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For the past couple of decades, printing prophets haveforecasted doom for printers who do not extendtheir services beyond traditional reproduction. At

the same time, there has been a frustrating scarcity ofinformation about role models and action plans to helpsmall printers expand into new services to improvetheir odds of long-term survival. This column will in-troduce you to Laurie Carr and Julie Mavis, co-ownersof Cats Media, a small Ontario company, who have re-cently emerged as role models intent on helping othersmall independent operations convert to new businessmodels and revenue streams.

In 1986, Carr’s mother, Nan Carr, and stepfather,Gary Fishlock, started the business as a quick-printingfranchise in the Don Mills district of Toronto. (Theycan’t name the franchise company as a condition oftheir termination agreement.) For 20 years, they main-tained the franchise, with Fishlock driving outside salesas Nan managed in-house operations. When their fran-chise contract expired, rather than renewing, they de-cided to continue in the same location (where they stilloperate today) as an independent business.

During the last dozen or so years of the franchise,Laurie Carr entered the family business, after she hadalready built a 20-year career of her own as a comptrol-ler in the automotive sector. “Initially, I came in just tohelp them out part time, because they were strugglinga bit. It was the early ’90s, and they were just starting totake on things like floppy-disk work, which they didn’tunderstand. They only understood hard-copy kind ofwork,” recounts Carr. But because market demand forcomputer-generated production escalated, Carr endedup staying with the family business.

Independently, Julie Mavis had built her own careerwith the Hudson’s Bay Company, where her progressionfrom store manager to senior executive gave her ampleopportunities to hone her skills in marketing and busi-ness strategy. After 17 years with HBC, she felt it wastime for a change, so she left, ran for political office, andin 2000 was elected municipal councillor in Port Hope,the municipality where she and Carr both live (an hour’sdrive east of Toronto, population 16,500).

Carr and Mavis join forcesWhile on council, Mavis was responsible for the Eco-nomic Development and Tourism portfolio and hadthe opportunity to work with Carr on a mutual project.Their collaboration proved so successful that Carr in-vited Mavis to join her family’s business in 2001.Fishlock, who was intent on retiring at the end of his20-year franchise contract, stepped back and let Carrand Mavis co-manage the operation for a couple ofyears, until eventually he and Nan sold their stake in2006. Now, as co-owners, Mavis looks after the strategicvision and creative side of the business, while Carr over-sees the numbers. Although Fishlock has since retired,Nan still works in the business two days a week, focus-ing on administration and print-related specialty jobs.“She doesn’t have any understanding of the new serv-ices but is a great resource on the traditional print side,”says Carr.

Steps toward changeWhen Carr first arrived, the prepress side of the busi-ness was completely manual. “The company had a cou-ple of major clients at the time: A communicationscompany and a financial-services company. Once westarted doing their artwork on a PC, both were so de-lighted with the opportunities and the quality of ourproduct that our business with them expanded expo-nentially,” she recalls. For instance, one new job they ac-quired involved archiving all the data for one large

company’s training manuals, plus printing and ship-ping the manuals all across the country.

Next, Carr and Mavis expanded into mailing, fulfill-ment, and IT services, such as database management,all of which they felt were a natural extension of theirexisting post-print operations. “Our existing clients un-derstood these services, they needed them, and werehappy to let us take care of them,” Carr continues. “Thenew services didn’t bring in a lot of new clients. Rather,it was usually people who were print clients first whomoved into purchasing them. We grew through printcontracting for our existing client base.”

At present, the mailing and fulfillment part of thebusiness mainly serves two major clients: One that pur-chases legal printing for the condo industry and theother an international hotel chain. In total, Cats Media’scurrent Toronto operation consists of seven staff (plusCarr and Mavis), two Risos (one inkjet and one dupli-cator), one colour and four monochrome toner-basedmachines (mostly Ricoh), plus bindery and mailingequipment.

VICTORIA GAITSKELL

Creative Cats

12 • PRINTACTION • OCTOBER 2012

Top photo (L to R): Tracy Kerr, Designer; Julie Mavis,Owner; Aaron Sawyer, Marketing; Laurie Carr, Owner;Jay Robinson, Creative Director; Jeff Shadwick, Designer; and Rick “Big Data” McMurray, Web/IT(along with Jay’s dog, Bandit, Studio Greeter).

