As I’ve written about before, we have been engaged with Aileronfor over two years. Aileron has helped us put a professional management system in place, define our mission and vision, as well as helping me to assemble a very strong board of advisers (which I would recommend to any business). Anyway, my contact at Aileron, Bill Barkalow threw out an idea of having an MBA team from University of Dayton conduct a study on Oregon. So, a little explanation on this; UD has a program called the capstone program (part of the MBA program) where they put a team of MBA student together, and as their final project prior to graduation, they do a full fledged study of a selected business.

At first glance I thought “a study”, what does that mean? But the more we thought about it, the more we thought “let us define” what study we want done. In a changing bnusiness like the printing and graphics business, there is a lot of wild speculation about what the industry is changing into. I read a lot as well as see a number of printers going the MSP (Marketing Service Provider) route. I also see print companies that are going the total automation route…figure out a way to convert everything to CMYK and automate the rest (that means not much customer service, and if it does not fit into a square hole, it’s kicked out). Then of course you have the printers out there that just refuse to believe the world is changing at all, and they are just going to keep doing what they have been doing for the last 20 years. Conclusion: yes, we’ve thought a lot about our future, and although we have a pretty good idea of where we are headed, why not have the MBA Team give us their 2 cents.

So, my challenge to them was this: If you just found yourself owning this company, where would you take it to assure success in 2015? The great thing is that if we did not like the results, we were not in any way committed to following them. So we proceeded with the Capstone project over the last 4 months, and believe it on not….I was more than pleasantly surprised.

Our team consisted of 5 students, Joe, Joe, Nathan, Mark and Celine. I won’t dig to much into the finding’s right now (I’ll save that for the next 5 months worth of blogs), but I’m thinking each team member had 125+ hours into this report. They started with a whole industry overview, and like a funnel, they narrowed it down to our local region, then to how Oregon fits into this region, and then on to new trends. They studied all of our product lines (and an industry overview on each product). After that, they made some recommendations, and even had some implementation plans for some of their recommendations. Actually, I was absolutely blown away by their thoroughness, and all the research that went into this.

So, since blogs that are to long probably never get read, I will hit upon some of the specifics of their study as well as our future plans in coming blogs. After weathering the recession of 2008-2010, I’m thinking that 2015 is looking pretty good in this business.

As a side note, everyone that was present for their presentation at Aileron a couple of weeks ago (and who had seen one of these before),  said this was the best Capstone project they had ever seen done

I recently spoke to a senior graphic design class at The University of Dayton (at the request of Kathy Kargle, their instructor) about working & communicating with printers in the real world. What a great opportunity for me to talk to future clients, but I couldn’t help thinking of the bright future that these students have in front of them.

I might be showing my age, but the things that can be accomplished today (especially within the last 5 years) are things we could never imagine doing 10 to 15 years ago. Like what? Well…..color management, laying down heavy solids on a number of different substrates, the speed & quality with which jobs can be done (new presses), the relative ease that we can preform complex prepress operations. The list goes on, and we have not even touched on cross media opportunities that are just opening up…the ability to send different messages and communications to different channels & ways of making print interactive. Just use your imagination!

A quick word about these students….They were great. They listened, they asked questions (intelligent ones), and they really knew what was going on. I felt so excited for them (no, actually I wished I was in their seat), ready to go out into the world of marketing & communications with all these new tools at their fingertips, and the best thing, they know how to use them.

So after we talked about all the cool stuff that they’ll get to do and work on, we started talking about the way the communication process has changed between designer and printer over the years. Way, way back when, the designer would hand us an art-board, full of complex overlays, runyliths and notes. Lots of notes and instructions. If the handwriting was good, and all the notes about 50% this and overprint that, we’d spend some time in the darkroom, even more at the stripping table and then through some kind of magic (that I don’t want to remember) we’d burn a Dylux or Color Key and explain to the customer what it would actually look like (we hoped). Most of the time we did not even know what the printed piece would be used for, we were just so intent on assembling what the designer/client wanted.

Fast forward about a million years…..with today’s software and automated equipment, it seems like we can do anything. Our mindset is changing also. I spend more time with designers and the marketing department trying to understand what the printed piece or the whole campaign is trying to achieve. When your printer or service provider understands what you want to accomplish in the end, its a lot easier for us to make recommendations that could save money, time or even make to project look better. That’s a big change in the dialog from a few years back. As printers capabilities grow and we start having more tools & processes to help marketing departments get their jobs done I expect this dialog to keep growing. From helping to manage databases for mailing, variable data and Purls, to fulfillment, to multiple uses of content, the printing companies that weather the storm will end up with a lot of capabilities. And good dialog with our client will be the key to making projects and campaigns work.

I know this sounds pretty upbeat in the mist of news about the economy, mid term elections, and all the other crap we get thrown at us every day. But spend a little time on a college campus, UD, Sinclair WSU or OSU, and you’ll see a lot of really smart kids doing and studying really smart stuff!