Formula for Engraving..Help!!

[Phil Garcia]

Got it, I guess I will just have to spend the time to time engraving speed's at different dpi's. Sometimes, you just have to do it like Nike.

[Rodne Gold]

Pricing on a time based model is not ideal , there is a price the market, customer and item will bear and its thru experience and a bit of market research that you determine this.
On a time based model you will often be way too pricey or way too cheap.
Apart from that , if your laser is slow, or you using high DPI to engrave deep cos your laser is less potent , you are charging your customer for its slowness compared to another faster more powerful laser.

[Bob Davis]

Rodne, I couldn't agree with you more.
Just for another complication of it, the GCC lasers have a setting in the driver for "cluster" where time can be saved by not having the head traverse large blank areas. And if the job has lines of text you would need to measure each line and then add them up...
Why the focus on time? Lasers are quick, and the vast majority (of our jobs anyway) take longer to setup than to actually engrave. The customer is purchasing a result, not your time, and you should charge what the market will bear.
I really hate it if a customer says "Is that all it costs?" That means I have left money on the table. I also don't like it much if I don't pickup a job because the customer thinks it is too expensive, but if that doesn't happen every now and again I know I'm too cheap... and as I said, I really hate that.

[Stephen Beckham]

Got to go with Rodne here as well. IF you estimate $10 on a job and it actually takes 13.253642 minutes - are you loosing $3 and change? No - you gained $10 because you made the sell. If you estimate $10 on a job and it takes 26 minutes - you don't know your laser very well. That comes with time. I've been in it for almost four years now and I've got a pretty good sense of how much it's going to take for different sizes - not to the minute.second breakdown, but by looking at the item and asking myself "how much would I pay to have that etched?" and a guestimate of how long similar items have taken - I give pretty accurate quotes.

Have I been grossly off before? Yea - that's when I tell the customer they got a bargin and that future items if repeated would incur the additional costs by how far off I was. It let's them concur that sell (business 101 - let your customer feel a win without breaking your bank) and gives them an honest assessment if they come back with additional similar items. It also builds good customer relation because you show that when you make the mistake, the customer will prevail - earning the respect of that customer.

Keep in mind - I'm not telling you to give it away - just keep pluggin away and things will become second nature. I believe that most of us (I too) who start some excel spreadsheet or some macro or anything similar to help with this issue - reach a point where it becomes unnecessary.

[Scott Shepherd]

I'm with Rodney and Stephen on this one as well. If I ever get to a point where I have to fight over pennies and seconds, I've transitioned into the wrong market for me.

I would imagine Trophy's are that competitive, where .05 cents matters, but for 100% of my work, it's not that critical. You have to be somewhat aware of what the cost would be at your competitor is they selected them.

You can do a name tag in 5 minutes, start to finish. So it's worth $5 plus material, plus the catch, or maybe $6 total? Now go find someone that will sell 1 name tag for $6. For 1, you can get $15, if not a little more. So your pricing model would have lost you money on that deal. However, they can't go anywhere in town and have one name tag made for $6.

You have to learn your market to some degree and that just comes with time.

[Martin Boekers]

Rodne is a wise man!

If it helps in early stages of learning your laser keep an informal log as to substrates, powers, time etc. There can be many variables but as you get better you will be able to figure a fairly acurate time.

If your doing many single pieces focus on the first then turn focus off for the rest. Focusing takes a fair amount of "reletive" time.

When I do alot of metal plates, it's nice to have an outline to trim square to. Instead of rastering the outline around the live area (as previous manager recommended) I vector the outline, by doing this I cut engraving time typically by 2/3s as the raster only does the type and skips the space inbetween. A quick vector outline and I'm set.

If the order is quite large say 1000 name tags it's usually to my benefit to run a test at different resolutions to see how much I can cut laser time while still keeping quality high.

I tend to run most every thing at a higher resolution if possible as it seems most local competition tends to run lower and there is a visible difference in the quality of the product.


Marty