Integrity Graphics,
Inc.: From conventional prepress firm grows a multi-dimensional communications
company Integrity offers conventional offset printing, multi-color digital on-demand reproduction and variable data printing, mailing and fulfillment, complete finishing services, digital and traditional photography, CD and DVD duplication, and web-to-print online order entry for clients as well as other printers and agencies. The company’s growth over nearly 20 years can be attributed to the firm’s philosophy from the start: hire quality people, continually focus on improving the quality of its products and services, remain a leader by embracing new ideas and technologies, and create lasting value for clients, vendors and partners. Salesman by day; proofer by night
Two of the biggest accounts that helped Integrity in its early days were Levitz Furniture and the grocer Purity Supreme. Work, and accounts, expanded to include Staples, Agway, ITT Corporation, AIG Bankers Trust among others. In addition to circulars, Integrity had a hand in annual reports and marketing collateral material. “I was a salesman by day, and a proofer by night,” LaValla said. One of the company’s early investments was a $60,000 digital camera for prep work that sometimes included elaborate meals that were cooked on sight and presented in a kitchen that was set up at the company, which had eight full-time employees after its first year in operation. “The aroma from cooking filled the workplace in those days,” he said. “We ate well too, as we would always eat the food after we were done with the photo shoots.” Another early investment was an FX desktop computer, one of the earliest models released by a new company called Apple Computer. It wasn’t long before other business-minded folks saw the potential of how computers could be a useful tool in the workplace. A business niche that had about 200 prepress companies when Integrity started exploded to more than 3,000 by the early 1990s. Typesetting may have been on its way out, but desktop publishing was here to stay.
Before the expansion to include print manufacturing, Integrity had amassed an impressive array of digital prepress equipment. In addition to being one of the first to invest in a high-end digital camera, by 1993 Integrity had two digital scanners and high-end systems that allowed it produce work six times faster than desktop systems. “We figured if we’re going to get into this, we might as well jump in with both feet,” La Valla said. Integrity developed a solid reputation as a new alternative to short-run collateral print work, which was enhanced by the company’s experience with color correction and file prep issues from its humble beginning. While it had a press, and growing sales, Integrity was missing at least one link from calling itself a “full-service” printer as the mid-1990s slid into the late-1990s: it had no bindery. Most finishing work was subcontracted out. “It wasn’t an issue for many of our clients, but we knew internally that if we wanted to grow as printers, we needed a bindery,” La Valla said. “We did well,” he added. “We were careful not to carry a lot of debt. Several of us were willing to go with out paychecks to get this thing going in the early days.” Those early sacrifices would pay dividends later. If you’re going to grow, go big
“I knew the owner well enough to call him up,” La Valla said. “I called him one day in 1996. That started the dialogue.” La Valla’s call turned out to be fortuitous. Fox Press owner Bob Charbonneau had reached the crossroads many owners do. Charbonneau had to decide whether to make major investments to keep his company viable and competitive in the coming years, or develop an exit strategy to leave commercial printing. He chose the latter. “Bob decided he wasn’t going to re-invest. Also, he wanted to sell the building. He had a bindery. He had older press equipment,” La Valla said. “We were growing. We were two miles away from his building and we needed more space. We knew we needed bindery and finishing capability. It couldn’t have been a better match.” The deal was completed in 1998, and to the credit of the senior executives at both companies, no jobs were lost. All 37 employees from Fox joined Integrity’s 40 full-time employees. La Valla said since the dissolution of Fox Press, former owner Bob Charbonneau has been enjoying retirement in Florida. “Bob had groomed a very good sales team but one factor that concerned me at the time was that one of Fox’s clients accounted for 35 percent of the company’s total sales.” La Valla got the needed reassurance from that client that it wouldn’t abandon the newly formed company. The Fox acquisition put Integrity squarely into the commercial sheetfed arena. Since that deal, Integrity acquired three other businesses. In 2002, Integrity acquired Standard Printing, a family-owned printing company in South Windsor with annual sales of more than a $1 million. Also in 2002, it bought Typehouse Design, a pre-press house and a developer of asset management software/workflow business that was re-incarnated into Integrity’s emerging online print order entry business, PrintHub and MarketingHub. And its last acquisition was Bay Data in 2003, the core of Integrity’s CD and DVD duplication business. “The Fox Press deal gave us the ability to compete at a higher level in the local market against our larger competitors,” La Valla said. “We couldn’t compete before.” For a while, the newly formed company was known as FoxIntegrity. Within time, the Fox name was retired.
