Hi, I’m Jerry Scher with Peak Focus. I spent a lot of time in the printing industry, in fact, over 35 years working in lots of different capacities. And one of the things that I’ve really become aware of here of late is the dramatic changes that the industry is going through.

And when you really think about it, to begin with the role of the CEO is to be a strategist for their company. To define what their future looks like, create a shared vision, get everybody in alignment and moving forward with a new strategy. And, quite frankly, at this particular juncture in this industry that’s a critical place to be.

Now, that being said the CEO also has to be concerned with the people that they have within their organization because in order to execute whatever plan that they develop they need the right talent on their team.

And then, of course, they also need to be on executing. They have to have the cash and financial resources to accomplish what they want to accomplish.

Well, I’d like to really focus on the talent piece because one of the questions that I keep raising with folks is what the performance differential is of their people. For example, if you have an A player on your team in your sales force, how much more revenue and profit do they generate versus the average and the less than average performers. That’s a real critical issue for a lot of printing companies.

The other thing that’s been defined is the fact that today – and I’ll focus on sales for this particular presentation – is that most printing company executives will tell you that they do not have the sales talent to sell cross media services. This is a significant challenge.

So I’d like to propose a new approach and that approach includes a much more systematic strategy for recruiting talent, bringing them on board and getting them up to speed. And I look at it from multiple steps.

To begin with there’s a lack of definition of what the job is. They clearly need to define what they’re looking for in order to go look for what they’re looking for.

Secondly, they have to have different tactics in place to attract talent from different locations than they’re currently used to doing.

Third, they have to go through a filtering and refining process that defines which are the best talented people so you can go after them.

Once they’ve identified them one of the greatest weaknesses in the whole process is a lack of good solid interviewing skills. Too many executives, middle managers and supervisors will openly admit that they really don’t interview very well. And this is a real problem. So developing those skills are really important.

And finally, the actual recruiting process. Going out and attracting the talent by creating a really powerful brand for your company is extremely important. Once, of course, you get people on board if you don’t have a really effective onboarding or training and development program in place then you’re gonna waste a lot of the talent that you’ve recruited.

This, to me, is one of the greatest challenges that this industry’s facing today. And learning how to go about and identifying these folks, recruiting them and getting them on board will make this transition significantly easier for everyone.