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 Tenn.-based nonprofit trade organization, has dropped betweeh 20 percent and 30 percent in sales durinvg thepast year, presidenrt Ed Chalifoux said in April. To cut printers across the South have laid employees off or goneto four-dayt work weeks, he said. Local firms such as , and Inc. are seekingb new ways to offset their dropasin business. At Publishers in the Louisville area’s largest printer, sales for the firstg quarter of 2009 were down about 20 percenyt from the first quarterof 2008, to aboutf $45 million from $55 million, president and CEO Nick Simob said.
The company has not lost any customers, he but the magazines that it prints have about 20 percenft fewer pages because of cutbacks fromhis advertisers. The recession has accelerated a long-term trend away from the printede word in theprinting industry, Simon said. “Printint is shrinking just a littlr bit,” he said. “The Internetg and the computer have a lot to dowith Jeffersonville-based Voluforms has fared a little with a 7 percent to 8 percent drop in overallk sales year-to-date, president and CEO C. Michael Stewar said. One reason for that is that the company began diversifyingv its products severalyears ago.
profit margin was down about 2 percent in thefirsg quarter, compared with the firsrt quarter of 2008, he said. The commercia l side of the business, in which the companyt prints labels and cover sheet for products soldin stores, has fallen off aboutg 40 percent over the past two years, he But that business makes up only about 10 percentg to 12 percent of the company’s totalo business, Stewart said. About 45 percent of totap revenue comes fromprinting scanner-friendly forms for financial institutions, such as counter checkds and deposit slips.
That business is goinf well, Stewart said, because it enablee banks to do more document processinhvia machines, thereby reducing payroll costs. The rest of the businesxs is from providing printing and software for the health care About eightyears ago, the company created a series of electronicv forms for hospitals that helped them reduce 80 percent of the paperf forms they were he said. “We’ve done a lot of thinga to be more on the leading ofthe industry, Stewart The company even has taken advantage of the fact that othed printers are laying off employeea by hiring a few new employees.
So Voluforms now has 85 employeesz between its Jeffersonville distribution center and its Sellersburg printing Revenue for the first quarter of 2009 at Standar d Publishing in Shepherdsville came in atabout $3 million, whicu was about $50,000 below the first quarter of general manager Robin Crump said. Standard Publishing, a divisionj of Shelbyville-based Landmark Community Newspapers Inc., printsa community newspapers owned by theLandmark chain, as well as nich e publications such as Business First.
Thos e publications have lost some ad she said, but nothing compared with metro “We’re seeing some reduction in pages, but nothin g causing us to panic,” she Standard has not laid anyone off, but in Landmark mandated that everuy employee, including corporate staff, take one eight-hour day off without pay per month, Crump said. Landmark’s corporate culturw always has embracedlean staffing, she but Standard Publishing has found smalk ways to cut expenses, such as reducinhg janitorial service from five days a week to thres days a week and reviewing the maintenance contracts on some