A Career in Print: Pat McGrew

Pat McGrew is Managing Director of McGrewGroup, providing guidance and triage for printing, marketing service, workflow, and companies supporting the print and communication industry. Karis Copp speaks to Pat about her storied career in print, how she helps her diverse client set to be successful, and how print businesses can weather the COVID-19 storm.

HOW DID YOU GET INTO THE PRINT INDUSTRY?

I grew up in this industry. If I’m honest, my first foray into the printing industry was when I was 13. A while ago! I didn’t realise at the time, but it was going to be a tipping point in my life. When I was in junior high school, I was the editor of our school newspaper, and the deal the company that printed our newspaper had with the school was that anyone who worked on the paper also could work up in the print shop, to prepare the copy and get it ready for printing. A lot of people weren’t interested in that, but I just jumped in with both feet.

My mom would drive me up to the printing company, and I’d be up there for four or five hours every month getting the layout and dealing with the photomechanical transfers for the screened images of the basketball players and football players. I started to get really intrigued with the process of preparing for print. The printing company had been in business from the 1700s, and the building had been there from the 1600s – I realise in the UK that’s not very old, but for us, that’s very old! I learned the process of getting something ready for print, and I would sit with the people who were doing the typesetting, and I learned how they laid things out and the people were willing to answer any questions. They were just wonderful.

When I got up into high school I was once again the editor of the paper, and the same business also printed the high school paper too so I just continued with it, and along the way I ended up working at the newspaper plant. They taught me typesetting, first on the hot lead machine but then we got our very first photocomposition machine, a Headliner. I thought, wow, this is really cool. Then we got our first real photo typesetting text machine and over the next three years they upgraded their technology several times, so I learned typesetting in addition to all the other stuff – I realised I had kind of gotten addicted to the smell of ink! It’s the solvents in the ink that make you love it. To this day I can walk into a building, and go, oh, there's a press here somewhere, I can smell it!

HOW DID YOUR CAREER IN PRINT PROGRESS FROM THERE?

Everything that I've done in my life keeps dragging me back to print. Eventually I moved into technical writing and developing course materials and doing a lot of training, built a software company that was in embedded in the print industry. When we sold it I thought, I still love this industry. I actually worked at InfoTrends for about five years as the person who handled the transaction printing work, then I moved to Pitney Bowes, handling their document strategy.

I then went to Kodak and worked on the early days of marketing high speed inkjet web presses into the market when nobody was really sure what that was. The person who hired me said, ‘do you want to change the world?’ Who can say no to that? It was about trying to figure out why someone would want to buy a high-speed inkjet web press, and then bringing that story to market. This is how we created TransPromo as a talk track, to try and intrigue people who did bills and statements, which was about the level that those presses were really capable of producing at the time. I then moved over to HP, as we were building the higher speed, higher quality machines, then I moved back to InfoTrends. So, it's been a life that started with one little tipping point.

AS A LEADING INDUSTRY CONSULTANT, HOW DO YOU CHOOSE WHO TO WORK WITH?

Clients find me. I’m equal parts art and science, that’s how I think of it. I am not a programmer, by any stretch of the imagination. However, I can read code because I had to when we owned our company, so I’m comfortable talking about and looking at codebases, I am comfortable understanding technical architectures, but then I am also a writer, and to some extent a product designer, so I am comfortable looking at a product and identifying how to make it better, and comfortable with product triage. Every job I've ever taken seems to use all of that and then build on it. I always said when I was at Kodak and then again at HP that every job I've ever had led me to the job I was doing there, and the same is true right now – everything I've ever done is led me to what I'm doing right now.

Because I have lived on all sides of the process, having worked in prepress, analogue, digital, run print shops, lived with very technical digital equipment as well as analogue equipment, I am comfortable talking to anybody about any kind of print. Fundamentally, I’m always excited to work with companies who are looking for help. They have a product that isn't quite behaving the way they want it to, or they're bringing a new product to market but they're not quite sure what talk track is going to help lift them above the fray to get visibility. Printing companies and vendor companies don't quite understand the power of the print sample; that's why I do Print Sample TV. The whole idea is to lift the talk track among both the vendors and the printers that they serve. To understand that if you're a brand owner, if you're a designer, you need ideas, and you can help provide those ideas if you create things that will intrigue and show off the power and capabilities of your hardware and software. But show it physically, because a screenshot on a laptop or a phone isn't nearly the same as a tangible piece of print.

