Don't want to hire an employee. Rather buy an Auto press!

Here's a youtube video covering the exact question you have..
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiVB0xKf87A[/media]

See if its worth it to you (you have been measuring everything, right?)

I only have a manual press and am in the absolute infancy stage of screenprinting, but I do have a lot of business experience outside of this industry and in my opinion, it would be a good investment if you had the money for it (cash). With the way the economy is right now, I would personally rather play it safe than sorry and buy it outright or at least have the funds readily available to pay for it outright than leasing.

Maybe you'd benefit from that one HUGE customer that would allow you to get closer to purchasing the equipment outright..

Is it that you had one really good week and now you feel like you want to ramp up for a production increase you've yet to see?

At the rate you're going now, one person can output 200 shirts per day in about 4 hours, so while an automatic (may) save you time, I'd want to see my quantity be at least in the 2,000+ shirt per week range before making that investment. Lots of other things to have outside of the automatic itself, air compressor etc.. that you'll also need.

The biggest question is: How soon can the automatic begin turning a profit? Is not having it slowing you down now?

Dan from Forward Printing has an article on screenprinters.net on the first page talking about when and why they upgraded to an automatic. Hopefully he'll chime in and give you more insight. That article though, was great and I suggest you check it out.

Do you have a shop right now?
What type of business metric software are you running (calls/week, average sale)? (Quickbooks?)

tdigital said:

Here's a youtube video covering the exact question you have..
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiVB0xKf87A[/media]

See if its worth it to you (you have been measuring everything, right?)

I only have a manual press and am in the absolute infancy stage of screenprinting, but I do have a lot of business experience outside of this industry and in my opinion, it would be a good investment if you had the money for it (cash). With the way the economy is right now, I would personally rather play it safe than sorry and buy it outright or at least have the funds readily available to pay for it outright than leasing.

Maybe you'd benefit from that one HUGE customer that would allow you to get closer to purchasing the equipment outright..

Is it that you had one really good week and now you feel like you want to ramp up for a production increase you've yet to see?

At the rate you're going now, one person can output 200 shirts per day in about 4 hours, so while an automatic (may) save you time, I'd want to see my quantity be at least in the 2,000+ shirt per week range before making that investment. Lots of other things to have outside of the automatic itself, air compressor etc.. that you'll also need.

The biggest question is: How soon can the automatic begin turning a profit? Is not having it slowing you down now?

Dan from Forward Printing has an article on screenprinters.net on the first page talking about when and why they upgraded to an automatic. Hopefully he'll chime in and give you more insight. That article though, was great and I suggest you check it out.

Do you have a shop right now?
What type of business metric software are you running (calls/week, average sale)? (Quickbooks?)

Click to expand...

Thanks this will help a lot. We have a shop right now and we are using Quickbooks.

Although I agree that we would like to see a larger volume going out per week, (this is one of the issues) we are not confident to receive orders that large since we don't have the capacity to fufill it. One option i thought of was to take on larger volume orders, but outsource it for now to shops with automatics.

We've come to the conclusion to automate bc we've been seeing a growth ever since 6 months ago, and we project a larger growth by the middle of next year. I was leaning towards leasing due to the tax breaks. The $30k estimated price includes a M&R diamondback, air compressor and chiller, and some misc supplies. By paying $600-700 a month on an automatic, we can pay the lease per month with only 2-3 small jobs which could be well worth it.

Plus, my arms are killing me............lol (I was joking around with my fiance and said that the $30k investment on an automatic, would probably be cheaper then a medical surgery bill on both my arms)....but maybe that isn't a joke.

I'd be willing to talk to you about purchasing an auto no problem... It's an exciting thing, and if you have the volume, there is nothing to be afraid of. We just got our first after printing manual for 3.5 years. We waited until the very last minute to get ours, we were fatigued, we had sore arms, we were profitable, we had auto jobs lined up beforehand to put on the press immediately, etc. We were completely maxed out on our 6 color 4 station manual, 3 people working too many hours a week. Investing in the equipment is better than investing in the labor and a 2nd manual in my opinion. There are also ergonomic and health issues that could be considered...

As Tdigital mentioned earlier we just published an article on screenprinters.net you could check out. Feel free to call us too, we're willing to talk. The phone number and email is plastered all over our website.

Best of luck, and shop wisely! The purchase of the auto should probably be treated the same way you would buy a home...

We are scheduled to check out the ISS trade show in Long Beach this JAN 09 so that we can check out all of our options for an auto. I also have another dilema regarding the auto.

