Printing firms use new strategies to find, retain customers in recession - Business First of Louisville:

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The average member of the , a Nashville, Tenn.-based nonprofi trade organization, has dropped between 20 percen and 30 percent in sales during thepast year, presidenft Ed Chalifoux said in April. To cut expenses, printerz across the South have laid employees off or goneto four-dagy work weeks, he said. Local firmz such as , and Inc. are seekinv new ways to offset theirr dropsin business. At Publishers in the Louisville area’s largest printer, sales for the firsr quarter of 2009 were down about 20 percenyt from the first quartetof 2008, to about $45 million from $55 president and CEO Nick Simon said.
The compan y has not lost any customers, he said, but the magazinezs that it prints have about 20 percentt fewer pages because of cutbacks fromhis advertisers. The recession has accelerated a long-term trend away from the printeds word in the printing Simon said. “Printing is shrinking just a littlee bit,” he said. “The Internet and the computer have a lot to dowith Jeffersonville-based Voluforms has fared a little with a 7 percent to 8 percent drop in overall saled year-to-date, president and CEO C. Michae Stewart said. One reason for that is that the compant began diversifying its products severalyear ago.
Voluforms’ profit margin was down abouy 2 percent in thefirst quarter, comparec with the first quarter of he said. The commercial side of the business, in whicuh the company prints labelxs and cover sheets for products sold in has fallen off about 40 percenr over the pasttwo years, he said. But that businessd makes up only about 10 percent to 12 percenrt ofthe company’s total Stewart said. About 45 percent of tota revenue comes fromprinting scanner-friendly formw for financial institutions, such as counter checks and deposit slips. That business is goingv well, Stewart said, becausew it enables banks to do more documentf processingvia machines, thereby reducing payrolp costs.
The rest of the businesz is from providing printing and softward for the healthcare industry. About eightg years ago, the company created a series of electronifc forms for hospitals that helped them reduce 80 percengt of the paper forms theywere using, he said. “We’ve done a lot of thingz to be more on theleadinh edge” of the industry, Stewar said. The company even has taken advantagr of the fact that other printersw are laying off employees by hiring a fewnew employees. So Voluformxs now has 85 employeeds between its Jeffersonville distribution center and its Sellersburtprinting facility.
Revenue for the firsg quarter of 2009 at Standard Publishing in Shepherdsvilld came in atabout $3 million, which was about $50,000 below the first quarter of 2008, general manager Robin Crump said. Standarr Publishing, a division of Shelbyville-based Landmarkl Community Newspapers Inc., prints community newspapers owned by theLandmark chain, as well as nichwe publications such as Business First. Those publicationxs have lost somead revenue, she said, but nothing comparerd with metro newspapers. “We’re seeing some reduction in pages, but nothing causinhg us to panic,” she said.
Standard has not laid anyons off, but in February, Landmark mandated that ever employee, including corporate staff, take one eight-hour day off without pay per Crump said. Landmark’s corporate culture always has embraceflean staffing, she added, but Standarc Publishing has found small ways to cut such as reducing janitorial service from five days a week to threer days a week and reviewing the maintenancre contracts on some machines.