Big changes
are brewing at specialty color sheetfed shop Kirkwood Printing
Combined, the four men have more than 75 years of printing experience and have brought with them roughly $10 million in client accounts. Winship, Kelley and Ed Mitchell, Kirkwood Printing’s longtime vice president of sales and marketing, shared their vision recently for the future of the company. Coppinger, Cummings and Krikorian were unavailable. Getting back to a customer-focused
atmosphere Francis had four sons and Edward had four daughters. In true, tight-knit family fashion, all eight first cousins became equal owners. Kelley’s mother Catherine was one of those eight cousins. Another cousin, Fran Canzano, son of Francis, was president in 1999 when the family voted to sell Acme to World Color. Three years later, World Color was acquired by Quebecor Printing, which changed its name to Quebecor World. Quebecor continues to own Acme today. From their experience through the Acme acquisition, Kelley and Winship are convinced that printing is best done on a local level where printers can stay close to their clients and be more responsive to meeting their needs and providing solutions. That is what prompted them and Coppinger to find a better fit personally and professionally. “Coming over to Kirkwood was a perfect opportunity to surf our own wave,” Kelley said. “There were only a few printers we thought we could go to, and Kirkwood was our top choice. These guys (Kirkwood and its current employees) are heavy hitters. They’re very knowledgeable when it comes to quality color printing. They have the printing capacity to immediately handle additional work. It’s been less than a month, and this is a very good fit. For me, I’ve been shadowing Kirk to try to learn as much about the operation here as I can.” “We wanted to get back to a family-owned, customer-focused atmosphere,” Winship said, “and this is a great place to do that. The printing horsepower that exists on the production floor here just blew me away the first time I saw it. There is more sheetfed printing capability here than we had at Acme. Our goal is to fill the hours of the day with printing work,” he said. Changes coming in production The company presently has 75 full-time employees, 50 of which are considered production workers, including six customer service representatives. The new owners are prepared to add 10 to 15 production employees over the next year as they ramp up production. “There’s a huge amount of talented people out of work from places like Daniels, Acme, Andrews and others that we intend to tap into,” Kelley said.
Kirkwood has four 40-inch sheetfed presses. There are two Mitsubishis, a seven-color and an eight-color, both with in-line aqueous coating; and two Heidelbergs, a four-color Speedmaster Perfector, and a six-color, that at eight-years-old is the company’s oldest press. The men are convinced that this marriage couldn’t be better. They each share Kirk Krikorian’s penchant for color excellence. It was bred into them at Acme, and Krikorian has built a successful career and company on the same guiding printing principle. About the company The company moved to its present location on Route 38 in Wilmington in 1980. Two additions have been made to the building since then, and it now encompasses 50,000 square feet of space housing state of the art technology in prepress and the pressroom, complemented by a complete bindery operation that includes letter press scoring, diecutting and wire-o binding capability. Two Agfa Xcalibur 45 thermal platesetters drive an ApogeeX PDF-based front-end and output Agfa Thermostar P970 thermal plates. The system represents Kirkwood’s third generation of computer to plate technology. The latest investment has been in proofing. The company installed a Kodak Approval XP4 proofing system to supplement the Agfa Sherpa equipment in place. The Kodak system initially costs about $68,000. Service contracts will bring the bill to more than $100,000, but Mitchell, Kelley and Winship don’t bat an eye at that. They realize proofing is critical to their work and to their clients. Individual RIPs are devoted to each of Kirkwood’s four presses to increase throughput, but the conversion to a CTP workflow increased efficiencies tremendously and reduced the time it took to create a job once the files arrived. Right-sizing the company after the
slowdown In a relatively short time, sales began to dry up and eventually shrivel to $9 million annually. As the slowdown took hold, Krikorian and his team made numerous changes. They cut their payroll nearly in half to 53 employees, and learned they could still function effectively with fewer workers. Slowly, they built back sales and grew confident that they could continue without needlessly adding payroll.
One year after 9/11, Kirkwood’s sales were up 10 percent. They closed 2003 with another 9 percent gain in total sales. The numbers for 2004 look good as well. Kirkwood got back to a stable footing, but Mitchell and other senior managers knew they had plenty of unused printing capacity that they needed to fill. Mitchell tried numerous tacks. He recruited sales personnel; some new, some with established books of business. He purchased lists. He encouraged his eight sales representatives to try new methods of prospecting. Overall, the success that we were looking for still was not there.” “We knew we needed to do something totally different to achieve new growth,” Mitchell said. “We’ve done very well coming back from where we were in 2000, but we have been anxious to grow our business. When Will, Eddie and Bob approached Kirk, there was excitement over their ideas.” Never head-to-head competitors Its bread and butter work has been brochures, sell sheets, point of purchase displays, posters, financial reports, catalogs and postcards. Among its client base has been financial, advertising, medical and software companies and educational institutions. That is all about to change, as Kelley and Winship see an opportunity to load up their new presses with longer run jobs. Annual report printing, among other work, will be key to filling press time at Kirkwood. The men were responsible in the past for producing Exxon Mobil’s annual report, a 2.5 million-piece press run that was worth $2.2 million in business a few years ago. “The clients we have brought with us to Kirkwood have embraced the change with open arms,” Winship said. “They don’t feel like we’re going to make a change to hurt them. This is the right platform for our customers.” Now, the new leadership feels they have little time to waste. Within two weeks of the expanded leadership, contractors are busy building three separate client rooms for clients who come to make press checks or meet with Kirkwood management. The rooms are being designed with the client in mind. They’ll include comfortable furniture and ample workspace, Internet access, a television, telephone, refrigerator and more. “For us, it is and will always be about the customer,” Kelley said. Despite the national trend of slowing print sales, Kelley, Winship and Mitchell are confident they can garner a good portion of the printing work that is out there. Most of Kirkwood’s work comes from the heavily populated portion of New England: Boston and the surrounding communities, reaching to the Manchester and Concord, N.H., area to the north; to Worcester, Mass., and beyond to the west; and to Boston’s South Shore and Providence, R.I., to the south. They are not intimidated by perceived threats to printing that exist today. In their specialty area of multi-color printing, they haven’t seen an erosion of print like in lower-end quick printing where many one-color brochures and less expensive printing has gone directly toward the Internet. “My grandfather used to bend over and pick up paper off the floor of his shop,” Kelley said. “That represented his attitude and the pride he had in his work and his workplace. We have that same feeling, and it is evident that it is a culture Kirk has created here at Kirkwood. We are putting additional tender loving care into current and future client relationships, and those we’ve brought with us. Our future looks bright.” About the author: John Scibelli
is editor of New England Printer & Publisher magazine and director
of communications for Printing Industries of New England. He can be
reached at 508-804-4113 or by |
Will
Winship IV, Bob Coppinger, and Eddie Kelley, grandson of one of the
two brothers who took Acme to national and international printing prominence,
along with John Cummings founder of Image Scan of Providence, RI, closed
the deal for majority ownership on Oct. 27, the same day the Boston
Red Sox won their first World Series championship since 1918.
Mitchell
manages eight sales representatives, but that area too will be built
up with additional employees over time. Although they are not big on
titles, Kelley is executive vice president, general manager; Winship
is executive vice president, sales; and Coppinger is president. Mitchell
remains vice president of sales and marketing.
They’ve
gotten sales back to $11 million annually, Mitchell explained. “Though
we had to down size and lose a few clients, we found that the majority
stayed with us. They might have bought a little less during that time,
but that was OK. We reached a point in our recovery that we knew we
were going to make it.”
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