By T.J. Prieur
Steve Pahno, owner of Dominion Printers in Virginia Beach, has been around the printing business since he was a youngster.
His father, Pete, has worked in the industry since the 50s. He remembers setting type by hand and using hairdryers to set the ink on printing plates.
As the industry evolves from offset print to digital, the small retail space that encompasses Dominion Printers juxtaposes old and new.
A one-time retiree, Pete now works for his son. For the older gentleman, printing is not so much a career as a lifestyle.
“I just like the atmosphere of printing—the machines, the folders, the copiers, the stitchers, anything pertaining to getting printing done, it’s what I like,” Pete asserts. “I come here every day and I love it.”
It’s a sentiment that seems to be shared among Dominion’s 20-odd employees, many of whom have worked for Pahno during the majority of the company’s 26 years in business.
Steve considers them to be family and does his best to make sure they’re taken care of. Dominion pays the majority of its employees’ health insurance and offers a 401K with the hope that they’ll be able to retire “and be ok,” Steve says. “That’s my goal, [to be] more than just the bottom line.”
Though Steve laments that he hasn’t been able to give as many raises as he would have liked to these last few years because of the recession and the changing print market, he has yet to lay off any of his employees.
The loyalty he feels to his employees makes Steve reluctant to make a speedy and perhaps more cost-effective transition to digital printing. Increased digitization makes a human workforce increasingly redundant.
“I tend to take some jobs now that I wouldn’t have in the past,” Steve says, work that is more challenging and less profitable, “just to keep people busy.”
The printing business is in a difficult transition to digital right now, Steve explains.
He cites the growth of personal and professional Web sites, increase in postage costs and decline in direct mail as factors affecting printers. Runs are becoming smaller, even among larger companies, he says.
“Instead of somebody doing 5,000 brochures, they may do 500,” Steve observes. “And they’ll want them right away, and personalized, so I see a trend in that direction.”
Clients are also “going green,” Steve adds, and while the printing industry is following suit by instituting environmentally friendly practices, customers are cutting out paper materials. He offers the example of newsletters. Instead of printing newsletters professionally, they do it on the Internet through e-mail.
“The Internet’s tough,” Steve admits, especially as a growing number of customers turn to the Web to find the best prices for certain products. “You can go online and find 5,000 business cards for 20 bucks.”
Even when people turn to local businesses for their printing needs, the competition “is tighter than it has ever been,” he says.
Steve tells the story of a nearby printer’s advertising tactic. The man offered to take 10 percent off of any invoice a customer brought in with a guaranteed 25 percent off an additional order.
“That’s a sales tactic, which I think you’ll get a lot of bottom feeders doing that type of thing,” Steve remarks. He refuses to resort to such devices.
“We have a custom-manufactured product, you know, and it’s worth a certain amount of money,” he says.
Though Steve admits that profits are down, Dominion Printers is operating at near-capacity, as it has been for the last five years.
“We don’t have a sales force, so a lot of our business is word of mouth,” Steve says. “I think people trust us.” Much of Dominion’s work is for local customers and non-profit organizations.
The key to turning a good customer base into a sales force is front desk customer service, Steve confides. Dominion has four employees that take care of customers that e-mail, phone and walk in orders. The company tries to complete new orders quickly. They also archive every order they receive, which encourages return business for individuals who need to reprint or tweak old materials.
In order to meet an increasing demand for digital work, Dominion is also continually upgrading its front-end and pre-press software. They are completing more on-demand work to serve customers accustomed to the Internet age of instant gratification.
Steve uses the Alpha Graphics franchise to illustrate his point. The company has opened up around 200 stores and converted a number of offset printing companies. The newer stores have no offset printing capabilities.
“They’re all digital,” he utters, a tone of finality in his voice. “Every one of them.”
Steve’s prognosis for the printing business isn’t a positive one. To be perfectly honest, he says, he wouldn’t want to be starting a printing business right now.
“Everything is moving toward digital,” he concludes, “so the offset printing end of it is a dying breed, in my opinion.”