Inset: Cats Media’s Port Hope studio sits under the CP Rail viaduct, overlooking the Ganaraska River.

Continued on page 24

New-media serviceTheir next big leap was into consultativemarketing services, including businessbranding, logos, graphic design, digitalphotography, videography, and Web devel-opment, design, and hosting. “The moverequired us to hire new people with newskills, and required big changes in the mindset and culture of the company – but it hasalso been a lot of fun!” recounts Mavis.

The milestone occurred in 2008, whenCarr and Mavis opened a second locationin Port Hope, equipped with desktop Macs,laptops, an arsenal of software, and six cre-ative staff to produce all creative work in-house. In addition to bindery equipment,the Port Hope studio also houses a colourcopier for proofs and odd quick-print jobsthat clients need right away; but “the maininvestment is people and intellectual prop-erty, not hardware,” says Carr.

“The reason we have two locations isthat a creative brain doesn’t do very wellin a busy, noisy manufacturing environ-ment,” explains Mavis. “If you go to all theexpense of hiring creative experts, you alsoneed to provide them with a creative en-vironment. So we built them a cool spacewith a funky interior design and a varietyof work areas where they can create indi-vidually or collaborate by spreading them-selves out and bouncing ideas off eachother and the clients.

“Formerly, we tried and tried to bringthe creative department into our Torontoproduction facility, but it didn’t work out.It took a totally different environment tomake it work. The two facilities are both

awesome, but they’re too different to workin one space.”

Mavis, who currently serves on theboard of directors for the Port HopeChamber of Commerce, says she finds iteasier to recruit qualified staff in PortHope because, unlike Toronto, other localemployers pose less competition. She saysanother advantage of operating there isthat their staff ’s community involvementhas made the company well known in thesmaller municipality, whereas in Toronto,where the population is so much larger(5.5 million in the Greater Toronto Area),interactions with people are less frequentand more impersonal. Their Port Hopeclientele include non-profits in thehealth-care field, small retail, major in-dustry (especially the nuclear sector), andgovernment at all levels.

“Since we can’t just rely on print salesany more, we must also sell creative serv-ices, and for this process we’ve gone fromdoing individual sales to team sales,” sheexplains. “The people with the right skillsgo out and talk to the client. One personcan’t sell the whole thing.” Both she andCarr make sales calls along with other staff(“As owners, we never stop selling”), butmost of their sales calls are done by cus-tomer service reps in each location whoeach have their own accounts. Sometimes,because in some quarters businesses stillremain somewhat patriarchal, they delib-erately send male staff to visit certainclients because they’re the gender the per-son on the other side wants to see.

24 • PRINTACTION • OCTOBER 2012

GaitskellContinued from page 12

Cats Media’s design team works within an open studio.

(L to R): Maggie Peacock, Manager; Laurie Carr; Julie Mavis; Katy Caines, Print Production; Issac Williams, Production Supervisor; and Tim Yu, Admin Systems(not pictured, Nan Carr and Gary Cormier).

Continued on page 26

TRADE PRINTING

Staying informedTo stay current, Carr and Mavis try to at-tend a lot of conferences, especially theNational Association of Quick Printers(NAQP) Owners Conference in Chicago,held this year in October immediately be-fore the Graph Expo trade show. NAQPprovides programs, studies, discussion fo-rums, and products specifically focused onthe interest and concerns of small com-mercial and quick printers. Since 2005, ithas been part of the National Associationfor Printing Leadership (NAPL), based inNew Jersey.

This year Carr and Mavis also attendedthe June InHOWse Managers Conferencein Boston, a multi-part conference for cre-ative freelancers, designers, and managersof creative environments, because theywanted to get a handle on how to managea creative team. The previous year they senttheir Creative Director to the same confer-ence to learn about design trends.

“Historically, the U.S. market has been abit ahead of the Canadian market,” saysCarr. “We used to be able to look at themand see what services are taking hold therethat would subsequently move into theCanadian market. I don’t think their mar-ket is as prominent as it once was, but it’sstill very important for us to keep an eye onwhat’s happening south of the border, es-pecially the creative side. Nowhere inCanada can hold a candle to California orTexas where a lot of creative information iscoming from.”

