Transcript:

Hi.  I’m Kent Buescher, President and CEO of U.S. Press LLC here in Valdosta, and I’d like to talk to you a little bit about innovation and ideas, where you can get ideas.  You know, so many times I know it’s easy for us when you’re in the middle of the forest, you can’t see the trees sometimes, that we miss places we can get ideas.  And I think, you know, origination sometimes is very, very expensive trying to come up with original ideas, that it is a lot less expensive and a lot quicker to imitate.  And the places we may imitate is not necessarily just copying our competitors, because that only goes so far.  And the guy that came up with the idea the first time in a business probably has a share of mine, or the second guy may.  The third guy, nobody remembers who he is.

I can tell you that throughout my career I’ve always looked at what happens in other unrelated industries.  And a case in point, in the early 1990s, U.S. Press had gone through a very rapid growth phase and we’d always grown 20-25 percent a year.  And all of a sudden, about 1992, we hit a plateau, and our growth rate slowed down to 3-4 percent.  And I was racking my brain because we were constantly adding capacity.  How can I continue to grow at a more rapid clip?  And one of the things that took an awful lot of time for me at that time, is I was one of our chief estimators.  

And in the way that we had to create process color jobs in those days of very analog, very time-manual work to create a set of final films is that every photo that a customer wanted to add in a brochure had to be scanned on a scanner.  And then we created individual films and we stripped them in place manually, which was very time-consuming and very expensive.  And depending on the size of the photo, that determined the price of the color separation.  They could run anywhere from about 75 bucks up to $1000 or $1200 or more, depending on the final size of those films for each photo.

And we had just installed some new cutting-edge equipment, a Crosfield Studio system, that allowed us to scan into a system and so we didn’t have to create those expensive intermediate films.  But we really hadn’t figured out how to market that.  It was a great time-saver for us, but it wasn’t doing anything that would bring us a lot of new business.  And I was racking my brain trying to figure out the solution and how to market it, what can I do, and it was just too complicated.  And so one day as I—you know, my big vice that I’ve told people is I drink a lot of Diet Coke, and always take this little afternoon break and I head down to the Minute Market near U.S. Press, and go get a big 44-ounce Diet Coke.  And so one of those days, you know, I went out to do that back in the early ‘90s.

And so I pulled up to the Minute Market and they had this big sign that said any size soft drink 49 cents.  And it just hit me all of a sudden that wow, there was my solution.  And so what I did since I knew I didn’t have to create immediate films, we went out and we said we’re going to charge $39 for any size color separation, and it did two things for us.  The first thing it did it made it very easy.  We no longer had to ask people can you tell us the exact size.  They’re out there measuring photos, whether we’re going to put them on art boards.  It took a long time in the sales process.  It took a long time in the estimating process.  We cut that out immediately.  All we had to know is how many pictures.  The second thing that happened is, because it dropped the price drastically on color printing and it didn’t cost us any more to do it, is that we were able to more than double our business over the next three years.  So you never know where you’re going to find ideas.

So I’m a big believer that I always look out what’s happening in other industries.  Where are those places that people have got original ideas, and can I use those in my own business?  So I’m a big believer and recommend highly that you look outside the landscape in your own backyard, so to speak, and look in the places that you wouldn’t normally think, and say are there ideas that are utilized in those businesses?  Can I use that in my business?  So that’s one thing I would recommend doing.

If you’d all like more information on any of these topics, please feel free to call any of us at U.S. Press, 229-244-5634, stop by U.S. Press in the Industrial Park, or check us out online at uspress.com.