Tom Taubenheim
Editor’s Note: Tom Taubenheim, co-owner of A/E Graphics in Wisconsin, was elected to the IRgA board earlier this month. He was profiled in an IRgA article in 2016 (click here to read that article). In this Q&A, he brings us up to date on his business and his thoughts about the reprographics industry.
Ed Avis: In 2022 you acquired B&L Graphic Solutions (click here to read about this). How has that acquisition worked out?
Tom Taubenheim: It’s been going really well and they’ve become a very good part of our team. In many ways they did things differently than what we did in other parts of our company, so we had to learn how to do some things operationally, such as how projects are quoted out. Getting used to that took little bit of time, a little learning by some of our people on the management side. But it’s been going really good.
How do the services of B&L differ from what you were already doing?
It’s really a focus on more volume printing on corrugated stock, whether that’s cardboard or plastic. A lot of retail displays and yard signs. And then the other aspect is more small format, printing flyers and a lot of catalogs for companies. We did a little bit of that over the years, but not to this level. They’ve got some digital light presses that can pump that stuff out and fold and stitch and all that kind of stuff. So if we need something real nice and some volume on card stock, glossy, whatever, they can print it out. It’s a much better overall quality for our customers.
Yard signs produced by A/E
What are some big markets for the yard signs you’re printing?
Sometimes booster clubs come to us and want quantities of signs for different events, for example. So we’ll run a bunch of yard signs for individual players on a team or for a school graduation. They get sent out to the parents and they put it in their front yard or whatever.
With election season coming up, are you printing more yard signs and such for candidates?
Yeah, we just had a huge run of a few hundred double-sided yard signs for a referendum that’s on the ballot here.
Is getting paid a challenge with election signage, since most candidates end up losing the election?
Well, yeah, that did prove itself as a challenge for us with one particular candidate up here and we had a lot of trouble getting paid toward the end when additional signs were ordered. I would highly recommend upfront payment if you can, or at least half depending on your situation. In this case, the candidate lost, and I don’t remember if we ever did end up getting paid or if we had to write some of that off.
Other than adding B&L to your business, what else has changed in your business since the article we wrote in 2016?
Since that time we upgraded our operating software that handles not only our backend accounting and payables and stuff like that, but also our invoicing and tracking of all of our contracts. It’s called E Automate. It doesn’t have the most appealing interface, but it is very good at the capabilities and what it can do as it relates to having equipment in the field. It handles the contracts, tracks usage and square feet and all those different capabilities. It integrates with some of the leasing outfits that we utilize for collecting payments for us directly from our customers. It is pretty slick stuff. And it’s not a cheap date. There’s a cost there for some of these services. But customers can go online, they can pay with a credit card, they can pay with ACH, see their accounts, and there’s a lot of neat stuff with it.
And I guess the only other thing would be expanding our equipment sales into more of the graphics market. We’re a Canon loyalty dealer, so that’s all that we sell. And we only do large formats. So that means the Colorado and Arizona series.
To whom are you selling those printers?
It is very, very diverse. It can be companies that do, for example, convenience store graphics or high run banners. There are a lot of different industries and it takes a whole different method of finding these companies and developing those relationships. And that is not an overnight process. Selling a plotter to the AEC market for a new customer could take a year or two, but some of these cycles on the graphic side could be three years or longer.
When you get into the graphics type stuff, they make money with this equipment. So you really need to know what you’re doing. Service has got to be quick or our customers will lose money. It really adds a whole different dynamic.
Since you print color graphics yourself, do you find you’re selling this kind of equipment sometimes to competitors?
Yes, that may be an issue with certain companies, but I think for the most part in the realm of digital graphics, each one of us has our own different niche we specialize in. Whether that’s car wraps or wall murals or high run banners or labels, wallpaper, a lot of us are just into different things. So we can be selling to a competitor to some degree, but on the other side, it helps us out because we run the same equipment we sell, we service that equipment, and our people know the RIP software. They know some of the ins and outs of the equipment. So that can be a help to some of our customers too. And we can offer overflow printing.
What’s your feeling about the future or reprographics overall?
Oh boy. I don’t know. Get me in a room with 200 of my colleagues and let’s see the answers. The big thing I think everybody will acknowledge is regionally it can be very different. I mean, depending on what you’re doing and the time of the year and just what’s going on with the economy, it can impact different parts of the country at different times.
When it comes to traditional reprographics, how customers use us is changing. A lot of AEC employees are working from home maybe two or three days a week. And those are two or three days that for the most part, they’re not printing. And in general, volumes are decreasing. And so that does change how they use the equipment, what they need it for, and what kind of equipment, how heavy does it need to be, what kind of production power does it need to have? It is a rapidly changing thing.
Now that you’ve joined the board, what do you think the IRgA can do to help this industry and its members thrive?
Well, years ago, we were all chugging along and you had organizations like this that helped you meet some of your peers. But you know what? We had a lot of leverage with vendors and you just got things done and things were great. Today, it’s obviously very, very different. Things are very fractured. So it makes this kind of organization all the more important today, maybe even more so than it ever has been.
Hearing how people are doing things, where they are finding success in generating ongoing revenue, new revenue, is valuable. That’s a role IRgA can play. It’s about supporting businesses and letting them know that their dues are an investment and they should get some kind of return.
I think if you’re going to be a member, you should be active and contribute and help keep it going, because it’s only going to benefit all of us because this is all changing really, really quickly. In the next five years, I think this whole landscape of printing in large format and the type of equipment and who you’re doing things for may look completely different. That makes a group like this even more strategically important, and a valuable resource.