Everybody quotes the revenue and nobody quotes the hours. Here is a real run costed all the way through, including the parts that are not fun.
A laser machine pays for itself in six months, or so the sales pitch goes. It might. It also might not, and the difference is almost never the machine; it is whether the person doing the sums counted their own time.
So here is one real job, costed all the way through. Numbers are rounded and deliberately cautious. If it works on cautious numbers it works.
The job
A livestock cooperative wants 2,000 ear tags, numbered in sequence, with their name on each one. This is an ordinary size of order and a good example because it repeats: the same client comes back next season.
At a wholesale rate of KSh 25 a tag, the job invoices at KSh 50,000.
What comes out of it
Blank tags. The single largest cost, and the one people forget entirely when they imagine this business. You are buying 2,000 physical tags before you engrave anything. Call it KSh 18,000 to KSh 22,000 depending on supplier and quantity. Take the higher figure.
Machine time. Roughly 6 to 8 seconds a tag including handling, so about four hours of marking. That is not four hours of your day: you also have to load, unload, check and pack, which realistically makes it a full working day for one person.
Your day. This is the line that gets left out. If you would not work a day for less than KSh 3,000, then a day of your labour is KSh 3,000 whether you write it down or not.
Consumables, power, wastage. Small but real. A handful of tags will be misfed or mis-numbered. Budget KSh 1,500 and be pleased when it is less.
Getting it there. The cooperative is in Nakuru. Either you deliver or you courier, and either way it is a cost.
Tax. If your business turns over between KSh 1 million and KSh 25 million a year, KRA charges Turnover Tax at 1.5% of gross sales, in force since 1 July 2023. On this invoice that is KSh 750, owed whether or not the job made a profit.
Cautious total: roughly KSh 29,000 out on a KSh 50,000 job, tax included. About KSh 21,000 of margin for a day and a half of work: good money, and nowhere near the number people quote when they are selling you a machine.
What the arithmetic tells you
Three things, and none of them are about ear tags.
The margin is in the run, not the item. A 2,000-piece job and a 200-piece job take a similar amount of setting up. The small one earns a tenth of the revenue for half the effort. Chase repeat volume clients, not variety.
Materials are most of your cost. On this job the blanks are 40% of the invoice. Where you buy them, and at what quantity, moves your margin more than how fast your machine runs.
Payback is measured in clients, not months. A machine at KSh 290,000 is roughly 14 jobs like this one. Whether that takes six months or three years depends entirely on how many cooperatives, schools and hotels you can find, and finding them is the real job. The machine is the easy part.
The version of this that loses money
Run the same job at retail-hunting scale and watch it invert. Two hundred tags for a smallholder invoices at maybe KSh 6,000. The blanks still cost you, the setup is identical, and the drive out and back is the same drive. By the time the day is done you have earned less than you would have working for somebody else, and you have used a machine worth a quarter of a million shillings to do it.
This is not an argument against small jobs. They build a reputation, and they turn into large ones. It is an argument against building a plan on them. If the projection that justified the purchase assumes a steady stream of small orders at wholesale-ish prices, the projection is wrong, and it will be wrong quietly for about eight months before anybody notices.
Where the work comes from
The clients who order repeatedly are institutional: farms and cooperatives on a season, schools on a term, hotels on a stock cycle, companies on an audit cycle. They are unglamorous, they pay late, and they come back, which is worth more than a stream of one-off retail orders that never repeat.
Weighing this up seriously? Read the list of jobs people ask for before you choose a machine, and the questions to ask a seller before you pay for one. In that order.
Sources: KRA, Turnover Tax (read 14 Oct 2026).
Common questions
Do I need to supply the blank tags myself?
If you are running the business, yes: sourcing blanks is part of your margin and part of your risk. Buying them well is one of the few levers you fully control. If you are the customer, not the operator, the tags come supplied and engraved as one price, which is the KSh 25 wholesale figure.
How many tags can one machine do in a day?
The marking itself is 6 to 8 seconds each including handling, so the machine is not the limit. You are. Two thousand in a working day is comfortable for one person who has set up a proper flow. Trying to do four thousand alone in a day is how mistakes enter a numbered sequence, and a numbered sequence with a mistake in it is a reprint.
Is engraving better than printed tags?
For livestock, yes, and the reason is simple: printed numbers fade in sun and rain within a season, and a tag you cannot read is a tag that is not doing its job. Engraved numbers are cut into the material and last as long as the tag physically survives, which is usually years.
What is a realistic first year?
Slower than you hope, and driven by how many institutional clients you sign, not by machine capacity. Most people who do well in year one already had a route to a few of them: a family farm network, a school, a company they used to work for. If you have no such route, budget for the time it takes to build one.
