The goal of any print business—like that of any business—is to be profitable and often time that requires growth. We’ve all heard the term “growing pains,” but sometimes the end result of that growth is where the pain points are. Of course small printers have their challenges, but beyond a certain growth point new sets of challenges start to kick in and we’re often not prepared for them as we scale up. Many of them center around leadership.

Most businesses, print or otherwise, are small or mid-size businesses; only 0.4% of all businesses generate more than $10 million in revenue. Likewise print service providers, and as a print service provider, when you get to that $10 million mark, you start to have different kinds of problems and challenges that require leadership beyond the owner or president. In a small business, typically all or most decisions fall on the founder, owner, president—or whoever is the acknowledged leader of the business. As businesses scale up past a certain point, that becomes an unwieldy task. Where I spend most of my time—and most of my anxiety—is contending with inexperienced leaders, or the ability for my team to make decisions about things they’ve never done before.

The revenue level is a demarcation point. In a $1 million company, it’s often about how hard you work as the leader of the business and all decisions fall upon that leader. When a company hits about $5 million, there are a number of team members and some management tasks are delegated within the organization. When the business hits about $5 to 8 million, there are some real systems in place and perhaps there are managers overseeing different parts of the business. But where you really struggle is in that $8 to10 million range. It’s hard to find a true leader—other than the founder—who drives the business and sets the vision. So what ends up happening is that everybody runs to the founder, who makes a decision, and then everybody goes back and executes that decision.As a result, you often hear owners saying, “Nothing happens unless I’m there” or they complain about their team members or their employees. What I’ve seen over the years—and still in some of my peer groups—is that the ability to put in place a more professional staff that has experience, maybe from outside the printing industry, or leadership skills that can help take all the burden of decision-making of the founder.