One of the interesting consequences of the franchise model is that very often it attracts print business owners whose backgrounds are far afield of the commercial printing industry, or even the wide-format printing industry. This has the effect of bringing new ideas into the business and the industry at large, as these owners are not saddled with “the way things have always been done.” That said, becoming the owner of a print business is not without its learning curve.

Last November, Greg Ellison became the new owner of SpeedPro Denver, and like a lot of franchise owners—and SpeedPro studio owners—Ellison doesn’t have a print background. He spent most of his early career in telecommunications as an engineer, until the repeated churn of mergers and acquisitions led him to grow disenchanted with that industry. “I reached a point in time when I’d had enough,” he says. “I asked for a package and they were nice enough to give it to me.” So what was next? “I wanted to do something completely different,” he says. “I knew I wanted to be a small business owner, so I started shopping for businesses and going through business brokers and broker magazines looking for what was interesting.” With a manufacturing background, he was looking for something with a manufacturing focus, but also knew he wanted something business-to-business. He found that there wasn’t much that really fit that mold, but did find that printing and signage kept cropping up. “I ended up gravitating towards the idea of getting into graphic printing,” he says.

A franchise broker put him touch with one sign franchise that was looking to open a new facility in the Denver area, but Ellison didn’t necessarily want to build a new business from the ground up. “Working on a business for two or three years before I could write myself a paycheck was not very appealing to me,” he says.