DO YOU EMBRACE CHANGE, AND ARE SOME BUSINESSES/PEOPLE LESS OPEN TO CHANGE?

I would agree that there are some in the printing industry and some print shop owners, who are not as excited by change as I am. I understand why; if you're running a business and you are worried about your labour costs and inventory costs, and you’re trying to play the ‘guess what the margin should be this week’ game. Print can be a very commoditised business, and change can be a daunting thing.

I’ve walked into companies – and I've done this for 30 (or 40 years if we’re honest! ) – in which the idea of a digital press has them getting out the garlic, the crosses, and the holy water. They were really not interested! They understood the pricing model, the paper, the ink, they understood how to sell conventional offset printing. However for a variety of reasons they might be forced into digital in order to meet the needs of some of their customers, and I've been involved in a lot of those situations where the first digital press is being put into an analogue company. The companies that are less willing to embrace that change struggle, and some of them never become successful digital printers, because they're constantly fighting the technology. Conversely, those that take that digital press and say, ‘Okay, we’ve got a customer who needs this kind of work, so we're going to make this work. What's the best way for us to get there? How can we not only do it, but make money and be innovative?’ Those are the companies that thrive.

I've been in huge digital-only companies where they have sold off all their offset because they got past the point where they needed the offset components, and I've been in extremely successful companies that run both, and they're successful in both sides of their house. But you've got to want to work with the technology to make digital work, and because digital is not going to stop changing, it will keep getting better; the speeds get better, the drying technologies in inkjet get better, the substrate ranges keep expanding, the nature of the jobs keeps changing, and it's going to keep on changing. So once you embrace digital print you've got to keep on going with it. You can't just buy one digital machine and say, okay, I'm done now. If you bought an Indigo 6000 a while back you were extremely competitive in the marketplace because you could do things nobody else could do, but if you're still running that same machine today you're probably not as competitive.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE BIGGEST CHANGES YOU’VE SEEN IN YOUR CAREER?

I would start with the concept of variable data printing. It was meant to encapsulate the idea that instead of having to pre-print something on offset and then either type into a form to add information you could put it through a laser printer to add variable data to it in one process. The big sea change in the ‘90s was the ability to create something where the print stream contained all of the content needed to create a personalised communication to someone, and in the very early days that was the mundane things like insurance policies and credit card bills and bank statements – not sexy stuff at all.

But without those pioneering companies who made it possible to merge mainframe-based data with print streams on the way to the printer, and create these ‘page of one’ printing solutions, I don't think we'd be where we are today. So, to me the ability to do variable data printing and the art and the science that went into it was a huge significant change. Once we could do that in black and white, we knew that the next big change was going to be to do it in full colour. It took a while to get there. I was doing variable data printing in 1984, and so I always giggle when people look at variable data printing as something new.

We laid the groundwork for what came next. There were people who were doing inkjet printheads hanging off of offset printers to do variable data into offset shells – there were all sorts of interesting technologies, and some of them are still in use today. For me, the next big sea change after variable data printing in black and white was as we came into the  early 2000s, really making it possible for any printer to buy a full colour CMYK digital press in either toner or inkjet, and create products that were sellable at the right price point that were full colour variable data pieces. Then, instead of inserting things into the envelope with a bill, you could actually print it in line and then you could personalise it, you could target it, you could do a lot more and a lot higher quality kinds of communication, because now you could do it all in full colour.

Now you could meet the brand owners’ requirements to have a rich customer experience and still meet the security requirements of a transactional document, put it all in one envelope and get it out the door. So, that rich digital colour and the ability to execute that was the next big change for me. And what's happened over the last, we'll call it 15 years, is that technology has just gotten better and better and better. Inkjet has become richer and more capable of what I think of as brand quality, advertising quality digital printing. If you own an Indigo or a Nexpress or an iGen, Ricoh PRO9000 series, or an Iridesse or MGI, these are amazing machines; they print amazingly beautiful printed colour. The ability to produce all that and make it variable opens up more and more opportunities to the people who are doing brand campaigns and the design for those campaigns.

