Starting a new business—much less a print business—at the height (or depth, as the case may be) of the Great Recession may not have been the most advisable idea in the world, but when the entrepreneurial spirit strikes, sometimes you have to go with it. So it was in 2010 that Steve Moran-Cassese decided to start a print business. “Everyone was like, ‘You’re going to start a business now?’ And I said, ‘Well, this is the best time. It can only get better from here.” And thus was born SpeedPro Marin in San Rafael, Calif.

Moran-Cassese had spent 17 years in the agency world, working on corporate event management and hospitality, leading to a stint working on the Olympics. Weary of the agency world, and an entrepreneur at heart, he looked around for business opportunities. “I came across SpeedPro and I really liked the model a lot,” he said. And not having a background in print production, he added, “I wanted something with training wheels.”

So how much of a challenge was it to start a print business at the nadir of the economic downturn? “I've asked myself that before and it's a difficult one to answer,” he said. “Because I was new I just didn’t know if it would have been better if we were in a booming economy. We were starting from zero, so anything upward sounded like a great idea.” SpeedPro Marin had an eight-month ramp-up, with Moran-Cassese pounding the pavement introducing local businesses to his shop. He outsourced work to nearly SpeedPros, and gradually accumulated business. “I was able to fill the pipe a little bit during that time,” he said. “It was a little slow, but every year from that point on we were growing 20% or more year over year. We were just rolling and growing and had a great reputation.”