An Opportunity to Change the Industry for the Better

In considering my life in print, I must say I was not born to it, I did not achieve it, nor did I have it thrust upon me, but rather I would venture a fourth category, namely, “stumbled into it accidentally.”

At various points I had brief encounters with print in some way. When I was young, my father, a newspaper man, took me to work and showed me how newspapers were printed. I thought the presses were impressive, but I found more fascinating the man sitting in the dark little room in the back setting down the lead type to form the pages of the paper. (He could read backwards!) Twenty years later, Dad showed me this new software that replaced the only process I had ever seen — a thing called PageMaker. He was very excited that he could layout a smallish newspaper in less than a day.

Then a few years after that, in the late 80s, a friend of mine started running a small print service out of a strip mall in Georgia. Being young and needing all the cash I could get my hands on, I worked for him on days off and in the evenings. I learned to run a small 2-color Ryobi and most of the finishing and binding equipment you’d find in any quick print shop. Alas, I did not yet think print was a career for me. My friend sold his shop at the age of 50 and moved to Ecuador to live a life of leisure and adventure.

Fast forward another 15 years or so, I’m still dodging about trying to make money, between jobs, and a friend asks me to help where he was a manager at a color separation outfit in the flexographic printing world. I said sure, but what’s flexographic printing? After being properly schooled on the fine craft of platemaking, I did that, a well as assemble color keys, go on press checks and manage accounts for the next two years. And, thus, my printing career was born.

Well, not quite. It seems that there was change afoot in the platemaking world. Many clients were installing their digital sparks for platemaking and cutting out the middle guy. It was not the last time I would hear the word “digital” and how it was disrupting print. Reading the tea leaves, I decided to jump and wound up at another printing company, but this time in the retail space as a project manager. I was once removed from the printing process, but since I knew some of the lingo, they handed me print heavy accounts. After two years, I was plucked from obscurity to run their graphics printing division. I’m still not sure why the COO took a chance handing over an eight-figure operation to an avowed novice, but I’m very happy she did.

For the next eight years I spent my days, and a few nights, immersing myself in the business of running a print shop with 75 employees, part of a company of 300 employees. I learned much about screen printing. We also had offset, and with my hire we began the process of migrating as much and as fast as possible to digital print. By the time I left, the vast majority (90%) of the print produced was digitally printed and digitally cut. We also took on a new MIS system, scheduling system, web-to-print interface, and were in the process of automating and integrating file prep, job tracking and workflows when I left. It was quite a time.

So, when I left that job to take the reigns at SGIA, I came with a bit of historical insight, however brief, and some definite notions about what the future might look like, both for an Association and a trade show. The first thing I knew was that print was ever-changing. You can’t stop it; you can’t even slow it down. The best you can do is figure out the best way to take advantage of it. I also knew that printers no longer fit into neatly defined categories. With digital printing technologies in place, moving to adjacent markets and starting up new product offerings was much easier than in the past. I did it, and so could others. I also understood that suppliers and manufacturers were subject to the same stresses and strains that any printer in a shifting market faces. Their marketing dollars have to perform better than ever — OEMs and printers simply have more markets and audiences to address. And from this confluence of market forces came the concept of PRINTING United. At least in theory.

What I wasn’t sure about was how to get all the printer audiences in the same place with all the relevant suppliers with their offerings. That is, until I met my kindred spirits at NAPCO Media in the persons of Mark Subers and Dave Leskusky, who, through a much longer history and even deeper understanding, saw the changing market and opportunities to change the industry for the better the same way I did. Coming together we now we had something that would be a credible, strategic, and potent answer to the market forces shaping our industry. And PRINTING United is that something.

With NAPCO Media’s audiences of commercial, in-plant and packaging, and SGIA’s audiences of graphics, garment and industrial, as well as our collective reach into the suppliers of these same communities, the opportunity to bring the audiences together with the full range of solutions is clear. It is, in fact, compelling. The only question left for those reading their own tea leaves: How will you respond to change?