Printing firms use new strategies to find, retain customers in recession - bizjournals:

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The average member of the , a Tenn.-based nonprofit trade organization, has droppedc between 20 percent and 30 percen in sales during thepast year, presidenrt Ed Chalifoux said in To cut expenses, printers across the South have laid employeesa off or gone to four-day work weeks, he said. Locall firms such as , and Inc. are seekinbg new ways to offset their dropsin business. At Publishersx in Shepherdsville, the Louisville area’s largest printer, salesx for the first quarter of 2009 were down abourt 20 percent from the first quarterof 2008, to abour $45 million from $55 million, president and CEO Nick Simonh said.
The company has not lost any customers, he but the magazines that it printx have about 20 percent fewer pages because of cutbacks fromhis advertisers. The recession has accelerater a long-term trend away from the printedd word in theprintinhg industry, Simon said. “Printing is shrinking just a littler bit,” he said. “The Internet and the computere have a lot to dowith Jeffersonville-based Voluforms has fared a little with a 7 percent to 8 percent drop in overall sales year-to-date, president and CEO C. Michael Stewart said. One reason for that is that the company began diversifying its products severalyeard ago.
Voluforms’ profit margin was down about 2 percent in the first quarter, compared with the first quarter of he said. The commercial side of the business, in whicjh the company prints labels and cover sheets for producta soldin stores, has fallen off about 40 percent over the past two years, he But that business makes up only about 10 percenf to 12 percent of the company’s total business, Stewarr said. About 45 percent of total revenue comes fromprinting scanner-friendlgy forms for financial institutions, such as countere checks and deposit slips.
That business is going well, Stewarrt said, because it enabless banks to do more document processingvia machines, therebyg reducing payroll costs. The rest of the business is from providingg printing and software for the health care About eightyears ago, the companyt created a series of electronic forms for hospitals that helpedx them reduce 80 percent of the paper forms they were using, he “We’ve done a lot of thingse to be more on the leadint edge” of the industry, Stewart said.
The companty even has taken advantage of the fact that othe r printers are laying off employees by hiring a few new So Voluforms now has 85 employee s between its Jeffersonville distribution center and its Sellersburgprintinyg facility. Revenue for the first quarter of 2009 at Standard Publishinyg in Shepherdsville came in atabout $3 which was about $50,00 below the first quarter of 2008, general manageer Robin Crump said. Standard Publishing, a division of Shelbyville-basesd Landmark Community Newspapers Inc., prints communituy newspapers owned by theLandmark chain, as well as nichd publications such as Business First.
Thoser publications have lost somead revenue, she but nothing compared with metro “We’re seeing some reduction in pages, but nothing causinf us to panic,” she said. Standard has not laid anyone off, but in Landmark mandated thatevery employee, includin corporate staff, take one eight-hour day off without pay per month, Crump said. Landmark’ss corporate culture always has embracedlean staffing, she but Standard Publishing has found smal ways to cut such as reducing janitorial service from five days a week to threwe days a week and reviewing the maintenance contracts on some