Bassette Company:
Reducing time, cost and grief for its customers
By Robin MacLeod
Bassette Printers is one of a dwindling number of commercial printing companies throughout New England — and the nation — that can lay claim to having remained in business continuously under the same name for more than 100 years.

Six years into Bassette’s second century, owner Kevin Kervick has reshaped the Springfield, Mass., company to position it for a bright future.

A 14-year-old orphan starts as an office clerk
The company was founded in 1898 by business partners F. A. Bassette and William C. Lawton. The men started their enterprise in a six-story brick building on the corner of Dwight and Hillman streets in downtown Springfield, where the company remained for the better part of 70 years. In 1972 urban renewal forced Bassette to relocate to their present site in a developing industrial area on the edge of downtown — a site that has served Bassette Company well over the past 30 years.

In 1906, Bassette and Lawton hired William Kervick, a 14-year-old orphan who had been left at an early age to make his way on his own in the world. Lawton gave William a YMCA membership so that his new employee would have a bed at night. This homeless teenager who started as an office clerk, worked his way up through the ranks, and was eventually elected president in 1955.

Kevin Kervick worked at Bassette with his father Robert for more than two decades before Robert’s death in 1998. In October 2002 Kevin purchased Bassette from a family holding company, becoming sole owner. “I honestly couldn’t tell you when I actually started with the company,” Kervick said. “In a family-owned business, how do you nail that down?”

Kervick’s years of experience with the company gave him a foundation to continue the philosophy of Bassette and Lawton. His easygoing style shows in his relationship with his executive team. Bob Haynes serves as vice president of sales. Jeff Scott is vice president of manufacturing and Bernie Spirito is vice president of finance.

It is a team that understands Kervick’s ongoing mission to transform his business into more than just a printing company that puts ink on paper.

“They ‘get it.’ They understand the need to move beyond the traditional print shop boundaries,” Kervick said.

Bob Haynes, a seasoned print sales executive, came to Bassette from a company heavy with divisions, but light on communication. “In a company with so many divisions, we could literally outbid each other on the same job and not know it until it was too late. It was frustrating to work under those circumstances and after talking to Kevin, I knew his management style and the direction he was taking the business was something I wanted to be part of.”

Becoming the sole source of printing and much more for clients
Just like his father and grandfather before him, Kervick has continued his commitment to change and innovation. His direction for growth has broadened into what he calls the “Supply Chain Profit Solution.” The goal of Kervick’s approach is to become the sole source of printing for his clients, and to synchronize and harmonize the many processes necessary to meet to each client’s specific needs.

The team’s objective is to attack the cost of print in many different ways and reduce the time clients spend managing their print purchases. This allows the client’s employees to be engaged in higher value tasks.

Inventory tracking and management are only one component in Kervick’s “Supply Chain Profit Solution.” Bassette also shows clients how to eliminate a lot of the soft costs related to acquiring print. One service Bassette offers that may not be considered traditional among printing companies is the ability to develop comprehensive, private, business-to-business Web sites that clients use to manage their print procurement with Bassette. Bassette’s Web site designer not only builds Web sites, but helps manage continuing transactions over the Internet.

Although the legal name of the business is Bassette Printers LLC, Kervick conducts his business as Bassette Company and will soon be changing the sign on the front of the building. “In a client situation, beginning a presentation by saying ‘Hi, we’re Bassette Printers’ pigeonholes you into a certain category when we have so much more than print to offer,” he said. “The reason why we get the work these days is not because we are a printer. We are really selling much more than print, although print happens to represent the final product. This approach is reflected in our corporate tag line ‘Better Process. Better Solutions.’”

In a custom business where no off-the-shelf product is sold, Kervick believes that trust and relationship must come first, and in a time when corporations are looking to streamline, Bassette is ready for the challenge. As the business developed, the executive team saw Bassette was becoming more than a printer to its customers. Some clients like the supply chain offering so much that they ask Bassette to source or distribute non-print items as well.

The willingness of Bassette Company and its employees to grow the information technology side of the business has been one of its greatest strengths. While the base of Bassette’s business is southern New England extending as far as New York City, its updated technological systems have made it possible to retain business, even when that business moves farther from New England.

“Typically in the past, if a large client moved out of our service area, it was the kiss of death for that account,” Kervick said. “Now, we are able to retain that business and service the client as efficiently as we always have. One of our top five clients moved to South Carolina several years ago. We’ve not only maintained their business, we’ve grown it.”

Bassette expands into digital on-demand printing; but first
comes the sales
When Kervick decided to grow the digital on-demand capabilities of his company, he took an innovative approach that allowed him to fill on-demand orders even before installing the necessary equipment or training any employees to produce the jobs on site.

He did this by partnering with an in-house shop of a large corporation. “They were looking to develop a little bit of outside business, so we wound up streaming some outsource work to them. They were happy to have the business, and it bought us time to ramp up in that area. It was a win-win situation. The end result was a fully developed in-house digital-on-demand department that reached break-even sales in record time.”

