Cary: Hi, Cary Sherburne and Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I'm here with Angie Krisel who is Design Services Manager at Liberty Creative Solutions in Tinley Park, Illinois. And Angie, your business has really migrated to what, you know, the industry is being told they need to do for the future, which his kind of a marketing services provider model, one-stop-shop, so you’ve got design, you’ve print, you’ve got mailing, you’ve got agency services. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what the reaction of customers has been to that. Because sometimes printers worry that, you know, if they add these services, they’re going to be competing with some segments and maybe customers don’t want them to do all that stuff.
Angie: I think it’s a hard thing for initially, for customers to look at a printer and realize that they can get good design service and good marketing services from a printer. And I think once you get in the door, that’s what we pride ourselves on with our customers. They feel comfortable working with us from the very beginning. They work with us designers right from the very beginning, all the way through the end of their design process, all the way through the printing and the mailing, and I think that gives them comfort that their job is staying in house and they’re getting hands-on dealing with the same people working on their project from beginning to the end and I think that’s what sells us.
Cary: And there’s only one person to point their finger at, right?
Angie: Absolutely, when something goes wrong?
Cary: Yeah, exactly.
Angie: That’s right.
Cary: Not that anything does in your business, of course.
Angie: No, not at all, we try our best.
Cary: You know, and I also find it very interesting, when we talked earlier, you made the comment that, you know, as a designer, because you have the digital printing technology right there in the back room, that it gives you kind of a leg up in being able to understand how, you know, how can you be really creative with your designs and at the same time leverage the capability of these digital devices?
Angie: It’s very, very true and as I’ve said to many designers and many people, that’s not something that they teach you in design school? Is about the whole printing production and we get files from agencies as well, because not only, you know, do we design, but we print. And a lot of times their files don’t always cooperate with the presses.
Cary: Right, right.
Angie: So we have to fix those files. So I think, you know, with being, I think it’s fortunate that we work as designers in house and we know how to design to maximize our press’s capabilities.
Cary: Yeah. And then I think there’s a lot of things, of course, that you can do with digital that you can’t do, maybe with, well, with offset or other printing technologies.
Angie: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Cary: And plus, you know, there’s the other issue about everybody wants everything yesterday.
Angie: Yesterday and it keeps getting faster and faster.
Cary: You know, maybe when we talk again next year, you’re going to have grey hair from all of this fast turnaround stuff, right?
Angie: It’s amazing to me how quickly it goes.
Cary: Yeah.
Angie: And I think it’s, too, with having the digital capabilities, you can turn stuff around quickly and that’s, again, why people keep coming back to us.
Cary: Yeah.
Angie: Is because we can turn things around so quickly.
Cary: And then do you know who, I mean, when you talk to the customer, who’s your primary at the customer, by title?
Angie: Well, we deal with a lot of marketing people usually in the, you know.
Cary: So you’re not really in procurement and talking to procurement people too much?
Angie: No, not too much.
Cary: Yeah, yeah. So, that’s good, well, it’s always nice to hear the stories of successful transformation cases because it is a difficult transformation.
Angie: It is. And it’s one that you need to keep making.
Cary: Yeah, yeah.
Angie: Because the technology just keeps growing and growing and you got to keep up with it.
Cary: Yeah, it’s not a snapshot—
Angie: You’d be left behind.
Cary: It’s not a snapshot, it’s a movie.
Angie: Yeah, very true.
Cary: Well, thank you so much for sharing with us.
Angie: Thank you so much.
Discussion
By Gordon Pritchard on Mar 21, 2011
Kinda says it all: http://printplanet.com/emails/images/003-The-Pundit-800.jpg