We do things a little differently
From the beginning, I knew that I wanted to be something different from other printers in the industry. Where the big printers staffed offset operators to run massive presses, I began my company with a heavy focus on digital printing, and I hired people outside the industry. Pretty much everyone in my shop is a new generation learning the business from scratch. They’d never done this before, and I put the time into developing them and learning from them to change the way we think about what a printing company looks like.
It's a unique approach. I hired a communications major who started as a customer service rep, and now she’s our number one data analytics person. She taught herself the analytics portion of it, and that’s kind of what we’ve done, is create a training culture. We’re always training and helping our team evolve and advance in the company. It’s this approach of putting learning at the center of our business that has helped us to really help our customers when it matters.
With COVID, we dealt with restaurants shutting down and how they were going to reopen. One of the things we did when that was happening was to understand where things were going and what they would need. We knew that they’d be going to paper menus, so we worked on getting paper in-house ahead of time and prepped for when they could reopen. We knew that they needed to open and get their menus ASAP, so we reorganized the shop so that we were able to print day-of and get their menus to them the same day if we could. Sometimes they’d come in, and we’d say ‘Okay, come back in 3 hours. We’ve got you.’ So we got a huge growth in our menu department, around 40% of our restaurant customers came from that time.
Our agility has allowed us to help our customers and pivot as they do. We work with some mortgage companies who do same-day trigger mailings. Through COVID it was really important to mail same-day and get in-house as quick as possible to beat the competition. As we’re coming out of that, the market is shifting and now what they really need is to save money. So we reorganized our workflows and production to move to once-a-week drops to bring cost down.
Our ability to change quickly with market shifts, changing objectives and the like to help our clients is unlike other print companies. We don’t get stuck in ‘this is all we do,’ but we constantly question how we can achieve what the client needs. As a company we’ve embraced a culture of ‘challenge me as much as you can,’ because that’s how we can reevaluate how we’re thinking and figure it out, and we’ve done some really cool things as a result.
Author: Galo Fraga
Running an award-winning marketing firm with sales growth of more than double the industry standard comes innately for Galo. With over 30 years of experience, he has worked with many notable brands, including J.P. Morgan Chase, Congressional Bank, Alliance Data, Limited Brands, DSW, Merck, New York & Co, Pfizer, and many more.
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