While most would agree that an important component of outsourcing is the ability to partner with other companies to ensure customer satisfaction, Manufacturing Vice President Jeff Scott is taking that philosophy to new heights with Bassette’s approach to “Disaster Recovery.”

“Recovering from a disaster at Bassette becomes a very important issue,” Scott said, “especially when you become the sole source printer for a client. A power outage, machine malfunction, or weather-related problem at Bassette all can affect our clients’ marketing communications. We are in the process of putting together a program that will address this situation specifically and allow us to deliver to the customer even in the event of a disaster. Creating redundant systems and establishing a disaster-proof workflow with outsource partners sounds easy, but there is a lot of complexity to it. I honestly think most companies haven’t thought of their own disaster recovery issues because they have not included sole-sourcing in their sales strategy.”

Weathering the economic slowdown; learning how to reduce time, grief for clients
Displayed on the whiteboard in the company boardroom is a list of more than 40 New England printing companies that are now defunct, all of which have closed their doors in just the last three years. Kervick keeps this list as a stark reminder of difficult economic times.

“Traditionally, when the economy dips, printers have been among the last to feel it because large corporations often keep budgets intact through the remainder of their fiscal year,” Kervick said. “Several months before Sept. 11th, our sales began to decline and we had already taken steps to weather a difficult time. After the tragedy, many printers in this area were unable to recover from the economic devastation and ended up closing their doors forever.”

In better economic times, used printing equipment available for sale was often old and tired, and few printers were willing to take the chance of buying sub-standard equipment. With so many printers going under in the last few years, the market was awash in newer equipment that Bassette was able to scoop up at a fraction of the original price. “Some of this equipment was hardly broken in when we bought it,” Kervick said.

Clearly, Kervick and his team are excited about the acquisition and installation of the new equipment, but they are also realistic regarding its overall importance in the big picture. “New, updated equipment is certainly important, and we are delighted to have it, but equipment is not a strategy,” Kervick emphasized. “I’m always amazed at the number of printers who feel they can gain a sustainable competitive advantage merely by buying off-the-shelf technology.”

“It used to be that every time we did a prospective client presentation, the first thing we did was submit an equipment list. Today, the finest equipment in the world won’t distinguish you from the competition. Now, our presentations center around a much bigger picture: our ability to reduce cost, time and grief for the client. We barely talk about equipment anymore.”

Retooling a 106-year-old company
The growth in Bassette’s business and the addition of sophisticated digital equipment along with a new six-color press has prompted Kervick to initiate some major changes on the production floor in order to make room for these new acquisitions. Almost every section of the manufacturing area is under construction. The digital imaging area, formerly the cafeteria, is now the home of the new black and white Heidelberg 9110 and the Xerox 60/60 digital press. The digital imaging department is also currently being set up as a secure room to ensure confidentiality while doing financially sensitive printing work.

In another area of the plant, plumbers and electricians are hard at work on the installation of Bassette’s new six-color press that will be an addition to the existing presses, rather than a replacement.

“Surge capacity can be a real problem in this industry and when the business comes in, we have to be able to figure out how to handle our surge business,” Kervick explained. “The glut of equipment on the market makes it not worth selling our oldest press, so keeping it in good working condition with a cross-trained staff can help break the bottleneck, no matter how much extra business comes in.”

Sharing the burden and sharing the wealth
A friendly atmosphere exists throughout the plant, but so does one of fixed determination to meet every need of every client, perhaps a natural by-product of the veteran work force. Many of Bassette’s 66 employees have passed the 20-year mark with the company and several will retire as 35 to 40-year employees. The emphasis on the importance of family, and the flexibility Kervick allows is the reason that many employees are happy to stay.

Accommodating children’s grade school schedules with different start times or welcoming family in the break room for dinner with a second shift employee are ways of taking care of the people who take care of the business. Kervick also has an “open book” policy and shares what is going on in the company from an economic standpoint with all of his employees. The owner believes this “open-book” philosophy fosters a healthy environment because everyone knows what is going on. “The employees are privy to our top line sales and our bottom line profit figures,” he said. “When we do well, there are company-wide bonuses from the top executives right down to the janitor. And I’m proud to say we ‘made bonus’ in our most recently completed fiscal year.”

Over the past two years, Bassette Company’s sales and customer base have continued to grow, and although technology has reduced the actual space needed for printing, Bassette’s new, broader approach to the printing business is to use that space for managing and controlling its clients’ inventories.

As more and more clients have embraced the Supply Chain Profit Solution, Kervick and his team are highlighting the success of the program to prospective clients, further expanding the business.

Although Bassette Company’s approach to printing has changed dramatically, since 1891 and the days of letterpress, Kervick’s commitment, sense of history and business philosophy is a tribute to his grandfather who against all odds, worked his way up, treated his employees well and looked to the future to grow his business.

About the author: Robin MacLeod is a freelance writer living in Longmeadow, Mass. She can be reached by e-mail at .