As technology changes virtually every aspect of our lives, our industry and your print business are not exempt from its pervasive impact. I don’t hear it as clearly or as often anymore, but it still comes up at least once a month in conversations with printers: “I just want to print. I’m good at it, I have the capacity, I have the staff, I have the facility.” Being just a printer was enough to be very successful for a very long time in this industry. There was plenty of demand. There was the desire for lots of messages to be delivered via ink on physical substrate. 

Being “just a printer” of course meant you staffed your organization with people seated in a carpeted area of your plant to deal with order details, artwork, sales, and accounting. But you were mostly defined by what happened back on the cement floors, where your presses were running, and finishing and shipping were happening.

Today, many printers staff more people in the carpeted area than they do on the production floor. This is partly due to automation on the production floor and partly because you can’t just be a printer anymore. Customers want you to solve all kinds of technical issues in front of your press. Just think about the big trends around personalization, data cleansing, etc. Now you, a person who prides themselves on being an expert at print manufacturing, is asked to hire technical people to streamline customers’ data to make print more personalized, more automated via campaigns, and more targeted. Suddenly you don’t feel very much like a printer anymore. You feel more and more like a technology business.