When It Came Time for Ripon Printers to Expand, There Was No Place Like Home

On December 31 last year, Sells Printing Company of Berlin, Wisconsin, ceased operations after nearly 100 years in the printing business. Eight months earlier, the one-time $30 million firm sold off its presses and certain other assets to Ripon Printers of Ripon, Wisconsin, as it scheduled plans to lay off its workers before closing its doors at year-end.

This is a story that no doubt reveals something of the challenging times that printers have faced in the digital economy, but at the same time, it sheds light on how a certain class of lean-and-mean competitor is continuing to grow, as others falter.

Andy Lyke, CEO of Ripon, would likely tell customers that the “lean and mean” label is only half right when it comes to Ripon.

“Last year, we had two people out of 300 leave the firm—and it may sound rather trite, but our story is really our people,” explains Lyke. Yet Ripon’s CEO doesn’t conceal the fact that over a period of years, the $45 million firm’s management has devoured bushels of Lean-enterprise best practices.

“The focus is always on how do we become more orderly about how we operate. And we look at a problem and ask, ‘What’s the permanent solution here?’ The fact is that we don’t want any Band-Aids, and this has really turned over some new ways of approaching things,” says Lyke, who began his career as an Arthur Andersen accountant, before making a detour in the mid-1980s to join the firm that his parents had established back in 1962.

According to Lyke, Ripon’s “Lean journey” began about 6 years ago, when a Ripon manager returned from a Lean seminar “fired up.” The operating philosophy quickly resonated with Lyke, who a short time later signed on some Lean advisors to help indoctrinate Lean into the firm.

“This is very challenging to do successfully without outside advisors, so we didn’t hesitate,” explains Lyke, who says that Ripon managers are instructed daily to focus on two primary things. “First, we have to execute, and second, we have to plan for the next job by asking the question: How can we do it better?”

Clearly, the answer to this question has changed over time and so too has the equipment that Ripon has needed to routinely invest in. Ten years ago, the firm made a sizable investment in heatset printing (a process in which ink is dried rapidly by forced-air heating). The investment paid off, and today heatset accounts for nearly half of Ripon’s business. Lately, the firm has invested in a number of digital presses.

“Digital is not a huge part of our business at this point, but it augments what we’re doing, and it helps when customers want small runs of things, or perhaps they want a big, personalized campaign. We can now do these things pretty easily,” says Lyke.

Meanwhile, after 50 years of growing out a national footprint, the purchase of Sells Printing’s assets brought Ripon a roster of printing clients closer to home, where Sells had long produced catalogs for companies throughout the Milwaukee market.

“We’ve been a national printer for quite a while, but we never had our location play to our advantage like it can now,” explains Lyke, who expects the Sells sales relationships and assets to help grow its revenue by 40 percent. With more customers locally, Lyke says, Ripon’s new clients will likely share the firm’s “Midwestern work ethic” — one he describes as a commitment that employees make to their employer and its customers.

However, today those customers have more digital options than ever before. Asked whether certain customers are completely pulling out of print, Lyke says: “We’ve seen some of that, but we’ve also seen customers stop printing and quickly return to it. So I think that there’s a backlash, and while we don’t expect print to be the way it was, companies are viewing it now as a way to differentiate themselves.”

And as for differentiating printing companies, Lyke echoes his earlier remarks that it all comes down to people.