In this first decade of the twenty-first century, one of the most serious challenges facing owners and managers of commercial printing companies is the pressing need to achieve and sustain a reasonable rate of revenue growth. Growth is to a business enterprise what oxygen is to a living organism. It is the life force of the organization and the key to business life or death. Growing companies thrive; enterprises that don’t consistently grow soon begin to shrink and eventually vanish. Growth provides the financial fuel for investing in new technologies, for acquiring more productive equipment, and for developing or acquiring the human skills and capabilities that enable a business to achieve and maintain competitive advantage.

Despite the obvious importance of growth for business health, most companies do not manage growth well and, therefore, most fail to achieve significant levels of sustained growth. During the period of 1997 to 2002, the thirty companies that make up the Dow Jones Average grew revenues at a collective annual rate of only 4.9 percent. And, this average growth rate was helped substantially by the presence of rapidly growing companies like Home Depot, Merck, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and CitiGroup. Exclude these five companies, and you would see that the remaining twenty-five Dow Jones companies grew revenues at an annual rate of only 2.3 percent during the same period. Recent research by management consulting firm Bain & Company, Inc. supports the view that sustained growth can be very illusive. Bain studied the financial performance of 1,870 companies over a ten-year period. The research showed that only 13 percent of these companies achieved even a modest level of sustained and profitable growth.

Sustained growth is a particularly difficult challenge for commercial printing companies. Since the late 1990s, economic and technological developments have combined to restrain the revenue growth of most US commercial printing companies. In essence, these developments increased the attractiveness of products, services, and technologies that can function as substitutes for the products and services provided by commercial printing firms. The result has been a substantial and persistent slowing of the printing industry’s rate of growth. In fact, most economic data indicate that real (that is, inflation adjusted) print sales have been declining since 2001.