Outpace the Next Holiday Rush

The holidays, hectic as always, are over. If you run a 3D print farm you’re probably just starting to recover from the chaos of the holiday rush. You may have watched the articles and posts about New Year’s resolutions and dry January flood your feeds with a lingering sense of exhaustion. You may be thinking “I can’t do that again.”

But, at the same time, you may have goals for 2025 - maybe by the end of the year you’d like to triple your production or double the size of your farm or go from 5 printers to 50 printers. 3D print farm owners tend to be ambitious with their goals, and with printers getting more reliable each year, they’re within reach to those who are committed. Commitment only goes so far, though. At a certain point, physical limitations are hit, and figuring out how to push past those requires a different mindset.

“Set systems, not goals” is a phrase that has risen in popularity in recent years, especially in productivity spheres online. Usually, this advice boils down to cultivating habits that set you up for success in reaching the goals you’ve set, but manufacturing basically invented the practice of optimizing systems. So how can you as a 3D print farm owner set up systems to hit your 2025 goals? Let’s dive in.

The Problem With Goals

The specific goals we set can help craft our ideal system - they’re a starting point. Most 3D printing businesses tend to have output-related goals, like increasing the number of printers, their revenue, or the number of units produced. These metrics are similar, but represent different mindsets going in. Of these, the most common goal we encounter is to increase the size of their print farm. But print farm size only says so much on its own; other metrics like market demand, sales, print hours, uptime, and revenue should all be considered in conjunction with farm size in order to get a full picture of print farm success. Otherwise, any person could buy 60 printers and claim they hit their goal.

It’s important to understand your motivation behind the goal you set. Do you want to increase your income? Do you want to decrease your workload? Do you want to expand your business to other regions? Do you want to spend more time on original designs? Do you want to make online content around building a print farm? Do you want to teach others how to make a successful 3D printing business? Your true motivation may reveal that a mindset shift is in order.

So, goal-setting is more nuanced than a lot of us like to think. But even the simplest goals have systematic solutions, so let’s get into it.

Creating Systems

For today, we’ll discuss a scenario using the most common goal type we hear: “I want to go from 20 to 60 printers by the end of the year.” Effectively, the goal is to triple our production.

Breaking it Down

It would be useless to just say “buy 40 more printers and move on with it”, so let’s take a minute to dissect this goal. 60 printers theoretically means 3x more output by the end of the year, which also means 3x more customers/orders or 3x the average order size.

Here’s the big problem: it also means 3x more work - for you. Not only are you processing, packing, and shipping 3x more orders, you’re also having to plan 3x more jobs (which is 8x more complex) and starting/removing 3x more prints while swapping 3x more filament. The reality is that you will be at least 3x busier when you hit this point. If you’re working 60 hour weeks now, you’ll have to work 180 hour weeks by then (I know! A week only has 168 hours … that’s the problem). Not to mention that the percentage of downtime on your farm will inevitably increase with the number of printers due to printers sitting idle waiting for you to deal with your increased workload. So, we need to get creative to make this work.

The Baseline

First let’s establish our baseline - most farms we work with report that they experience  around 30% downtime from filament changes and removing/starting prints. So let’s start with an easy win: switching to 5kg spools (or an AMS loaded with all the same filament). This cuts our time spent switching filament significantly. If we used to swap spools three times a week, we can get that down to about once a week. If your printers sit idle for an hour every time they are out of filament, that reduces downtime to 25%.

The next easy win is to automate part removal and print start (check out AutoFarm^3D™ for 3D printer & farm automation, if you haven’t already). That gets us down to 5% downtime, because not only do we save time during the day, we reclaim lost hours in the night that we weren’t even aware of. Now, for every 4 printers with 5kg spools and automation, we get a full additional 168 hours of production - a whole new printer. Before proceeding, I’ll make Mr. Smith (my high school math teacher) happy and show my work:

Your Workload

So far, we’ve focused on the machine’s time, but that’s not all that changed - your time has also been reduced. Let’s take a look at your new workflow. Before, the farm determined where your time went; filament needed changing so you were there; prints needed removing so you were there. Now, you still have to change filament but that’s become a once-a-week job. Maybe you dedicate an hour each Wednesday afternoon to switching all your filament over. Prints are automatically started and removed, but you need to pick them up to actually pack and ship them. Maybe each day at 1pm you go around and collect all your finished prints and spend the next couple hours packing up orders before going to ship them. Instead of scrambling to process new orders between print farm responsibilities, you craft your schedule to work for you.

Now what’s taking your time? Packing and shipping, sure. Responding to customer inquiries, creating print jobs as orders come in. Actually, we brushed over the actual process of creating print jobs - they don’t just magically appear in the queue and get sent to printers, right? But what if they could? What if you uploaded a CSV of your new orders each morning and the system was able to automatically create print jobs from that CSV, then add them to the queue, then send them to printers one after another, until everything was printed. This may sound like a far-fetched dream, but it’s going to be possible very soon (like, within the next 2 months, soon) in AutoFarm^3D. Be the first to know when it’s available to try.

Bouncing off of this new workflow, you spend hardly any time on order processing/tracking because it’s done for you. Your other day-to-day tasks remain relatively minimal and your output is up by 25%, so what do you spend your time on? The fun stuff. Now you get to actually figure out how you’re going to ramp up to 60 printers. Here’s where you get to dedicate chunks of time to crafting and implementing marketing and sales strategies, cultivating relationships with large repeat customers, optimizing print designs for quality and speed, creating new product lines, and pushing the boundaries of your business. As you gain even more traction, a point where adding more printers is necessary arrives, and it’s exciting instead of stressful.

Ramping Up

It’s March and business is booming - you just received 10 new A1s for your farm. Of course, with new printers comes unboxing and setup, but A1s work out of the box, so “setup” really just means “storing the shipping boxes.” One last step is needed to keep the momentum you’ve created: it’s time to automate them. This adds ~3 minutes per printer, as you click the hardware into place and add your new machines to your dashboard. In under an hour, you’ve added an additional 50% capacity to your farm, and the new printers work seamlessly alongside the rest of your farm, the only extra work is a few more filament spools to change.

By December, not only have you scaled up to your target of 60 printers, but you’re getting the output of 75 printers at your old pace with a lower workload (and less money spent on printers). Plus, you’ve been able to increase your print quality and raise your prices, upsell existing customers, and acquire a few big accounts that pay extra for customization and buy in bulk. Your competitors with the same goals never set up systems to achieve them, their strategy of hoping their wishes will come true and doing their best to stay afloat has proven ineffective; they only made it to 40 printers and are struggling to keep up. Meanwhile, you’re thinking about what 2026 has in store for you - maybe 150 printers and a partnership with a marketing agency? Or a focus on big customers rather than ecommerce and a 20 hour workweek? Or a YouTube channel documenting your journey? The opportunities are endless.

Summing It Up

Systems are the key to achieving goals, and the more streamlined, efficient, and resilient your system is, the better your chances are of hitting your goals, no matter how ambitious they seem. Your future self will thank you for taking the time to overhaul your current process. If you’re ready to get started on your ideal system, we encourage you to contact us for a personalized demo of AutoFarm^3D, where we’ll go over your specific issues and goals and come up with a plan that works. Let’s make 2025 your best year yet!