Mavis continues: “Our staff are self-mo-tivated and passionate about technologyand design, so they often use the Internetto make sure they’re ahead of [the sector’sstandard] skill level. Because the industrychanges so quickly, the challenge is stayingon top of it. At the InHOWse conferencethey told us that when people are beingtrained, what they learn when they firststart out is obsolete by the time they’ve fin-ished school!”

Keeping watch over your statsCarr says one of their biggest challengeswas learning how to be profitable. “Overthe last few years we’ve worked especiallyhard to keep paying the bills and monitorwhere our profit is going. Although, as awhole, the industry is reducing in size, ourcompany has continued to do about thesame year over year.”

She attributes their financial stability toknowledge obtained from annual statisticalreports published by NAQP, including theFinancial Benchmarking Study, QuickPrinting Wage & Benefits Study, andHourly Cost Studies-Print Operations forUp to 20 Employees. She and Mavis en-countered NAQP around the same timethey were buying the business. They hadn’tseen anything like those reports before andconcluded that they needed to obtain moreinformation in order to initiate change inan informed way.

“The statistical reports we received fromNAQP in the first year were invaluable tous because they gave us the ability to com-pare our numbers against other businessesof similar size. It’s great information thatallowed us to streamline our original busi-ness and make it more cost-effective, muchleaner and more profitable,” explains Carr.

“Once we did that, because we becamemore profitable, we were able to start tran-sitioning and able to take the risk of addingnew services.”

Carr says NAQP also provides informa-tion on how to move into marketing serv-ices, but one of the biggest problems is aprinter’s own resistance to making thosechanges. “The Association takes away someof the fear by providing support and adviceon how to do it. They are treading slowlyon the transitioning, because I think a lotof members are still afraid of changingfrom being a print or commodity producerinto a service provider, but they’re defi-nitely going in the right direction – .”

“– Although, we’d like to see them do awhole lot more,” interjects Mavis.

Constant learningMavis laments that one of their challengeson the creative side is that they haven’tfound a source of statistics comparable toNAQP for benchmarking yet.

She says one thing they learned whenlaunching new services was the importanceof costing everything out in advance. “Forinstance, we had no idea how much moreexpensive our insurance would be once westarted doing Web development,” she recalls.

“You also have to learn how to bill ap-propriately for work on the creative sidewhen all you have to offer is time and a tonof skills. You have to get used to thinkingalong the lines of: ‘It will take my ProjectManager this many hours to understandyour requirements and pass them along tothe Web Developer, who will take this longto custom-build your Website.’ It helps ifyou hire designers with experience, becausethey know what other companies arebilling, so you can learn from them.”

Evangelists for changeTwo years ago, the fact that no organizationin Canada provided statistics and servicescomparable to NAQP’s prompted Carr tojoin NAQP’s Advisory Board as its sole in-ternational representative. She and theBoard plan to launch an initiative to bringthe association’s products and servicesfrom the U.S. into Canada in the near fu-ture. With Mavis, she is emerging as a lead-ing advocate in both countries for the needto support other small independent print-ers as they transition to new business mod-els. The Kwik Kopy Printing CanadaCorporation franchise (Richmond Hill,Ontario), with 62 locations across Canada,has invited Carr and Mavis to present a ses-sion called “Transitioning from TraditionalPrint to Multimedia” at its October confer-ence for franchisees in Guelph, Ontario. Atthe same conference, Carr and Mavis arealso scheduled to speak at a roundtable dis-cussion on industry trends.

As for their own company, Carr says:“Since we’ve just added mobile Websites toour offerings, the number of services weoffer is where we want to be – for now. Atpresent we have enough irons in the fire orballs in the air or however you want to putit. We’re happy to continue developingthose and our staff.”

She predicts: “But 10 years from now,there are going to be things we have to offerthat we don’t even know about yet. And ifthat’s the way the business is changing, thenthat’s the way we have to change.”

Victoria Gaitskell is keen to exchange ideaswith readers at victoria@printaction.com

GaitskellContinued from page 24

26 • PRINTACTION • OCTOBER 2012

TRADE PRINTING

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