GETTING UP TO SPEED

New owner Greg Ellison takes on the learning curve at SpeedPro Denver. GETTING UP TO SPEED

One of the interesting consequences of the franchise model is that very often it attracts print business owners whose backgrounds are far afi eld 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 fi t that mold, but did fi nd 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 By Richard Romano

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 diffi culty 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

graphics, and a major client is the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), which launched a bus service in 2016 called Bustangs, which runs from the Denver area out to the mountains.

“The previous owner had gotten into a contract with CDOT on Bustangs and we wrapped their 45-foot coaches,” Ellison said.

Late last year, CDOT launched Snowstangs, also 45-foot passenger buses which run from Denver to Colorado’s ski areas.

“We wrapped those as well. They’ve been a very good partner with us.”

Another major client is Mile High Food Trucks.

“That account is a lot of fun,” Ellison said. “They need a lot of design help, so my graphic artist truly likes doing work for them. He gets the opportunity to really get creative, and it helps them out a lot with their clients packaging customizing food trucks with well-designed wraps.”

While the Denver studio’s stock in trade is vehicle graphics, they also do their fair share of banners and wall and window graphics. Like some SpeedPro studios I have spoken with, SpeedPro Denver also sees growth opportunities in environmental or experiential graphics—the intersection of décor and signage—although he’s moving into it slowly.

One fun challenge to overcome was interacting with customers.

“I came from a design engineer/development engineer background and as such it was only about once a quarter would they allow the engineers to talk to a customer,” he said. “They didn’t let us get out much. So one of the things that’s been enjoyable is getting out and talking to customers and seeing what their problems are, what they’re trying to solve, and what kinds of cool things they want to do. That’s been the fun part.”

More challenging—and Ellison is certainly not alone on this—is getting a handle on pricing and estimating.

“It seems like you should be able to say, ‘This is what you want, this is how many prints, and this is how much I’ll charge you for it.’ But it feels like there’s a lot of

fuzzy logic in there that I’m still trying to get my head around.”

The change in ownership has lent itself to a heavy marketing push.

“There have been a lot of things that we’ve done since I came on board to introduce myself and the changeover of SpeedPro Denver from the previous owner to myself,” Ellison said.

But the bulk of the ongoing marketing is via search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising—“maintaining our name on the front page [of Google search results] and ranking as high on that front page list as possible,” he said.

It’s been a busy four months for Ellison, but an exciting time, as he learns not only the wide-format print business, but also the SpeedPro business.

“I have to add a shameless plug for SpeedPro,” he said. “When I was early in the investigation of SpeedPro trying to understand who they are and what they are, I found myself in a one-on-one conversation with Larry Oberly, the CEO, and was able to get his time for about 45 minutes and pick his brain. When you have a CEO who’s that dedicated to bringing in the right kind of people into his system, it really gave me a lot of faith and trust in the system and what they’re really trying to accomplish here.” ● Read More… Find article at PrintingNews. com/21122560