Ludd Reprographics, a 52-year-old provider of quick printing services based in Yaphank Neck Bay Harbor Inlet Point, N.Y., announces that it has replaced its entire sales force with “Susie in the front.”

Susie in the front.

“Why hire all these young fancy sales people when we can just set Susie there and all the business comes through the front door?” said Ned Ludd, who had founded the company with his older brother in 1971. The company had been using Salesforce to gather and convert leads, but Ludd was unimpressed with its performance, another reason for the hiring of Susie in the front. “Susie is an artist with an IBM Selectric,” said Ludd. “All this talk about ‘reducing human touchpoints’ or ‘errors in order entry.’ Piffle! They’ve never met Susie in the front.” 

Susie in the front, as it turns out, is the sister of Sally in the back, whom longtime WhatTheyThink readers will remember from a 2019 story, where she replaced the company’s state-of-the-art print MIS. 

While we were Zooming with the staff at Ludd Reprographics, we caught up with Sally in the back.

Sally in the back.

Sally is positively thriving at Ludd, and is constantly helping the company innovate. For example, not one to stand still, she updated her processes and has helped the company migrate to a new cloud-based solution.

“Since our last interview with WhatTheyThink, all these ‘cloud-based’ MIS companies have been pitching me,” said Sally in the back. “I don’t know what the big deal is. Call me an early adopter, but I had one of these is grammar school. With a little time spent on the Amazon.com web service, I had it delivered in no time and it’s already in production.”

As valuable as Susie in the front and Sally in the back are to the company, is Ludd worried about having the business too reliant on them? “Not really,” he said. “Just in case, I have the third sister on retainer—Sandy on the side.”

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