million-dollar business that produces surprisingly little money for the person who owns it.

Step 5: Never Check Whether the Job Actually Made Money

The job shipped.

The customer is happy.

The invoice was $4,800.

Sounds like a successful job.

Time to move on.

Whatever you do, don't look backward.

Don't compare estimated labor to actual labor.

Don't check how much production time the job really consumed.

Don't look at spoilage.

Don't consider reprints.

Don't account for unexpected setup time.

And definitely don't calculate your actual profit.

Because you might discover something uncomfortable.

That “great” $4,800 order might have made you $1,500.

Or $500.

Or nothing.

It might even have cost you money.

Without comparing what you thought a job would cost against what it actually cost, you never get the feedback needed to improve your pricing.

So you make the same estimating mistakes again.

And again.

And again.

A few dollars lost here and there may not seem significant.

But multiply those mistakes across hundreds or thousands of jobs and suddenly you're talking about real money.

This is exactly why looking at profitability after production matters. PriceIt's Costing & Profitability tools are designed to help shops compare what they expected a job to cost with what actually happened.

Congratulations! You're on Your Way

Follow these five steps consistently and you'll have all the ingredients you need:

Plenty of sales.

A packed production schedule.

Stressed employees.

Long hours.

Constant interruptions.

And surprisingly little profit.

Eventually you'll find yourself asking the question many shop owners ask:

“We're insanely busy. Why aren't we making more money?”

That's when it becomes clear that the problem was never the amount of work coming through the door.

It was how the work was being managed and priced.

Want to Stay in Business Instead?

Then do the opposite.

Know what it costs to operate your shop.

Price jobs based on your numbers—not someone else's.

Understand which jobs and customers are actually profitable.

Create repeatable workflows instead of relying on memory.

Give employees access to the information they need.

Use production scheduling to keep work organized instead of constantly reacting to the next emergency.

Track jobs in progress so your team knows where orders stand without having to ask.

And after important jobs are completed, compare what you expected to happen with what actually happened.

You don't need perfect numbers.

You need better information than you had yesterday.

Because once you understand where your shop is making money—and where it's losing it—you can start making better decisions.

That's how a busy print shop becomes a profitable print shop.

PriceIt Helps You See the Whole Picture

PriceIt Software was built specifically for decorated apparel businesses, including screen printing, embroidery, DTG, DTF, and promotional products shops.

Instead of managing estimates, orders, artwork, purchasing, scheduling, production, shipping, customer communication, and profitability in separate places, PriceIt brings those pieces together into one system.

More importantly, PriceIt gives you better visibility into what's actually happening inside your shop.

Because the goal isn't simply to process more orders.

It's to build a more organized, efficient, and profitable business.

And preferably avoid bankruptcy along the way.

About PriceIt Software

For more than 25 years, PriceIt Software has helped screen printing, embroidery, DTG, DTF, and promotional products businesses become more organized, efficient, and profitable. Backed by more than 35 years of hands-on experience in the decorated apparel industry, PriceIt was built around the real-world challenges print shops face every day.