Building A 3D Print Business Contest

Wrapping up the 3D print segment, Tom and Tracy Hazzard are brewing something great for their listeners. While answering the question if 3D Printing is a good business plan for small local businesses, Tracy launches a surprise business mentorship contest. Win $10,000 value in mentorship over 6 months from Tom and Tracy including consumer, market, and product.

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Building A 3D Print Business Contest

We had our fabulous interview with The UPS Store in San Diego.

I like where this question is going.

These are the audience we want. This is what gets me up in the morning and makes me not stop thinking at night. The question is, “I’m a small local business. Should I get into 3D printing?”

That depends a little bit on what your local business is, but if you are reasonably certain that the customers you’re bringing into your store would have a need for 3D printing or that can enhance what your business is in one way or another or the product can enhance that, adding those kind of products. In terms of being a small business and a local business, I personally would think that there are a lot of great things that 3D printing can do for you.

That’s one of the thing Burke Jones from The UPS Store is mentioning to us. How much publicity and local press showed up in his shop when he offered it? This is a hot press topic.

I know newspapers are old school, but you may have local newspaper or even local television media in certain parts of the country that are often looking for relevant local business stories. 3D printing is such a hot topic. It would not be hard if you’re up and running with it to get some local media attention.

It’s one of the things though to be cautious about is making sure that you’re ready for it. They got 72 million unique visitors to their website about it. They had the power of The UPS Store behind them. That’s probably a little exaggerated.

UPS was doing a big marketing push on it, but to their credit without a lot of business, UPS made some noise about it and got a ton of attention. While it may not be at that scale in your local business, it may be huge relative to you.

3D Print Contest: When promoting 3D to the public, make sure that you are prepared, your website is ready, and your machine is prepped.

You don’t want your website crashing. You don’t want the machine not working. You have to be prepared. You have to have great objects to show off what the capabilities are. You better have your brochures ready with your service costs and/or object print costs, whatever it is you’re going to offer. Think about the opportunity to get people coming in your store to ask you questions. They might email you a file to have you check it out, but you’re going to eventually pick up the phone. They’re going to come in the store to pick it up. It’s going to be a chance for you to have a customer interface.

Not only that, you’re also going to bring in new customers at some point who are looking at you only for 3D printing services. If you have other things that your business is selling, other services or products to sell them, you’re now bringing new customers into your store to leverage what you’re already doing.

The more people you bring in the store, the more of your stuff you sell because they’re like, “I forgot that was here. That’s great. I’ll buy that right now.”

It’s the convenience factor.

That’s a compelling reason to consider it. That being said, are you capable of handling? It requires skilled labor. It requires design skill. There are a lot of what-ifs behind that.

The machine is not going to run itself. You’ve got to have somebody capable of doing it. What we’ve learned from some of the people here in California doing it, and especially The UPS Store, forget the fact that UPS is making it available and has done many media blitz about it. They’re getting real jobs from real people and they’re profitable doing it.

Look at the case for the scanning. We wanted to get ourselves 3D scanned. We drove all the way to LA for it because there was nobody here in Orange County doing it. It’s not the worst thing ever, but we sought it out. Burke was saying the same thing. People are coming from LA down to his store because there’s nobody offering that who they can go and see it happening. They can do it online. That’s not the same thing because a lot of people want to learn. “Is this good for what I want to make? Is this good for what I want to do? I want to try this out.” It’s a test. They want to see it in person. It’s great to get a personal interface there. Don’t forget if you have questions or anything else you can check us out on at HazzDesign.com or anywhere on social media.

We’re always @HazzDesign on social media. We look forward to hearing from you. There is voice mail, email, tweet or something.

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