WIDE-FORMAT & SIGNAGE ─ Franchise Owner
GETTING UP TO
SPEED
New owner Greg Ellison takes on the learning curve at SpeedPro Denver. By Richard Romano
O
ne of the interesting consequences of the franchise model is that very often it attracts print business owners whose backgrounds are far afield of the commercial printing industry, or even the wide-format printing industry. This has the effect of bringing new ideas into the business and the industry at large, as these owners are not saddled with “the way things have always been done.” That said, becoming the owner of a print business is not without its learning curve. Last November, Greg Ellison became the new owner of SpeedPro Denver, and like a lot of franchise owners—and SpeedPro studio owners— Ellison doesn’t have a print background. He spent most of his early career in telecommunications as an engineer, until the repeated churn of mergers and acquisitions led him to grow disenchanted with that industry. “I reached a point in time when I’d had enough,” he said. “I asked for a package and they were nice enough to give it to me. I wanted to do something completely different. I knew I wanted to be a small business owner, so I started shopping for businesses and going through business brokers and broker magazines looking for what was interesting.” With a manufacturing background, he was looking for something with a manufacturing focus, but also knew he wanted something business-tobusiness. He found that there wasn’t much that really fit that mold, but did find that printing and signage kept cropping up. “I ended up gravitating toward the idea of getting into graphic printing,” he said. A franchise broker put him touch with one sign franchise that was looking to open a new facility in the Denver area, but Ellison didn’t necessarily want
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to build a new business from the ground up. “Working on a business for two or three years before I could write myself a paycheck was not very appealing to me,” he said. The very next day, though, the franchise broker got back to Ellison with news of a SpeedPro franchise that was already established but needed new leadership. So he had a look. “I found out that what they had here was really, really cool,” he said. “Not only is it wide-format graphics, but what really interested me about SpeedPro Denver is that most of the business comes from vehicle wraps, which I think are cool.” And that, as they say, was that. Ellison became the new owner of SpeedPro Denver, the third owner since the studio was founded in 2006. Seemingly thrown into the deep end, Ellison found the learning curve fairly steep—getting a handle on all the different kinds of substrates, let alone all the output devices, and what can print on what—but any difficulty getting up to speed was mitigated by coming into an already-active studio that had highly experienced staff. “I have a top-notch operations guy who’s also a graphic artist and he knows all the equipment out there,” Ellison said. “So that part of my learning curve—operations—turned out to be a low priority for me because I had expertise already in the studio.” SpeedPro Denver has a small staff of three fulltime employees: an operations manager, a production employee who does prep work, as well as lamination, installations, and a front-desk person who answers phones, prepares estimates and handles customer service. He also utilizes a part-time marketing person, and a driver who does deliveries a couple hours a day. SpeedPro Denver is heavily involved in vehicle
WhatTheyThink - Wide-Format&Signage | May 2020
