Wayne Barclay
By Ed Avis
Sometimes in business it’s smart to let other people do things for you rather than do them yourself. Wayne Barclay, owner of new IRgA member Blue Digital in Miami, knows that business adage well. He’s a master at outsourcing certain categories of work until the volume is enough to make doing it in-house more profitable.
For example, when he started the company in 2002, he was running two small-format copiers. When a client needed large-format work printed, he outsourced it to a local reprographics company. Eventually, the volume of large-format work grew, so when the firm he was outsourcing to was bought by Thomas Printworks, he invested in his own large-format equipment.
“We said, ‘Look, we’re doing so much work in this, let’s invest in a machine,’” Barclay remembers.
That was a good move because large-format work of one type or another soon became the firm’s bread and butter. Digital document management for AEC-related firms is a core competency today, and Blue Digital is reseller of Laserfiche, a document management system used by many municipalities.
“We have about 10 customers using Laserfiche now,” he says. “We do a lot of document scanning, and many of those customers use Laserfiche. It’s been really good for us, especially when COVID hit, because that just kept steady. The volume wasn’t as much, but we had 10 cities that were using us, so we were able to survive. I’m really focusing on getting more opportunities with Laserfiche because I think it’s a really good model.”
Even though Blue Digital does a lot of scanning and document management in-house, the outsourcing concept still applies to their digital document work. For example, Barclay has established a relationship with a firm in Colombia that helps index and clean up large scan projects. And when he needs CAD file conversions, he often sends those jobs to Pinnacle Infotech, a conversion and Building Information Modeling (BIM) outsourcing company. And he partnered with another IRgA member on a large hospital scanning and document management project.
Another area in which Blue Digital does a lot of outsourcing is in large-format color.
“We mostly outsource the banners and projects like that,” Barclay says. “I don’t really want to bring that in house. Down here we have a couple of really good trade printers, and [we can get] 100 percent mark-ups easily.”
However, just like they invested in large-format monochrome printing when the volume justified it, the company recently bought an HP PageWide printer to handle some large-format color work.
“One of our big clients is a cruise line and they’re always doing events and they need boards for events on the ship, like Mardi Gras,” he says. “They’ll call us at 10 in the morning and say, ‘Hey, we need a board by 2 o’clock.’ Now we can just throw it on the PageWide and print it here.”
The outsourcing continues in that kind of work – often the files the cruise line sends are not suitable for printing, so Barclay sends them to a freelance designer to get them into shape.
What does the future hold for Blue Digital? Barclay says he would like to grow his equipment sales business; Blue Digital is an RSA member and takes advantage of its Canon reseller program, and he has access to HP and Xerox reselling opportunities. And he’s getting into the 3D scanning business, another area with many outsourcing possibilities.
“I’m really analyzing what I can outsource versus what I invest in,” says Barclay, who has an accounting degree from Rutgers University. “Realistically, if things start to grow significantly in any area, let’s say large-format signage, then we might think about buying a latex printer or something like that. But right now, we’re fine where we are.”