Happy New Years! Of course, the beginning of a new year is the natural time to lay out plans for the coming year while reflecting on what did and didn’t work last year. In my years in business, one thing I’ve learned is that the big changes that our companies need to make never happen as fast as we would like them to and if we can identify the changes that we need to make, and then start taking the baby steps to get there…pretty soon we are changing the direction of the company. 

Training is Key in a Technology Economy

I’m finding a lot of forward thinking companies (ourselves included) are seeing training as a real key to not only growth, but to give their customers better access and understanding to complicated, under-used technology that’s available. And that means training for our employees as well as our customers. I think this sounds great, but in reality it can pose a lot of challenges. It starts with how and where to train. In many cases (ours included), there’s great customer service, but you know how the old proverb goes, you don’t know what you don’t know, especially in technology. We’ve got to continue to give our employees and customers access to all the cool things this technology brings us.  That means first we need to implement a continuous training program for us (webinars and other training from our vendors). Then we need to turn around and pass that information on to our customers. There are so many capabilities in the whole digital print workflow (from design to delivery) that go unused, everybody in this industry needs to continue to train themselves as well as their customers.

So the fun starts here….First, I need my conference room back, set up to bring training in from our vendors as well as push it out to our customers. And as we started our thoughts on redoing the conference room, it ended up expanding into the front office and prepress room. We started then to think ergonomics and how information, work and people all flow in an office, and we found that with some new furniture and people placement, we should be able to  really increase productivity. We’ll know the real truth when we are done, so stop in and check out our front office in a couple of months. There’s a lot more in the business goals for 2012, but for this posting, I’ll stay focused on the training and education goals and office remodeling.

So what about personal goals and resolutions? I’ve got some, and instead of trying to live by some statement, I like Chris Brogan’s idea of breaking your goals down to 3 words for next year…read his post. So without putting in to much deep thought, here’s my 3 words.

Self. I’m going to take better care of myself. In my case, I’m just getting over major surgery, and that has a way of making you more aware of both your body and your mind. I’ve never had more than a hang nail, so this was a life changing experience. Since starting rehab, I’m really enjoying getting back in shape both mentally and physically, and I’m going to keep it going.

Focus. I’m going to work harder to stay focused on the things that are within my control to change. And I’m going to not try and focus on a million things, I’m going to take them 1 or 2 at a time, figure them out and move on to the next ones.

Creativity. I want to nurture creative thinking not only in myself, but in the people around me. We need to consistently work on looking at things differently. I need to push myself, when I just can’t come up with that idea, word or thought, then do something to change my surrounding…take a walk, do something that you normally wouldn’t, just change the routine (and your thinking to). I’ve also been playing with the idea of finding ways to capture those ideas when you get them…it seems like we get ideas that are great, but if we don’t find a way to capture them when we have them, they can just escape us.

I’m not a New Year’s resolution kind of guy, but I believe if I put my goals or ideas in writing, I’m more apt to hold myself accountable. So, here’s to a successful 2012 for everybody….I’m thinking it’s going to be a good year!

Penny Ohlman Neiman has been a strong force in Dayton, Ohio for a long time in the advertising, marketing, and communications business. So when they decided to re-brand themselves as The Ohlman Group I was a little surprised……actually not really. Since they hired David Bowman and then Richard Kaiser, I sensed a new commitment to the future. I’d met with David and Richard both recently and I knew they had lots of new ideas and really wanted to move forward.

Now for me to say I knew everything going on behind the scenes would be mis-leading. All I knew was Cindy (in charge of purchasing print, among other things) had contacted Mike Greenabout their new identity, and they had been talking about a few things, including using “Soft Touch” varnish on both sides of their business cards as well as die cutting round corners. So this one scared me just a little…when a high profile client like Penny Ohlman Neiman (PON for short), is doing a project like this for themselves, and they are talking about Soft Touch Varnish (something fairly new)….I’m concerned.

Solid Side of Card

Non Solid Side of Card

Here’s why.  I’m really not comfortable yet with Soft Touch varnish on all of our presses. A few ink people are saying this is the best thing to come along in a while, Soft Touch Varnish is supposed to emulate the feel of “Soft Touch” card stocks like Touché , Starwhite Soft Touch and others. These papers are really cool, but ultra expensive, so we try to get that feel with varnish or a coating.We’ve experimented with the soft touch varnish on a few jobs, but not with documented consistent results, and that’s important….especially with a tight spot color and a  2 sided job with full bleeds (yes, designers like full bleeds on the back of their cards).  So I’m just imagining everything going wrong on a tight deadline…..So I got involved.

Working closely with Cindy (at PON), we determined that 100# McCoy Silk cover, a #1 Stock with a rich silky feel, would be the best candidate. Plus, Mike actually did a couple of tests with the Soft Touch, the McCoy and the designated press…He said it worked, but with a bright solid orange printed on the back (yes, that full bleed) and gassing problems with this varnish in the past….I’m still a little worried.

