Dan Jurkowitsch is the lead instructor over at Fingerprinting Classes. He believes anyone can start their own mobile fingerprinting business in four steps. The first of which is your setup. You’re gonna need what’s called a live scan device. It’s just a little electronic thing that looks like a printer and has a piece of glass on the top for people to press their oily paws on. Once taken, the fingerprints can be physically printed out or sent somewhere electronically.
Step two is getting yourself a website. There’s a lot of drag-and-drop website builders out there, so you can probably throw one up yourself. But you definitely want it to look professional, so it might not be a bad idea to hire a web designer off Upwork or something to make one for ya. Or, another option, you could always partner with a service like Printscan and get a website through them. I personally wouldn’t recommend this; I’d rather see ya do your own thing and keep all the profits.
Step three is gonna be education. “This is probably just as important as a website if not more important,” Dan says. “Education is super necessary because there are so many different types of fingerprinting services. Ink fingerprinting, FBI checks, FINRA check, FDLE, and so on. Then step four is marketing slash channeler. Let’s start with marketing. Now, believe it or not, there’s not too much competition in the fingerprinting space, depending on where you’re located or where you wanna start your business.”
“But it’s very very particular,” Dan continues, “because people all over the country, they don’t really know what they need and they might call it different things depending on where they’re located. People in California call it live scan, people in Florida call it FDLE, people in New York call it ink fingerprinting, people in Ohio call it a BCI check, and so on. It’s kinda like how some people call it soda, others call it pop, right? So you need to know exactly what people are searching for in your state.”
Marketing’s super important, Dan stresses. ‘Cause you can spend all this money on your live scan machine, on a fancy schmancy website, maybe even some business cards, right, but none of that brings you paying customers, does it? So it’s the search engine optimization (aka ranking in Google for terms people are already looking up) and paid ads that’ll determine whether or not you make any money at this; and if you do, how much, right? So you’ll wanna go all-in on marketing your fingerprint business.
But what about that whole channeler thing? What is it? “A channeler is some type of service or company or somebody that takes the fingerprint record and submits it to the agency that the person came to get fingerprinted for,” Dan explains. “So, for example, if somebody’s getting fingerprinted to request an FBI background check on themselves, right, because they’re taking a new job or going overseas, you can’t just take their fingerprints and say, ‘Okay, cool, that’ll be $90 please.’”
“You need to send those fingerprints to a channeler. And the channeler needs to send it to the FBI or FINRA or FDLE or wherever it needs to go. So, to recap, you’ve got the setup [meaning, your equipment], a website, the knowledge and the education, and then, step four, the marketing and channeler that you have to partner with. You’re gonna need all those things to successfully launch your own remote fingerprinting business.” Check out Dan’s YouTube channel for more tips and tactics.
