FINLAY — REDEFINING AN INDUSTRY
The term printer almost carries a negative connotation these days. Label a company a “commercial printer,” and the prevailing feeling is that the business has been painted into a corner, a dead end of sorts.
Certainly, this is not the case, but a new generation of companies that derive profit from putting ink on paper for customers has all but disavowed the term “printer.” Look at 75 percent of the companies that have changed their name in recent years. The word “printer” has been stricken from the name and corporate logo.
Still, the movement is less about signaling a dying art and more a trumpet of the evolutionary revolution that has swept the graphic arts industry, particularly since the recessionary blanket that smothered many a longstanding printing company in the first couple years of the 21st century.
Yes, the evolution was born out of necessity, but it was also a cleansing and invigorating movement that has ushered in an era of full-service, end-to-end product development, management, production and distribution. The printer has morphed into a solutions provider, keeping its customers in-house from start to finish, reducing vendors and costs in the process.
Case in point: Finlay Printing. Correction: just plain Finlay, thank you.
“We are so not a printer,” beams Kevin Kalagher, CEO of the Bloomfield, CT-based company that employs 100 people and now carries the tagline ‘Delivering Success.’ “We’re offering a lot of things that, 10 years ago, we didn’t provide.”
By the way, this particular next generation of not-a-printer is 130 years young. The establishment’s longevity is credited to the notion of addressing the needs of its customers and letting the client dictate future endeavors.
From a traditionalist standpoint, Finlay is a general commercial sheetfed printer. But its product and service offering has blossomed into every aspect of business that supports all of the needs of its clientele, from project management to digital asset management, from sales force automation systems to digital printing, and from fulfillment to distribution.
Not All Ink-based
Printing is, of course, all part of the package. But it is a package that offers much, much more.
In the process, Finlay continues to grow by avoiding the business potholes that have shredded the tires of longtime printers. Finlay doesn’t seek jobs, it forges partnerships. The company doesn’t battle for a slice of the pie, it bakes an entire cart of desserts.
“We try to develop accounts and don’t pursue the bid, price-only situation that so many printers have gotten caught up into,” says Kevin Kalagher, part of a one-two executive punch along with brother Todd, Finlay’s president.
“We’re out there creating value with a solution for a customer that might involve a sales force automation product for a client’s sales force, to get customized brochures from the field without having to go back through corporate or an agency. In doing so, we get the static printing, the large run sheetfed work, because we’ve helped their sales force be more productive out in the field.
“We purchased a new HP Indigo 3050 press for personalization and versioning. We’re developing programs with a couple of key clients to both introduce personalization into their marketing strategy and service current needs that they have for different versions in different sections of the country.”
Among its core offerings are point-of-sale products aimed at the beverage, hardware and sporting goods industries, including case cards, table tents, banners and shelf talkers. Finlay also addresses the higher education sector with view books and capital campaign brochures, as well as the corporate financial segment with annual reports.
Keeping in the 40˝ realm, another Finlay specialty is the museum/art world, producing exhibition books, gallery showing invitations, coffee table art books and posters for customers of some of the largest galleries and museums in the Northeast.
The Kalaghers are proud of their MAN Roland press arsenal, which includes a pair of acquisitions from last year’s Graph Expo in Chicago: a six-color, 40˝ MAN Roland 700 with computer-controlled inking and tower coating system, along with a 10-color, 40˝ MAN Roland 700 convertible perfector with the computer-controlled inking system. They join four other Roland models in four-, six-, seven- and eight-color varieties.
In Kevin Kalagher’s 25 years in the industry, he has found the MAN Roland brand to deliver consistent value, but there is method behind Finlay’s dedication to the press manufacturer. In Todd Kalagher’s estimation, the company appreciates MAN Roland’s dedication to JDF (Job Definition Format) and computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) standards.
“We took the time to learn how we were going to be able to utilize efficiencies and learn about the manufacturers that were going to be partners and not just suppliers. And we asked almost all of our customers what direction they were taking,” Todd Kalagher reveals. “When we started down the road of looking at JDF and JMF, and whether it really works…we wanted to be integrated so we could really take advantage of the efficiencies.
Waiting on Technology
“There’s a lot of hype about JDF in a lot of areas where it doesn’t work yet. We wanted to be able to play in the manufacturing supply chain, have a product that worked and a product that our customers wanted. With this three-tiered kind of decision-making process, it made it a lot clearer for those of us who understood what was going on in the marketplace, because we certainly don’t want to buy someone’s old technology.”
Taking cost out of the manufacturing process via CIM is only one of the critical decisions the Finlay executive team has made in the last year or so. In 2000, the Kalaghers sold then-Finlay Printing to the priNexus consolidation network. The priNexus model proved to be unsuccessful and, in 2004, the organization sold all but one company back to the original owners. The Kalaghers officially reclaimed Finlay’s helm last summer.
Almost immediately, the Kalaghers launched into a capital expenditure program to refortify the company’s equipment roster. It has done nothing but reaffirm the brothers’ vision for a profitable future.
“It was a wonderful learning experience,” Kevin Kalagher notes. “We learned a lot about the national printing scene, the finance side of the business, the structuring of debt and equity, and how to integrate and deal long distance with sister companies. We’re a better company for having done it, but now we’re looking forward.”
The present doesn’t look all that glum, either. The company posted $24 million in sales last year, and Kevin Kalagher credits growth to intensified marketing campaigns by its clients, companies that have increased their budgets to do so. Even more impressive is the early returns on 2005, which provided the best first quarter in the history of the company.
The solid start to ‘05 bodes well for Finlay’s investment strategies. In addition to the MAN Roland presses and the Indigo HP 3050, Finlay upgraded to the EFI Hagen OA MIS platform in 2004. At press time, the company was also auditioning Agfa and Creo products for a PDF workflow in the prepress area.
Bolstering the company’s fortunes is a marketing strategy implemented by Todd Kalagher that sells overall solutions rather than printing or jobs. Asking the right questions is an important element, he says, in finding out just what product the client is looking to obtain, as well as what is the intended function of the product.
When Finlay gets at the heart of what a client wants its product to accomplish and who are their customers being targeted, it propels the company to a whole new playing field.
“Dropping the word ‘printing’ from our name and Todd’s approach to going after the customer really allows us to play in a higher value space,” Kevin Kalagher notes. “We get to do work that provides higher margins than the traditional printer enjoys. In today’s world, the printer has been placed in a commodity box, but we don’t allow ourselves to get pegged. We’re stepping outside that box to differentiate ourselves from the traditional printer and to attract a higher value, higher margin of work than the traditional print bid allows.”
As the company continues to scale the marketing mountain and augment its JDF platform to remove costs and bolster the bottom line, the Kalaghers know that sheetfed printing may help pave the way to success, but it is far from being the only avenue to a future of full-service project management for clients.
“There’s a lot of challenges in the digital world, from MIS right down to production and fulfillment,” Todd Kalagher says. “Right now, we want to be the best at all of these things, to be the best in class. We’re going to challenge ourselves to become that model company, where people not only say that we do something well, but that we do it the best.”
