During the recently concluded Print ’01 tradeshow in Chicago, one of the general conference sessions was titled, "The New Business of Print." This session featured a distinguished panel of industry experts: Dr. Frank Romano, with the Rochester Institute of Technology, Dr. Ron Davis, with Printing Industries of America, William Herrot, with the National Association for Printing Leadership, William Lamparter, with PrintCom Consulting, Steve Bonoff, with the International Prepress Association, and Kip Smythe, with NPES. The stated objective of this session was to discuss the current state of the printing industry and to explore what the future may hold for the industry.

Growth (or, rather, the lack of growth) dominated much of the discussion during this session. Most of the panel members agreed that it would not be accurate to describe the printing business today as a "growth" business. Dr. Ron Davis, Kip Smythe, and William Herrot all pointed out that the printing industry is now a mature industry, and that, for at least the next several years, real printing sales (adjusted for inflation) are expected to grow at a slower rate than the overall U.S. economy. Bill Lamparter contended that it is not particularly useful to talk about the growth of the printing industry as a whole. "In reality," Lamparter argued, "there is no such thing as this nice, large homogenous print industry. In reality, it is an almost infinite series of market niches and slices. And when you start to look at it that way, the inevitable is there. Some segments grow, some segments decline, and some segments disappear."

Most of the panel members also agreed that, in the future, the greatest growth opportunities for printers will be found in non-print services, such as fulfillment, cross-media publishing, digital asset management, and database marketing. If this view of the future is accurate (and I believe that it is), printing company owners and managers will face significant strategic decisions.

The addition of significant non-print services raises important strategic issues because it involves a substantial expansion of a printing company’s scope of operations. In other words, adding significant non-print services can be essentially equivalent to entering a new line of business. This new business will almost certainly require the printer to develop or acquire new skills and competencies. It is likely to operate under economic and market forces that are quite different from those that apply to conventional commercial printing. The particular non-print services chosen may also require the printer to seek out a new kind of customer, and they may demand a new approach to sales and marketing.

All this does not mean that printers should not seek growth by expanding the scope of their businesses through the addition of non-print services. But it does suggest that expansion should occur only after the printer has developed a thorough understanding of what will be required to successfully and profitably sell and deliver these new services. Bill Lamparter forcefully addressed this issue during the Print ’01 general session when he made the following comment:

"That follows for all of the things that we’re talking about here when we look at printers doing something other than printing. One of the biggest places printers get in trouble is when they go into something other than printing and have no competence to do so. They think it’s easy . . . So, the advice, the thing that we see from people that make these moves is understand the businesses that you’re going to move into, whether its digital printing or something else, understand the competencies that are required and decide whether you choose to go out and get them before you jump off the end of the diving board into the pool with no water."

Well said.