Goodway Graphics: Venerable company makes transition from offset to digital; sees a bright and busy future
By John Scibelli
“Goodway Graphics is a sales oriented company, not a manufacturing company.”

“Our ability to sell determines what we will manufacture.”

“The company is not in the printing business, but in the business of graphic services.”

Those statements were made in October 1967 by a marketing VP at Goodway Graphics’ national headquarters in Philadelphia. They hold true today, and epitomize the mission of Goodway Graphics’ Burlington, Mass., operation.

Nowhere in corporate literature or on its Web site is Goodway Graphics described as a printing company, nor is the focus about the company.

From its mission statement to the thinking and planning by senior executives, to the day-to-day activity on a sprawling production floor, the focus is squarely on the customer and the services the 60-employee company provides.

One sentence in the Burlington plant’s mission statement sums up what Goodway is all about: “The primary focus of our company is to understand your needs so as to determine the best method of utilizing our web, sheetfed and digital capabilities to achieve your objectives.”

Led by industry veteran and 11-year company president, Noel Doherty, the Burlington company posted overall sales of $8 million in 2005. More impressive, however, has been the company’s steady transition away from a reliance upon offset printing for the majority of its sales toward the marketing of digital reproduction capabilities and other ancillary services such as mailing, fulfillment and more. Today, digital work represents 60 percent of Goodway’s overall sales.

Doherty, and Vice President of Sales and Marketing Rick Joly, expect digital sales to become a bigger chunk of the company’s business in the coming years. In fact, they have developed a corporate strategy in terms of capital investments based on that belief. They rely on Noel’s niece, Operations Manager Kim Doherty, for the strategy to be executed on the shop floor. She supervises production, prepress, customer service, a bustling digital production area, finishing, mailing, fulfillment and shipping. Numerous department managers answer to Kim.

Part of a bigger organization
The Burlington Goodway Graphics is part of a privately owned national company of the same name. Milton Wolk started a printing business in Philadelphia in 1928. His sons, Beryl and Donald, own the company today and are active in day-to-day operations. The company’s headquarters remain in Philadelphia, with production operations in Springfield, Va., and Burlington, Mass. – which company officials consider the “Boston plant.” Total company sales in 2005 were approximately $40 million.

Today, six sales people in Philadelphia sell marketing programs to national companies, which get produced at Goodway’s plants. Eighty percent of the sales from Philadelphia involve marketing programs with automotive dealers and the creative agencies that work with the dealers. The bottom line is that sales created by the Philadelphia staff provide a steady stream of work for Goodway’s manufacturing plants including Burlington, supplementing work generated by Doherty, Joly and four sales representatives.

Setting up shop in Massachusetts; digital investment begins
A major chunk of the Massachusetts economy in the 1960s and 1970s was built upon the nation’s defense industry, and to printers that meant lots of work handling government proposals streaming out of the U.S. Defense Department. Goodway wanted — and got — a lot of that business. Companies such as Raytheon, General Dynamics, RCA, Saunders, General Electric, and GTE were among Goodway’s customers.

Once the defense industry cooled following the high inflation years of the mid 1970s, the mini-computer bubble took over and Goodway locked up work from Digital Equipment Corp., Prime Computer, and Wang, all companies that no longer exist.

In each emergence or growth of an industry sector, Goodway, like other printers throughout the region, was there to provide the work.

Doherty worked 25 years as a sales representative for Goodway in those early days. He left and worked at Kirkwood Printing in Wilmington for a three-year stint, before returning to Goodway as president in 1995.

When he returned, Goodway already had its first piece of digital equipment, a black and white Docutech from Xerox.

“Our Springfield, VA., operation was the first Goodway plant to see the change coming,” he said. Although no one called it a transformation then, the expansion into digital reproduction equipment was underway. The Burlington plant installed its first digital color equipment — a Minolta CF9000 — in 1995. Other equipment soon followed. Goodway was among the first Massachusetts companies to invest in an iGen from Xerox. That was installed in August 2003.

Responding to a tightening market
Joly, Goodway’s vice president of sales and marketing for the past two years, said the company moved years ago to become a one-stop shop for clients. It added complete mailing services nearly four years ago and has already upgraded some of its mailing equipment. A regular job for one client, a national testing firm, requires complex coding of testing booklets that are distributed to high school students across the country.

“It’s not just mailing a printed piece,” Joly said. “Many jobs involve some design work, database management and database modeling. It gets very complex, and a long time ago we realized we were much more than a printing company.

