I’ve taken up riding recently and since I’m a novice, my curent goal is accomplishing a 50 km ride. Riding is great—you get on the bike, tuck in the abs, work up to a comfortable rhythm of pushing and pulling, and enter the zone, where you hope to stay as long as the road conditions, or your aching quads, allow.
 

When you’re in the zone most thoughts fall away, and all you concentrate on is the way your body achieves fluidity with the bike. Until your quads start to really hurt. Then you embrace the pain and make it your friend. And you grunt and you push until you pedal your way to those stoplights just a few hundred meters ahead when you can finally ease up. Whoo hoo!
 

I find when I ride that if I want to stay in my zone it’s best to look not at the distance I have to cover, not the intersection or the street, or the crest of a hill that’s a few miles up the road, but the pavement about 10 feet in front of me. Looking too far off just sets me up for despair and doubt that my energy will last long enough to do what I have to do.
 

Aside for the occasional road hazard, focussing on the very short distance is a workable (I think) strategy for riding. You don’t have to plan how you’re going to reach your destination, you just have to tough it out till you do.
 

Not so for business. And not so for any print shop. You have to keep your eyes focused on the far off horizon, strategize about how you plan to get there, and simultaneously make money on this week’s jobs.
 

Trouble is, in today’s business environment in general and printing environment in particular, planning for the long haul is hard. Aside from the very practical questions of getting financing for capital expenditures, clinching new clients, and making payroll, it’s not at all clear-cut where you should invest your energies and your money to ensure you’ll be around and financially healthy for the next five to 10 years.
 

I’ve spoken to several printers lately who say they have a stable business with regular clients, but they either squeak through on very thin margins or they don’t see their orders increasing. And when they look at the options for changing those circumstances, they stumble. Some moves are just too expensive, or require such a radical shifting of their business models that they feel stalled before they start. So, unfortunately, many simply hunker down and tough it out.
 

Keeping your head down and looking 10 to 15 ft ahead of you is clearly no strategy for a successful business. But if printers were to look at the horizon line, what would they see? Quite probably an industry that has shrunk by a good fraction, multiple technologies vying for market dominance, skittish customers, and electronic media exerting its stranglehold on how information is distributed. How do you plan for that?
 

Clearly there are no cookie-cutter answers, but in the realm of technology at least, several voices are united that inkjet will be the way forward. Pira International, a U.K.-based research firm, says that inkjet will be the predominant printing force of the next 15 to 20 years. Inkjet pages will grow at a compounded rate of about 10% per year, by value and by volume. And most of that growth will be driven by commercial, transactional and promotional print.
 

Admittedly, though many web presses available are out of reach for many small to mid-size printers, this technology should be on every printer’s horizon line.