DRSi work floor
DRSi employees hard at work.
By Ed Avis
When a Harvard Business School graduate who has traveled the world and worked for major corporations wants to go into business for herself, what industry does she choose? Reprographics, of course!
At least that was the choice of Jen Fuller, who was elected to APDSP’s board in early August. Fuller owns DRSi, a 30-year-old reprographics firm in Seattle. She bought the company in March 2019 and has been immersed in the world of plan printing, spec books, and presentation graphics ever since.
“I had not heard of reprographics when I started looking for a business to buy,” Fuller says. “But I’m happy with my decision.”
Private Equity Start
Jen Fuller
Jen Fuller
Fuller’s first job after graduating from Colorado College was for a private equity firm. She helped select investments for institutional investors, including Japanese company Mitsubishi. Eventually Mitsubishi invited her to work directly for them in Tokyo. She had studied Japanese in high school so jumped at the chance.
“It was a very different experience living in Tokyo,” she says. “It was pretty fun.”
Fuller spent a year in Japan, then decided to come back to the United States and attend Harvard Business School. She earned her MBA and landed at job at management consultant firm Bain & Company in San Francisco.
Working for Bain taught her a number of skills that she feels apply to her current position.
“I learned how to identify and structure a problem and come up with a way to solve it. I learned a lot of about financial modeling, business valuation and pricing strategy, and how to manage projects and work on a tight timeline and make sure folks know what they are responsible for.”
Her two years at Bain produced another benefit: She met her husband Ryan there. They left Bain together for another adventure: Living six months in South America.
“We thought it would be cool to learn another language,” she says. “We had heard from friends that Argentina had great language programs and was affordable. And it worked out just great. It was a fun place to live, great café culture, beautiful architecture. We were in Spanish class 20 hours a week, and we’d take off a week here and there to travel. It was a great experience.”
The couple spent five months in Buenos Aires, Argentina and one month in Santiago, Chile before returning to Seattle in 2010. “We wanted to come back and do something productive again,” Fuller says.
Learning Corporate Strategy
She landed at department store company Nordstrom. She worked in corporate strategy and picked up a few more things that apply to her current position: “I managed a team for the first time that wasn’t all type-A Harvard/Stanford go-getters,” he says. “I learned how to manage and influence relationships.”
She spent five-and-a-half years at Nordstrom, then took some time off to plan out her next venture. She was tired of the corporate life – she didn’t want to be another “cog in the wheel” at a large company again, she remembers. Around that time she met some people with similar backgrounds who had bought small businesses and loved it. She took a class on the topic, did some more research, and decided small business ownership was right for her. She began looking for a business to buy in 2017.
“I was not looking for a business in a certain industry,” she explains. “I was looking for a business in a certain size range, and location was important. I also wanted one that had a stable team in place without much churn, and one where there was an obvious reason for the owner to sell, such as retirement.”
She investigated about a hundred opportunities in the Seattle area and DRSi checked all the boxes. She got along well with the owner – who was retiring – and eventually made an offer that was accepted.
“The gentleman I bought it from was very open about the long-term declining trend in the reprographics industry,” Fuller says. “But because of some key strategic decisions he made, his company had fared much better than many others.”
Few Changes So Far
You might expect someone with Fuller’s business background to charge into a new opportunity and make lots of changes, but she spent most of her first year as owner learning about the business, getting to know her employees, and meeting customers.
DRSi’s customer base is mostly AEC, and that hasn’t changed yet. The company invested in an HP 365 latex printer, a Colex cutter and an Arizona flatbed printer with the hopes of expanding the graphics business beyond AEC, but COVID interrupted all that. She would also like to expand the customer base for her small-format department, which she feels is currently underutilized and could be serving more customers who are tangential to AEC, such as property managers who need flyers or business cards. But she’s focusing on maintaining relationships with existing customers until the situation improves.
On the back end of the business, she is in the process of standing up a new print MIS system from CoreBridge. “It’s going to provide better transparency into our margins, and I think it’s going to streamline our workflow,” she says.
Helping the Industry
Fuller, who has a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old, has her hands full with the new business and her family, but she says she’s looking forward to contributing to APDSP and the reprographics industry.
“I think I can provide an outside perspective,” she says. “Most folks in this industry have been in it a long time, and I know it’s helpful to get fresh eyes. I hope I can contribute that. And from my strategy and consulting experience, maybe I can offer a different way to look at problems and think about solutions.”