We currently have a warehouse space that we share with another business they use it mostly for storage but take half the space. The total warehouse space is 6k sq ft, including a 500 sq ft office, our own production space is currently 2000 sq ft. I feel like if we get an auto, we will need to get a new dryer, a space for a compressor, space for more screens, and more space for almost everything. BUT, there is no more room to expand in this shared warehouse for us.

So if we get an auto, we need our own warehouse, even if the new space is 2000 sq ft, we will have more control over space. But this also means higher expenses for us and a longer lease!!

Should we just install the auto in our current space and make do with such little space? It is currently hard to walk through everything as it is but an auto I think will make it nearly impossible to work with. After the auto in installed and we decide to move later, that means we need to pay to have it re-installed somewhere else which could also be a big pain.

Although getting a new auto and a new warehouse would be ideal, we don't want to take that leap right now. (What I was thinking was, getting a new warehouse and just work with manuals for now until we feel comfortable with an auto) BUT the auto is the money maker, and a new warehouse won't generate more money. Any suggestions?

You probably don't want to install an auto if you have any idea that you will not have enough space, or that you may run out of space in a short amount of time. To install it and then move it later is going to be additional headaches and money and if you can avoid that you should. You will most likely need the new dryer depending on what you already have, and other ancillary equipment as well... Sounds to me like you should focus on cranking out as much as you can on your manuals. Begin taking larger jobs in the meantime, and source them to one or more than one local contract printer that you can rely on. While you are sourcing those larger jobs, you can take time and find yourself a new shop space. When looking for the shop space, it seems like you should be looking for something that is larger than what you think you need. Something that will accommodate the auto, dryer, and everything else with room to grow into. By sourcing jobs for a few months while you do this other legwork, you will prepare your infrastructure to deal with a greater quantity of larger volume jobs and customers, and when you get the auto, you will already have the additional business and revenue in place to pay for it...

Thanks everyone!

I am going to talk with my bank today about equipment leasing procedures. I was hoping to check out ISS in Long Beach this Jan, 09, but I won't be able to make it. I am mostly interested in the M&R Diamondback for a starter automatic.

Estimated cost I have in mind for an 6 color 8 station diamondback auto (might even go up to a 7 color as a flash station), a decent dryer suited for an auto, flash, chiller, compressor, larger screens, larger exposure unit will run about $35k total I think.

Either we are really busy or really slow, lol but we are currently 10 orders deep and production time is soooo slow. After its all said and done at the end of the day I can finish a single order of about 100 shirts, 3 colors front, 1 color back. In between production, I am on the phone and on emails getting back to people with the help of my fiance. We literally received 12 phone calls yesterday, 10 the day before and about a half dozen to dozen emails each day. I think its time for me to take the leap for an auto! and a new warehouse.

A couple of questions I can't really find answers for so I need to ask you guys with automatics, how much is your average monthly power bill when running your auto press and dryer? I figure if its air supplied it won't be too much of a difference, but I could be wrong. Also, once you guys got an auto, did you have some unexpected expenses that you didn't think about? I'd love to hear from your experience with your first auto!

TshirtGuru said:

I am going to talk with my bank today about equipment leasing procedures.

Click to expand...

Beacon Funding was awesome to deal with! Great service, and they actually helped up us out a lot too when dealing with issues with the vendor that sold us our press.

TshirtGuru said:

A couple of questions I can't really find answers for so I need to ask you guys with automatics, how much is your average monthly power bill when running your auto press and dryer? I figure if its air supplied it won't be too much of a difference, but I could be wrong. Also, once you guys got an auto, did you have some unexpected expenses that you didn't think about? I'd love to hear from your experience with your first auto!

Click to expand...

Check out an article we have up on screenprinters.net titled appropriately on their homepage right now. It addressed many of these questions and in short:

Our monthly power bill was about 50% more with our new huge Adelco gas dryer. We were running a small Workhorse 3011 3 phase electric dryer before. We've since began really watching our production schedule after we saw the first couple of bills. Basically we have a couple hours set aside in the morning where we prep and register 3-4 jobs, what we think we will print in a day, and not turn the dryer on until all of the days jobs are set up to print. We reduced the time that we actually have to run the dryer from 8 hours a day to 5 hours a day. Of course in a year or two I do hope to have two shifts, prep in the morning, dryer running longer during the day, but for now this is working well. We still have a few more weeks before we get the new power bill since we've been running the dryer fewer hours, but I think it will save us a couple hundred bucks a month. We were paying about $400 a month with the Workhorse and it jumped to about $600 a month with the Adelco.

There were a bunch of unexpected costs for us during and after the install of the auto. Read that article to find out. All of the unexpected costs could have been expected had we received a bunch of good info from the vendor, but unfortunately the vendor was not much help to us in these matters. I'll tell you more in a PM or you can call me if you want...