Friday Factory: Should you build a farm?

On a client call this morning, someone was asking about when sales of their 3D prints get up to speed; what should they do?

Because when you’re selling maybe a couple of prints a week, it doesn’t seem like it takes much thought…

You might only need one 3D printer.

But if you build your business the right way, soon that’s going to grow. Very soon, those few sales a week, are going to turn into 10 a week, 25, 50 a week.

That’s how ecommerce scales up in the early stages if you have the right product, to the right audience, presented in the right way with a launch strategy.

And at those volumes, we need to have a plan in place.

Most people at this point end up just keep going and building a 3D printer farm. Now there’s no problem with this essentially, but it can cause issues. 

Because very quickly you can end up instead of being a business owner, you’re just a very well paid 3D printer farm operator. Spending all your time managing printers, constantly fighting that there isn't enough hours in the day. 

So what should you do?

Well first as I advised my client - we’ve got to start with the end point in mind. Your ideal end point.

It might sound counter intuitive, but this is why a lot of people end up absently mindedly building businesses they don’t like. A business that dosen’t serve them.

They just kind of put one foot infront of another, or brick by brick. Which isn’t a terrible thing to do, it’s just it’s easy to build a business that doesn’t serve you.

And then one day like I said, you’ve got a room full of printers. And no spare time.

Instead of spending that time growing your 3D print business, or with family or doing cool stuff that you can do now that you have the extra income.

So I explained to my client; you want to start by asking yourself "how do I want my business to operate in say 2 or 3 years from now?"

How many hours a week do you want to work. Do you want to take a 2 week holiday or longer a couple times a year?

What do you enjoy spending your time doing - and what do you not? What do you want to make sure you can afford to pay other people to do for you?

Because if you only want to work 15-20 hours a week, or less - then you’re going to need to make sure you build your business with certain systems to allow this.

Such as if you fit your printers with some automation equipment like Quinly that will turn your printer into a single printer factory, working 24/7 just churning out prints on autopilot, only needed human intervention to swap extra large spools of filament once a week or so.

Seriously, we have clients doing this - and it’s incredible. Means you don’t need many 3D printers.

Or you can get a Blackbelt or Creality CR-30 - these printers have belts on the bed instead of a fixed bed, so they can continuously churn out prints in a similar fashion.

Both incredible tools that completely change the dynamic of a 3D printing based business.

But beyond this, the ultimate goal - certainly it was for me and many of my clients is to get a contracted 3D print farm to produce for you. They’ll print, pack and dispatch all the prints for you, on your behalf. So you don’t even need to touch them.

Means you can use your printers for the exciting bit, and the boring production can be handled by others. 

This is one of the many reasons we only create 3D printed products with 10x profit margins. Costs £2 to print & you’re selling it for £25. So that you always have enough margin to scale and automate.

So the way we answer these questions is just with some simple numbers. Just work out how many of your prints your automated printer can create per day, based on print bed area and time taken per batch, and how many printers you’d need to do X amount in sales.

Hint: you should be getting figures where you can easily make $10,000 / month on between 4 and 8 3D printers.

And beyond that, you can have your next stage where you outsource that product to either a 3D Print farm that will do it for you - or go down traditional mass production options, if suitable.

If you’d like to get some clarity on exactly the right steps to grow your business, book a call with me here.

Have a great weekend!