This re-branding effort contained more than just business cards……there were letterheads, #10 envelopes, note cards, A-2 envelopes and post cards. Seems like a fairly simple job, but I know enough people at PON to be dangerous, and I’m just wanting everything to happen perfect….of course then Cindy calls me and tells me the deadline has been moved up by a week.

Front of 5.5 x 8.5 Post Card

Now in reality, this is a fairly common job for us (except the soft touch, which was new), and we have lots of other projects going on at the same time. So, in the end, everything worked out perfect. But we wanted to recap how we handled it for our “Branding” case studies. Everything other than the business cards were printed first, and allowed us to to set a baseline color for the orange. We got all that done the first day,so we knew what the cards should look like when we started on them the next day. In this case, we wanted to print shells of the cards so we did not have to re-invent the wheel (in our reality, we wanted the solid orange to be consistent, so we printed extras now). The real trick with these was print the solid side, and let it dry, then lay the soft touch on the next day, then repeat this process again. That’s 4 days on press….why?  Because with this varnish, we had experienced what we call “Gassing”  or Gas Ghosting in the past. To be simple, if you were to lay 2 sides with varnish on top of each other, the area under the varnish without ink lets out a gas, which leaves a ghost image on the sheet on top…just does not look good. Then to keep a consistent round corner on all 4 corners, we had the die cut. I don’t care what  anybody says, a round corner machine will show in-consistencies.

Other Pieces of the New Identity Package

Now, I know this is pretty boring story, especially if your not a printer or if this job is not yours. But I wanted to bring up the point about what really goes on in the back room when it comes to making a brand look acceptable…There’s a lot of thought and work put into it, and yes, although rarely seen there are some printers that are still very proud of their work. In this case Steve Harrow(along with a hand-full of other people) did an amazing job of making this brand look Great. And from what I heard, the Ohlman Group was really happy to.

2011...a Summer to Remember

July and August are supposed to be fairly slow months for printers and related industries…at least that seems to be the “old” normal. People are on vacation, kids are out of school and since I remember, there was just a little more relaxation associated with those summer months. So as I read an article in WhatTheyThink,  (premiere Print industry news and analysis) by Dr. Joe Webb, he  talked about the changing climate in the industry, and that the summer of 2011 would be a great year to keep our nose to the grindstone and figure out our future strategy. As a matter of fact, he predicted that we will all remember the summer of 2011 in 5 years for either doing something or not doing something when we look back and measure our success in 2016. I’ll come back to this point later, but the reason I’m writing this is to demonstrate how we are learning to integrate new tools into big projects.

So, we do a lot of work for a good sized retirement community in Ohio, and I’ve known for a while that they were going to go through a major re-branding. Well, it finally started to happen this summer. Actually, it was a very subtle re-branding, but they did put all of their divisions under the same name, so the look and feel was consistent throughout the whole company, using just color variations to differentiate the different divisions. At first I didn’t think it was to big a deal, but as I developed a spreadsheet on all the different communities, facilities and so on,  I realized this was a big project. There were over 15 different places (versions as we call them), each with an average of 12 to 15 products, ranging from over 200 different Business Cards (we did all the typesetting) to all sized envelopes to marketing sheets & letterheads. And to make things interesting, they were all printed in 3 or 4 very specific PMS colors.

I don’t want to be boring with technical details, but (just for a saecond) lets look a little deeper at a single product……9 x 12 envelopes, 15 different versions, some 3 colors, some 4 colors, and the colors change throughout. In all, there were a total of 5 different PMS colors used; to keep the colors consistant, we had a 5lb can of each color pre-made. Then we dicided to run everything on the 5 color press. Being on a 5 color, we were able to ink up 5 towers and just use the towers we needed for that specific product, then switch to a different mix when required. 

As stated earlier, we made a spread sheet of all the products and shared it with everybody involved in the sales, production and delivery on Google Docs. Between the spread sheet and our own order system (Printsmith), that allowed everybody involved to look at the project as a whole, or dig down to any specific detail, especially the guys who had to package and deliver everything…it went to so many different people and locations. And the UPS on-line system, along with our own systems delivery function was ultra cool in being able to send out delivery notices prior to the customer receiving them with a tracking number.

Snapshot of a On-Line catalog

Our next step is to build all of these products into an on-line catalog designed specifically for this customer. We will orginize it by division and then by product. If they pickout a 6 x 9 envelope, there will be a drop down menu to pick out the facility that will automatically populate all the fields with the correct information for that facility. They can then look at a proof and place the order and pick out their preference of delivery and payment. These systems do a lot and will become more and more common, especially for features like reviewing order history for diffrent products or replacing a closet full of inventory with just-in-time ordering.

So really, this job was not uncommon at all. But going back to the point at the begining of the story, 2011 is the time to view jobs like this a little differently. The point is not the technical details (boring!), but the  point is that we have to understand our customers needs like never before: eliminate as many un-nessesary customers touchs as possible, understand that everybody is doing more with less, so getting printed or marketing material correctly and at a fair price is Key. This is the new reality, and you know what…it’s not going away, its just coming at us stronger and faster every day.