Hi.  John Rosenthal with Digital Color Graphics.  We’re a print shop right outside of Philadelphia.  We cover the area as much as we can.  Ask good questions, some interesting projects, interesting companies are concepts that we’ve been working on.  We’re fortunate we have a mailing and fulfillment operation.  It’s a separate building a block away.  And one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve kind of expanded out operations such that it’s really become a strong arm of our company.  So we’ve been able to take on some big projects.

We have one customer where they can send out 150, 200 packages in a day.  And what we do is we assemble a project.  We can print 100,000, 200,000 pieces, and there might be 500 in a box or 1,000 in a package, depending upon the distribution.  So we can assemble it, pack it up and ship it out, and we’re experienced in it because it’s a branch of our operation.  So that’s been a nice project.  And that particular project is really much larger than that one project, because during our slow period we can generate maybe eight to ten jobs for this company.  So what’s really nice is it comes at a nice time.  Those are obviously nice companies and nice projects you like to find.  They’re not always that easy to find. 

But our fulfillment and mailing operation has been a big asset, particularly our mailing.  Probably 50-60 percent of the projects that we print we mail.  And so having the knowledge and experience of mailing has been a real plus.  What’s nice is I have my son who runs our mailing operation, so I can count on the reliability and the information being accurate.  So there are a lot of projects.  Sometimes customers will send us something already printed for us to mail and we have to call them back and say it doesn’t meet postal regulations and, you know, problems.  And they say oh, I didn’t know about that.  

So there’s an advantage to having a sophisticated mailing operation in-house even for a smaller company.  I understand some of the multi-million dollar companies do a lot of mailing and they’re pretty sophisticated.  But a lot of the small shops don’t and don’t really understand it.  So that’s a big plus for us.  We’re also very diversified where we can print, we can do offset, we can do digital, we have wide format, and we can do a mix of a lot of products.  So out the back door is one of the things that we’re really good at making it happen.

As I said, sometimes we get projects supplied to us and it doesn’t meet mailing regulations, so we have to call them back and say, you know, your postage just went up a lot, significantly.  And they’re well, why.  Because it didn’t meet mailing regulations.  So the drawback is we’d better make sure that what we do is right because we’re telling the customer this is your postage and then if we’re wrong then they say well wait, I thought you were the mailing experts.  So it’s really important to have a real handle on that.  And I think a lot of companies that are smaller in our environment really don’t understand how important it is to really understand the mailing regulations.

But mixing that when the project comes in from beginning to end, it’s a service we can offer so we can go more than just putting ink on paper whether it’s offset or digital.  We can go way beyond that because of this mailing and a lot of companies today need mailing, even though postage rates just went up.  It’s still I think a direction that a lot of companies go because they want to go online but that delete button—delete, and people don’t even get a chance to look at what you have delete.  Where when it’s in the mail, before they throw it at least they look at it and if it has some appeal and it’s focused on what they do, they’re going to still maybe read it.  And that’s the business we’re in, getting them to read it and take a look at it.