-- A Will Binding and Finishing Your Product In-House Bring Happy Returns
Jeff Holloway dreamed of becoming a successful printer one day. Today, at the age of 30, his dream became a reality. He has become owner and design director of Sherwood, AR.'s fastest-growing company, Pinnacle Printing & Design Inc.
Holloway’s first job in his career was working at a local newspaper office, where he was responsible for typing ads on a Mac and then working at a traditional fast-print shop for a while.
One of Holloway's subsequent jobs was to work for an insurance company. The company itself has a lot of printing sources, so it built an internal printing shop and Holloway was the only printing operator at the time. From this experience, he learned that the only way to achieve a higher profit is to complete his own work. Therefore, it is determined to start its own printing factory and to use the skills it has learned.
In 1994, Holloway bought the printing company of the insurance company. He rearranged the workshop and increased his investment in Pinnacle Printing & Design Inc. At the time, this small company had only two operators and had the most basic quick printing equipment, including an offset press, a camera, and some prepress tools. In addition to fast printing, Holloway loves designing company logos for other small businesses in the community.
Since the establishment of the company, Holloway hopes to provide customers with the one-stop service needed for printing and document processing, from the creative consultation to the complete solution for post-press processing. He has ambitious development plans. But at that time, he did not have enough technical infrastructure and financial support to achieve this plan.
In the first two years of Pinnacle's establishment, approximately half of Indo-China's home business came from Neighbor companies. The other half of India's business was mostly outsourcing business. Despite the limited scale of the company's development, it has formed the foundation for a group of loyal customers. In 1998, Jeff's father, Jerry, joined the company and became the company's key manager. Subsequently, the company invested for the first time in a batch of post-press processing equipment. They were a collating machine, a saddle-stitched binding machine, a folding machine and an indentation machine. In order to keep up with the rapid growth of the on-demand printing market, the company has also begun its efforts to turn to digital printing development and has purchased Xerox and Toshiba's digital color presses. At this point, the company already has three offset presses, two of which are ABDicks presses (a black-and-white press, a two-color press) and a Multilith two-color press.
The company's prepress work is done on its own Macs and PCs, and is particularly proud of its outstanding design level. With its own darkroom, you can complete all types of prepress work.
The company gradually began to obtain more commercial profits and provide professional services from non-profit organizations to various financial institutions. Operators and equipment were added to reach the peak of five offset presses.
Holloway appreciates his success as an entrepreneur and development concept established as a print consultant. However, he is still not satisfied with himself and he believes that there are still no truly well-established companies. There are still a lot of Indian and Indian jobs that need to be sent out to the outside world for processing. In addition, the company's existing operations have not yet been able to achieve the efficiency and flexibility that he hopes. In particular, the printing time cannot be as fast as the customer demands. In fact, the company's printing operators also hope to speed up the printing of man-hours, but the existing presses and binding equipment can not provide the required automation and production speed. So Holloway was very concerned about problems such as too long print setup time, unstable print quality, high failure rate, and overloaded operators. He thought that the company needed to upgrade its printing hardware, but hoped that the investment would be the best. Good return.
The turnaround that Pinnacle did not think of appeared in early 2000. A local customer, Charles Smythe, told Holloway that he needed to print a batch of labels for his new trading company Smythe & Associates in Little Rock. As Holoway has always had a good relationship with customers, he had talked with Mr. Smythe about his business plan, especially the printing company's working hours and operator challenges. For this purpose, Smythe conducted a basic assessment of Pinnacle's existing equipment and advised Holloway accordingly. If Pinnacle is equipped with more advanced, more diverse and more easily operated printing and finishing equipment, it will achieve better results. The proceeds. As a result, Holloway has purchased a newest Standard SD400 digital press from the beginning.
Pinnacle's operators quickly put the digital press into use, undertook various newsprints such as newsletters, postcards, menus, and envelopes, and used a variety of substrates, from 2.8 x 2.9 inches to 12.7 x 12. 17.6-inch color prints in a variety of sizes. And also use the SD400 digital printing machine to print different print jobs with at least 40 prints and up to 120,000 prints. Just six months after the new equipment was put into use, it has completed 600,000 pages of printing, and its printing capabilities will allow the company to reduce the number of offset presses it originally used.
In the next six months, the company accepted Symthe's advice and purchased three finishing machines from the same manufacturer. They were a collator, a booklet binder, and a folding sheet. machine. In order to make the workflow more smooth, all the binding machines are installed as close as possible to the SD400 digital press. The rationalization of the printing process also enabled Pinnacle to make maximum use of the production floor.
In the past, the company's operating personnel had to manually process the pages of the prints, with a maximum size of 8.5 x 14 inches. In contrast, the newly-acquired QC-P10 desktop collation machine is fully automated, capable of handling various types of substrates, processing sizes up to 12.4×17 inches, and collating speeds of up to 3,300 per hour.
The QC-P10 can also be processed online with the F4 Bookletmaker booklet special binding machine. The floor-standing F4 Bookletmaker binding machine can carry out up to 25 pages of folding and peacemaking and can process 1,800 booklets per hour.
Pinnacle's latest post-press finishing equipment is a PFP-320 folding machine. The desktop folding machine can perform high-speed folding of 190 pages per minute, and can automatically complete 6 kinds of folding formats, mainly letter type, half-fold type, parallel double-fold type, engineering type, z type, and large sheet type. folding.
After these investments, Pinnacle plans to double its output this year. Now 90% of the company's customers are local customers, and several of them have large business contracts with the company. In addition to Jeff and Jerry, the company employs six operators.
The company can now print and process almost any type of product, from financial forms to commercial cards, flyers, mailings, programs, labels, and certificates. Currently, only about 5% of the company's work requires outside processing. The main part is the four-color printing section.
Jerry proudly recalled that the company was only a successful small-scale traditional printer a year ago, but as it successfully seized the opportunity, it took a new step to become more integrated, able to provide full service, and provide New printers to print. Today, Pinnacle can provide faster printing services, better print quality, and more customer satisfaction.