Before Integrity changed its press line up, it had five presses in operation: a five-color 40-inch, a six-color 40-inch, a six-color 28 inch, a two-color 26-inch, and a two-color 40-inch. In addition to gaining needed production floor space, Integrity benefited from the cost efficiencies of reconfiguring its pressroom with just two offset presses, both of which are Komoris. In 2000, the company bought a six-color 40-inch press with extended coater that can run 15,000 impressions per hour, and in 2006 the company installed a six-color 40-inch press with four over two perfecting ability. That press also has an extended coater. “This is my third Komori,” La Valla said. “Each time we looked for a press, Komori has had the best deal and the best press.” Other equipment investments since the Fox Press acquisition included a Muller Martini saddle stitcher, two MBO folding machines, and a Creo Trendsetter that completed the company’s transition to a digital workflow. An area of the production department is devoted to digital printing
where a silver-hooded Nexpress machine fills one wall. Integrity purchased
the NexPress while Heidelberg and Kodak were equal partners in that
venture. Heidelberg sold its Integrity’s leadership is comfortable with its mix of clients. No longer does one client account for 35 percent of the company’s total sales. La Valla calls the client base a “nice mix” from financial services and insurance, retail businesses, consumer goods, and agencies. He says his sale team is “scratching” business in New York City, but adds there are plenty of potential new clients within the Nutmeg state. The Boston market has been good to Integrity as well, as La Valla said he makes regular trips to the region to tend to the needs of at least one key client and follows up on leads for others prospects. It’s people that make the difference
While Victor La Valla and Lorusso are both graduates of Rochester Institute of Technology’s print management program, and Joe La Valla Sr. worked in the printing business in many different roles with Response Graphics, a division of Moore Business. Joe Jr., chose another route. “I was the rebellious son,” he said. “I went into management. I knew from about the eighth or ninth grade that I wanted to run my own business. I just didn’t know what kind of business or industry it would be in.” The New Rochelle, N.Y., native and die-hard Yankees baseball fan, who managed a service department for eight years before starting Integrity, keeps his father’s Rolodex on a bookcase behind his desk. Employees make it happen There are two production shifts were employees work eight to 10-hour shifts five days per week, eight-hour shifts for prepress and other electronic prep workers, anywhere from one to eight people working in bindery, which is often on 10-hour shifts, and several employees are devoted solely to running Integrity’s digital printing operations. “We offer our employees a generous package in terms of wages and benefits,” La Valla said. “Employees can earn up to five weeks of paid vacation. The average tenure of employees here is 12 years, so it appears people enjoy working here.”
He worked out an agreement with computer training firm New Horizons so any company employee can get needed training whether it was for front-office administrative applications such as Excel, or workflow training to handle incoming files from clients. Longtime employee Gerry Gerlach has been a committee member of GRACoL, a volunteer industry group that has developed an evolving set of guidelines and recommendations to be used as an industry-wide reference source in quality color printing. The acronym stands for the General Requirements for Applications in Commercial Offset Lithography. La Valla’s emphasis on training contributed to the company being well position to accept and handle client files that began arriving in InDesign after Adobe created a design program to compete with QuarkXpress, the market leader. For his own professional development, La Valla is a member of Vistage, a peer group of company presidents and CEOs from many businesses. He commits — and looks forward — to an eight-hour meeting each month with peers to share ideas, experiences and solutions to the challenges business owners encounter regularly. Committed to the industry’s future “We had more than 150 applicants in one of the early years, but applications have dropped off recently,” he said. “We’ve decided to pull back and take a look at the program and see what we can do differently. “On the whole, our industry has got to do a better job of encouraging young people to consider entering our industry as a career.” Keeping the focus on the customer The company didn’t stay as a prepress house when desktop computers changed the rules and decimated long-standing business models. The company pushed its way into digital services and eventually printing. The company didn’t remain a traditional commercial printer after it bought its first press and later acquired Fox Press. It looked for new ways to deliver value to clients. It invested in bindery equipment. It invested in digital print reproduction and its sales staff is now educating clients how variable data print jobs can yield a greater return on a marketing venture. La Valla sees the investment in this web-to-print portal as a way to extend print services in a convenient way to clients with far-flung operations. He used an insurance carrier with a national sales force spread across the country as an example of the type of client MarketingHub can help. If brand identity and uniform is important to the company — and it usually is — an account can be created for the client and its employees on MarketingHub so any employee can log in and order business cards, corporate brochures or other printed material they need. The system allows the client to order only the amount they need. Integrity’s MarketingHub is powered by Pageflex’s web-to-print technology. The portal utilizes Pageflex’s suite of marketing automation tools that are integrated with interactive document customization capabilities. The portal enables the end-user client to achieve significant savings of time and resources by gaining greater efficiencies in the print ordering process. The service is another example of leveraging emerging technology to increase the value La Valla’s firm can deliver to clients. Integrity Graphics’ venture into web-to-print online order entry is a continuation of the company’s push into the future. And its future looks bright. About the author: John Scibelli
is editor of New England Printer & Publisher and director of |
Guided
by a five-member executive management team led by company president
and chief executive officer Joseph E. La Valla and senior vice president
John C. Lorusso, Integrity Graphics is an 85-employee company in Windsor
that offers an array of marketing communications services that have
helped propel annual sales to more than $13 million.
They
strived to gain a foothold by doing the separations for color advertising
circulars that went into Sunday newspapers regionally and nationally.
“With
the advent of the desktop computer, everyone saw a business opportunity,
and the market got very crowded,” he said. “We needed to
alter our business plan. By 1993, we decided to get into printing. We
pulled the trigger in 1994 and began to shift our business, and in 1995
we bought our first press, a 28-inch six-color Komori with a coating
unit.”
La
Valla’s biggest acquisition was his first. In 1998, he engineered
the purchase of Fox Press, a commercial printing company that had been
doing business in the Hartford area for 85 years. Fox had about $6 million
in annual sales at the time.
Fox’s
presses were functional and Integrity pumped a lot of work through the
cylinders while La Valla and his team devised a strategy to overhaul
the production area. 
La
Valla is a part owner in the company with Lorusso, and brother Victor
La Valla, who does not have a role in the day-to-day operations. A graduate
of Rochester Institute of Technology’s print management program,
Victor La Valla is a board member of American Rescue Workers, an organization
devoted to the rehabilitation of substance abuse victims. Victor La
Valla devotes his efforts to help place individuals from the program
in jobs in the printing industry.
One
La Valla mantra is “train, train, train.” 
It’s
developed a web-based made-to-order automated marketing solution Integrity
calls “Marketing Hub.” The company has two versions available.
One is for corporations and agencies — companies that can be considered
traditional clients of printing firms — as well as other printing
companies that may not have the resources to invest in their own application
service provider (ASP) model, but are attracted to ideas of providing
that service to their clients. 
.
