Transformations Series: Content Critical Growing with Inkjet – Part 2
Earlier this month we shared the first part of my interview with Fred Van Alstyne, Chief Operating Officer and John Slaney, Chief Technology Officer at Content Critical. We covered the process through which they decided to install inkjet which laid the groundwork for today’s post. This part of our discussion provides insight into their significant success in driving revenue with inkjet. As you will see, inkjet was not a panacea. Turning inkjet into a profit engine required a close look at people, processes and markets.
Kimberly Meyers: How did you prepare your staff for the changes?
Fred Van Alstyne: We relied on Canon for training since that’s where we bought our machines. All of our technicians went to their Boca Raton Customer Experience Center for training. Canon recommended Elizabeth Gooding [from Inkjet Insight] to work with the sales team and we quickly realized that our traditional print people didn’t understand the technology. We knew we needed to make changes to how we sold. John and I realized we needed to stop leading with print, we were actually selling a full-service solution for our customers.
Prior to bringing on inkjet (2008-2014) the discussion with our customers was about saving money. All that meant is we were lowering our price to save them money. By converting to inkjet we became much more efficient and were able to deliver the lower price to our customers at a lower cost to us, increasing our profit margins. And we were in a much better place as a viable company.
KM: What helped increase demand or brought in more unique work?
FVA: We had a lot of preprinted shells (mastheads) that were customer supplied. By going to the white paper factory, we picked up all that work. Once we showed that we could print all that in-line at a much-reduced cost we got an immediate increase in revenue. This happened within six months after installation. We no longer have preprinted shells. They were gone quickly.
As we were progressing and we had this speed capacity that we didn’t have before, we could take on longer run work. It allowed us to go after larger customers.
John Slaney: Also, we no longer had inventory control issues, no more waste of preprinted materials. All that was eliminated.
KM: Conventional wisdom tells us ROI takes time. How long did it take for you to gain necessary run rates and can you pinpoint any certain event that created a tipping point when you saw a noticeable gain in inkjet customers?
FVA: The impact was immediate. We installed in January of 2014 and by the middle of the year we started seeing improvement in our profitability. In 2015, as new sales and marketing processes kicked in, we began to experience volume increases. We grew double digits every year until 2017 and then over 16% in 2018 and 43% in 2019. Along the way we added a Canon i300 and two Canon ColorStream 6900s. We now have four machines. And a host of toner-based cut sheet devices.
KM: Did these new capabilities help you uncover new markets?
FVA: In 2016 we started on boarding several new customers. Our primary growth was across tolling, EzPass, and life insurance/annuity companies. That reflected a change in our business plan during this period. We had success and continue to have success.
KM: How can a printer most effectively promote its inkjet offering?
JS: For transactional print the ability to demonstrate a call to action, the value of color throughout the document, the variability, multiple pages, personalization and on-certs. And leveraging these capabilities to get those messages out there in regulated or semi-regulated communications.
In direct mail, it is introducing real detailed variability in those streams for the best call to action to improve their ROI. That’s critical in that space.
FVA: The multiple branding aspect, like with life insurance and all lines of insurance companies. They are selling through strategic partners, and now they have the ability to be really variable and address any need that a business would have
KM: Do you have short-term and long-term goals, in this pandemic environment?
FVA: We see a lot of opportunity due to Covid-19. Our pipeline has been really strong. Former clients have come back to us. I think there will be pressure on the in-plants (e.g., where do they get their redundancy). Are they in position to buy high-speed inkjet and gain savings when their year-over-year revenue is declining? They can easily outsource that work and get a better solution.
We are expanding from the east to the west coast, in the rocky mountain area and south. We believe this will help us from an output perspective and give our customers additional comfort.
We have a desire to move toward [Six Sigma] LEAN manufacturing. We went through Six Sigma LEAN processing. This is a 2021 goal to get the training and operations moving in that direction.
We’re also focused on an A-player strategy to help our staff development since the company is growing.
We also implemented Crawford’s PRO Conductor for page level verification which drives us to more roll-to-roll work. It allows us to gang jobs and provide even greater efficiency to our customers.
JS: We expect to only have toner boxes that do MICR by the end of 2021 in one of our centers. We’re getting further away from the toner devices.
KM: What sets Content Critical apart from the competition?
FVA: We just finished our strategic meeting discussing exactly this, so your timing is good. Our new brand promise is CREATE: Configurable, Redundant, Experience, Adaptable, Transparency and Excellence.
Everything we do is configurable. We used to say customizable. Our solution is built and has been tested and proven, we can make changes and adapt to our customer’s business and environment.
We have true redundancy since we operate out of multiple facilities all the time. As long as the product is in our facility, we can pretty much produce it where it makes sense that day. This gives customers a lot of comfort.
Our API ecosystem brings adaptability to the process and to the customer. Everything we have is “plug and play”. We want to bring best in class service to our customers. We have trusted partners and we can accommodate our customers’ requests though APIs.
Our workflow is adapted to each customer. There is an ease of implementation that we believe is considerably easier than our main competition.
We provide transparency into key information. Using our CXView web portal our customers get access to the process, results, reconciliation and SLAs. This gives them comfort that we’re meeting those requirements.
Creating a knowledge base and sharing it across the solution enables company excellence.
A final comment, we have a really good reputation in the marketplace about doing what we say we’ll do. We deliver. We’re very conservative because we want to meet or exceed promises and delivery. Our customers are happy to tell our story for us.