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Here are 4 insider-secrets to the copier world. Four ways to save significant amounts of money by the end of the week. Your local dealerships do not want you to know what is about to be exposed to you.
1) Upgrade Your Copier Today . Even if you signed a 60 months lease, you can normally upgrade it around 36 months – giving you a new copier, with the newer technology and a lower cost per copy, for the exact same price you are paying now – and maybe even a bit less. You can do the same thing on a 36 month lease at around 27 months. Reps do this all the time for companies.
You can fill out what is called a "Copier Pre-Quote " survey which tells your local reps what you want in your next machine (without having to spend hours in initial meetings with reps). It is like a Request-for-Proposal. You tell them the features you want and they email you back a quote. It tells them that you are all about price and will immediately knock about 20-30% off of the prices. (For the average copier of $ 8000, that's a $ 2000 savings!)
Once you have some numbers in hand, then you should ask the reps to help you upgrade, trade-in or ship back your old copier, which they will be more than happy to do.
2) Shop Your CPC. Do not estimate the power of pennies! That is, find out what your current cost per copy is. Do not look at your original contract because most dealerships will raise the cpc each year. So if you are the average small business office which prints about 10,000 black & white copies, prints and faxes each month at about a penny a copy, then you'll be spending $ 100 a month on your service agreement. If you throw 1000 color copies into the mix at $ 0.08 a print, then that's another $ 80 / month.
Now, you need to understand that copier dealerships give most of the profits of selling the machine to you, to the copier rep. They do not make money on the box, either does HP or Dell or Lexmark. They make money on toner! So believe me, they want to keep / win your business!
With this in mind, now go ask another dealership in your city (which services your brand of copier) what their rates would be if you switched to them (because the lease contract for the copier is not tied to the service contract usually, so you can cancel the service contract at any time). Let the reps compete with each other to drop that cpc as low as it will go, and get the sales / service managers involved because they know that they make money on cpc's.
If you just get them to drop the cpc down 20%, then that would be $ 0.008 (80% of a penny), per B & W copy and $ 0.06 for a color copy – bringing your monthly total from $ 180 down to $ 140! (Over the year, that's a $ 360 savings.)
3) Now Get Them To Lock-It In. Here's the power-punch. Get them to LOCK-IN the cpc for as long as you have the copier to seal the deal.
All prices go up – health care, education, gas – and even your copier toner. But you can ask the rep to lock-in your CPC price for the length of the lease and it will save you LOTS of money. Each year, with normal inflation, your copier dealership will raise their prices anywhere from 10-30%, and with gas prices soaring, maybe even more.
Here's the math: Let's say you start out with a contracting doing 10,000 copies a month for $ 0.01 a copy in B & W and 1000 / mo in color at $ 0.08 / copy.
Year 1 with these rates of $ 100 + $ 80 = $ 180 / mo x 12 months = $ 2160 / yr
Year 2 with a 20% increase in your CPC = $ 216 / mo x 12 months = $ 2592 / yr
Year 3 with a 20% increase in your CPC = $ 260 / mo x 12 months = $ 3111 / yr
Year 4 with a 20% increase in your CPC = $ 312 / mo x 12 months = $ 3744 / yr
Year 5 with a 20% increase in your CPC = $ 375 / mo x 12 months = $ 4493 / yr
That is an overall increase of 48.2% over a 5 yr lease, a total of $ 16,100 for your service agreement !!!
That 2x the price of the copier !!! Whoa! But if you locked down the CPC, then you've only spent $ 10,800. That's a savings of $ 5,300 dollars!
(Is this good info, or what? Do you see now why these dealers and reps do not want you to know this stuff?)
NOTE: This next detail can not be heard LOUD enough. Get this locked down CPC in WRITING !!! And save a copy of that agreement! It may be the single greatest move you make in the whole deal!
4) Change 3 Critical Color Settings. You need to lock down the color printing and copying. This is done in 3 ways:
a) The "Black Only" Copier Setting – Get your tech to change the copier default to "Black Only" copying so that a person must intentally press the "Color" setting to make a copy. If you do not do this, then anytime someone tries to make a copy with ANY speck of color on it, you'll be charged $ 0.08 for a color copy instead of a penny for a B & W copy! That adds up fast.
b) The "Black Only" Printer Setting – Get your tech to do the same thing on each computer that is set to print to that machine, or else for each blue email signature that is printed – BAM! Eight more cents to the copier guys.
c) The "Color Tracking" Setting – Have your tech assign "account codes" to each employee that they must type-in to use the color copying or printing (or can be running in the background on the printing side). This lets you know who is printing all the color. If you do not track it, and print out the report monthly to keep people accountable – then the youth ministry will be printing EVERYTHING in color, and staff will be printing out birthday invitations in color, and you will get a $ 5,000 color printing bill ! It happens all the time!
d) The "Single-Click Ledger" Setting – This could cut your color printing bill in HALF … literally! If you are printing posters, aka 11 "x17" pages or booklets or fliers, then get your dealership to set this up. If you do not, then the machine will count one long poster as two "clicks" because it will think that the big poster was actually two 8.5 "x11" sheets. But if you do the single-click ledger, then its just one click and then, half the bill.
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