“If you don’t offer these services, you’re going to suffer and stagnate because the overall pie for printing is not growing. The pie is so little that you have to be innovative. Customers are looking for solutions. The days of major clients looking for just printing are gone,” he said.

Joly said the company has 200 clients, but 24 make up 80 percent of Goodway’s overall sales. The company offers offset printing on two sheetfed presses, and one 36-inch two-color web press.

The company produced its first variable data printing work in 1998. Nearly eight years later, VDP generates $3 million in sales and represents more than half of the volume of digitally produced work. “Variable data printing is finally, finally catching on,” Joly said.

To augment its growing commitment to the future, Goodway converted to a fully electronic workflow earlier this year. The jewel piece is ECRM’s Mako platesetter. The Mako was ideal for Goodway because it can produce plates that fit on each of the offset presses.

“It’s hard to make significant margins on offset work,” Doherty said. “One way to improve margins is to limit or reduce your costs. We saw the investment in a platesetter as a way to do that. In the short time (about two months) that we’ve had it up and running, our staff is are very satisfied with it.”

Employees make the company tick
Much of Doherty and Joly’s time is consumed with following emerging trends within the industry, plotting a successful strategy for future growth, and handling their own client accounts. As a result, they rely on Kim Doherty on the production floor.

She is the go-to person on nearly all matters related to production and the employees there. She is responsible for all production, scheduling, job estimating, prepress, customer service and more. Thirty-four of the company’s 50 fulltime employees work in production roles. Joly said the company has a slew of part-time employees who are called with little notice when needed.

Kim Doherty has four line managers who report to her, a pressroom manager, bindery manager, prepress manager, and digital production area manager.

“We wouldn’t have had the sustained growth that we’ve enjoyed without talented employees,” Noel Doherty said. “Nor would we have been able to make a transition to having all this digital reproduction capability.”

Goodway runs two production shifts Monday through Friday, each with a 37½-hour workweek.

Talented employees mean more than just skilled workers. It means employees are open-minded enough to understand the industry has changed and they need to change with it. Goodway has veterans with more than 30 years in the business who learned the craft of offset printing years ago, but they understand that a company needs to incorporate new technologies to stay competitive and grow, and provide jobs.

On a recent tour, Facilities Manager John Engdahl was happily constructing expanded office space for Kim Doherty due to one thing — increased activity in the customer service area where three customer service representatives and project managers work.

The five-year horizon
Clearly, Doherty, Joly and the whole Goodway Graphics team wants to expand the company’s reach as a provider of digital reproduction and associated services.

“We’re not a click-based organization,” Joly said. “We’re value-added based. We’re all about helping our clients succeed. If we do that, we have an excellent chance of gaining more work from those clients.”

Joly foresees Goodway expanding into design services and more comprehensive data management. “We’ve written a job description for data management, we just don’t have the volume of work right now to support a staff position. We call in consultants now, but all signs point to that work growing.”

Doherty envisions Goodway as being almost totally digital in five years., “with the next generation of digital equipment replacing our old sheetfed equipment.”

He pointed to the consumer retail industry and the loyalty cards similar in look to credit cards that every store — grocery supermarket chains included — all have. Customers have to swipe those cards through an electronic reader to gain price discounts. The card swiping also allows stores to record individual consumer purchases, whether it’s broccoli, clothing, or more.

“Think of all the data the retail industry is collecting,” he said. “The retail marketplace is more advanced in their understanding of consumer habits and spending. I see that as an opportunity where a company like ours can help that industry with targeted variable data printing based on strong data.”

Doherty and Joly also see a growing relevance for web-to-print applications, where clients can custom order and more directly manipulate order entries, from a very selective print job of 50 custom-built brochures, booklets or proposals, to much larger print orders.

“When you think of adding fulfillment capability to this type of work — whether it’s adding yo-yos, mints, pins, t-shirts or anything else — we’ll be well-positioned to be the gatekeeper for the client,” Doherty said.

“Some of the skill sets we’ll need for the future aren’t presently housed in this building, but that’s what we’re working toward.”

The top two managers responsible for Goodway’s future in Burlington are confident they’ll lead the company to a 50 percent increase in sales over the next five years. They said 2005 ended positively, and they’re aiming for 10 to 20 percent growth in overall sales this year.

“We’re taking a long hard look at digital equipment alternatives that will help get us where we want to be,” Doherty said.

“Ninety percent of the people that look at printing aren’t concerned with how it was produced. That is no longer important to them.”

About the author: John Scibelli is editor of New England Printer & Publisher and director of communications at Printing Industries of New England. He can be reached at 508-804-4113 or by e-mail at jscibelli04@pine.org.