YOU’RE A HUGE ADVOCATE FOR EFFICIENT WORKFLOW – WHY IS SUCCESSFUL WORKFLOW SO IMPORTANT?

It doesn't matter whether you're selling ice cream at the beach, or whether you're selling printing products, everybody’s business has a workflow and it has to do with identifying the raw materials, what's going to go into the product, taking orders, identifying the pieces that have to go into the final deliverable and getting it out the door. At the highest level, that's what workflow is, taking the original order and getting it through the production process so it can be shipped.

In printing, it's a complex adventure because there are a lot of moving parts to a piece of print, and it’s not just about how to capture the customer intent. There's a little bit of art and science there, as there is in most phases of print; capturing their specifications correctly and getting a print file that is actually printable turns out to be harder than you would think it should be by now. Just because you have a PDF file doesn't mean that the printers that you're planning to use can actually interpret that file as the designer intended, there are many factors when it comes to getting the right colour, the right look, the right feel.

So, every step along that path from job onboarding, getting everything through pre-production and the production, post production, shipping – every one of those is a stop on the workflow adventure. One of the things I started to realise probably 20 years ago when I was working in the early days of VDP is that very few companies actually understand workflow from the high level, and as a result they do things very inefficiently. It becomes a very people-driven process and it's still that way today in many different shops that I walk in to. Over time, that inefficiency costs you money. So the reason I push the workflow story is because I want printing companies to think about how to take the touchpoints out of the workflow so that they can hold on to more the margin of their print jobs. Because let’s face it, print can be very commoditized, everybody's bidding against each other and the lowest cost bidder wins the job. Then they’ve got to figure out if they can make money with it. They can, if they can highly automate their process.

ARE ATTITUDES CHANGING IN THAT REGARD?

I think that attitudes have changed. I cry every time this happens (but I have to wait until I’m out in the car!), I walk into print shops on a regular basis where the print shop is still being run on an Excel spreadsheet. The company management have gone out and bought some slick web-to-print or MIS tools that are intended to manage all the quoting, estimating, and the business side of handling the print. They may have invested in some really nice colour management software, they may have a really slick artificial intelligence driven imposition system. However, when you actually look at how job information is flowing through the plant, it's a bunch of spreadsheets. So, there's not really a real time view of what's going on in the plant, and yet the people who own the business and the business management, they're looking at dashboards thinking that what they're seeing is what's happening real time. There's still a big disconnect between what business owners know about their business and what's happening on the production floor, and the tighter we can make that, the better off everybody is.

I think there's still a lot of fear of automation and software.  When you walk into a lot of print shops, some of this print software is darn complicated, the user interfaces are not friendly. One of my hopes and prayers for coming years is that the people who have this really great set of software programmes will learn to write user interfaces that are intelligible to mere mortals. You don't want to have to be Wonder Woman in order to do the workflow. You want to be able to heuristically say, I need this job to go through these four processes and I need it to come out on the other side, and I don't want to have to be keying everything into a spreadsheet to make sure those things are happening.

WOULD YOU AGREE THAT MANY BUSINESSES AREN’T AWARE OF EVERYTHING THEY CAN DO WITH THEIR EXISTING SOFTWARE?

You're absolutely right, that happens a tremendous amount. There are some extremely powerful tools in the marketplace that are not as well used as they should be. And it's a two pronged problem; a lot of print software is sold through distributors, which means that the originator of the software doesn't always have the opportunity to do that deep level of education that they might do with a direct sale, in order to help that customer understand what's really possible.

The other thing is that sometimes printing companies aren't ready to hear all the things that are possible. They have to take baby steps. I call it crawl, walk, run; they have to get into it and figure out how it behaves, and then they're ready to learn a little bit more and then a little bit more. Whenever I do a business assessment I ask, ‘when was the last time you talked to your vendor? You're asking me to help you buy some new tool, but have you talked to the vendors you're already working with to see if they can help you?’ It's an essential conversation that doesn't happen enough.

