The litho printing industry is hyper-competitive but there is a way to get in with minimal cost by using a one colour machine and focusing on invoice books.

The business
Usually, if you have a one colour litho machine you would be forced into producing cheap flyers, but by focusing on the custom invoice book market you can make good margins.
What you will be doing is creating invoice, order books, delivery books and various business forms customized with the clients’ logo, business registration, bank details and address etc. All these types of books are identical in design so you should have a template in your design software (CorelDraw, Illustrator) etc. then you just switch the logo out with the new client.

What you need
You need three things for this business: a litho printing machine, with numbering and a perforator, black ink and a good supplier of carbonless paper. Now the carbonless paper is key to this business. Carbonless paper is a coated paper designed to transfer whatever is written on the front to the sheet below it. Now you probably thinking what is so special about that? I mean carbon paper has been around for a long time: Efficiency. There is no need to look for a carbon sheet and then position it behind the page being written on, that is the old way of doing things. Carbonless paper is cheap enough to be able to make invoice books with and make a good profit. You can make easily make invoice books, in duplicate (two-part), triplicate (three-part).

Once the book has been numbered and perforated, it can then be bound. Starting out you don’t need a bookbinding machine for this as it can be done by hand.

Image credit: Stockman Paper