It takes both parties realising that they need to talk, and in the fast-paced world we live in, that's a little hard. Printing companies that sell software, whether it's theirs or a partner’s software, aren't particularly incentivised to go back and have multiple conversations.

They move on to the next hardware sale. We haven't always seen the vendors in the community set themselves up for that ongoing relationship conversation, and that's what I always hope that that we’ll get to, we're just not really there yet.

I look at the Solimar software, and I look at their customers and I say, ‘Oh my God, this software could brush your teeth if you would let it!’ And yet, getting the customers to realise that there's so much power in it can be hard. Same thing with Tilia Labs; I'm not always sure that they are widely recognised for the innovation that they put into their products. They're very smart people and they understand the guts of commercial workflow, their tools are really easy to use, but even their customers don't always understand everything that the software that they bought can do. And if you think about value-based pricing, every software company wants to get the best price they can for their software, they've put a lot of R&D into it, and the thing the software companies rarely invest in is helping people understand all the things they can do with their software.

WITH EQUIPMENT ON THE MARKET BEING SO ADVANCED, IS THERE MORE FOCUS ON WORKFLOW AS THE THING THAT WILL MAKE BUSINESSES MORE COMPETITIVE?

You would think that would be the case! Unfortunately that's not what I'm seeing. Sadly I think as a printing company, if you go out and you spend the $500,000 or $1,000,000 or more to buy a high end, high performing press, very often the software takes a backseat. You would think the logical thought pattern would be, ‘let’s put another $150,000 - $200,000 into software to make sure I can be as efficient as possible with this press’, but it's not. Instead it’s, ‘let's get the press in, let's get it working, let's start making some money with it, and then we'll figure out how to tighten up the workflow’.

My jobs when I was at Kodak and at HP had no descriptions attached – in many ways my job didn't really exist – After a company installs a press, when six nine months into the plan it wasn’t working because they didn't have the right workflow, my job was to go in and help. That was really the whole reason I existed, to go out to those companies and say, ‘okay, now that we have the press and we understand how the press works, how do we get work on to that press? Let's look at the workflow, let's look at the people, let's look at how you're selling, let's look at what you're showing your clients you can do’. It was a holistic approach to helping them become a better company, and it was rooted in the idea of making sure the workflow was correct, not only the technical production workflow, but also from a business workflow perspective.

IT’S AN UNUSUAL TIME AT THE MOMENT DUE TO THE ONGOING CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON HOW THIS WILL AFFECT THE PRINT INDUSTRY LONG-TERM, AND HOW CAN BUSINESSES WEATHER THE STORM?

This isn’t only a post-pandemic problem, it’s a problem that already existed in the print industry. The economy was good in many countries, but there was still a decline in the number of print businesses. There was consolidation. And, there was consolidation that didn’t always work out. It is on that platform that the pandemic entered the picture, leaving printing companies to figure out a new forward plan. Whatever the plan looked like in January and February is largely off the table.

Weathering the storm means doing the hard thing: an assessment of your current customers, their needs, your capabilities, and the likelihood that the markets you serve will continue to need what you have been selling them. For some printing companies, the opportunity to dive into production of new products for social distancing, including floor graphics and signage, have kept the lights on. Their challenges are sometimes more about staffing and meeting internal social distancing and safety guidelines than about how much work is coming in. For other companies, often those serving financial services and insurance and healthcare, the volumes haven’t dropped as they seek to stay in touch with their customers and see that email is not always the best method of keeping the attention of their constituency – at least not as the only channel.

So, the requirement is to look at who you serve and what they need. If your customers are closed and experiencing their own challenges that don’t present opportunities at the moment, it’s time to look for new customers. What can you produce, for whom, and at what price? And then, even if you have never done marketing before, it’s time to do it. And it’s time to have a heartfelt chat with the sales teams to ensure that they understand that it isn’t business as usual.

The good news for all of these companies is that there are a lot of us who know how to help!

WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON NOW?

My current client set is a diverse group of companies, all with different needs. For some it’s product triage. For some, it’s print sample program development. For some, it’s strategy work, and for others is help in messaging. For some, it’s all of the above. Everyday some new opportunity presents itself, so for me, I’m lucky that it’s a time where my skills have value.