Continuing Education

For Gordon Ryan, director of design, printing and fulfillment services for the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA), a career in printing is as much about communication as it is about ink on paper. For the past 31 years, the native Mainer has split his time almost equally between working face-to-face with customers and working the production floor. In fact, the diversity of his experience—partly a product of chance, partly of design—is what won him the job at NYSBA in the first place.

NYSBA is a private and independent 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization supported by the 76,000 attorneys and judges who form its membership. When Ryan signed on in June 2010, the association had recently relocated its print operation to a brand new, 21,000-square-foot off-site location. The site had been purpose-built to serve as the in-plant for an organization with a constant demand for high volumes of everything from ID cards to books. Even the HVAC system was designed specifically to support a printing facility.

On his first day, Ryan was faced with managing a team of eight employees (today it's 13), some of whom had been with the in-plant for more than 30 years. As for the operation itself, it was churning out about 80 million pages a year. To meet the challenge, he only had to look to his own experience.

Ryan's printing career began in college. He attended Rochester Institute of Technology for two and a half years, then returned home to enroll at the University of Southern Maine. He took his first full-time printing job after college, as a press operator for Minuteman Press. From there he jumped to another print shop, Quick Print Plus, where he moved from the pressroom, to the front of the shop to manage customer service, then back again as the production manager.

After a stint training with the Army Reserves at Fort Eustis, in Newport News, Va., he left the small print shop behind and took on his first position at a major commercial operation, Spencer Press in Wells, Maine. (Privately held Spencer was acquired by RR Donnelly in 2005.) The direct mail and catalog printer had a nine-acre production floor where a suite of Heidelberg Harris web presses was humming 24 hours a day.

Spencer is where Ryan's printing career began to take off.

"Working at Spencer really allowed me to use the education I had received," he says. "It was exciting. I got to see that printing is manufacturing, but it's custom manufacturing. Each piece you manufacture is different, and that's the fun part."

Changing Direction

In 1991, when Ryan returned from a nine-month deployment during Operation Desert Storm (he was a first lieutenant in the Army), the job at Spencer was waiting for him. He was soon promoted to a management position, once again overseeing customer service.

While Ryan says he loves the energy of the production floor, his career is also distinguished by a talent for engaging with customers directly—making the deal, closing the sale, keeping everybody happy.

Part of that comes from a natural entrepreneurial spirit, which emerged again when he agreed one evening in 1996 to buy into an existing printing business in Albany, N.Y. Ryan's wife, Susan, had family from the area, yet they were both still reluctant to pick up and leave behind family, friends and the natural beauty of coastal Maine.

But it was a rare opportunity and one that Ryan was ready to take. For the next 10 years, Ryan's shop handled the quick-turn, high-volume work supplied by law firms, government agencies and private business throughout the state capital.

"I'd always been drawn to this, to running my own business, to making your own decisions about it," says Ryan. But with less than a majority stake in the operation, his ability to guide the direction of the company was under considerable strain. In 2006, he tied up loose ends with employees, vendors and customers and sold his stake in the business.

He landed a job as operations manager with medium-sized digital and offset shop, Digital Page, which specialized in high-end production for customers like ad agencies and retail companies. Here, Ryan learned the value of an automated prepress system, Kodak Prinergy partnered with variable data software XMPie, which powered workflow either to an all-Heidelberg offset operation, or to the HP Indigo and Kodak NexPress machines handling digital work.

"It was a very exciting job: Local customers, quick turnarounds, and really high quality," he says. "And this rounded out my education. I now had great experience with prepress, digital, web, sheet-fed and direct mail."

After four years with Digital Page, Ryan saw the opportunity to join NYSBA. The organization brought him on quickly, thanks largely to the huge diversity of his experience.

Making the Right Choices

The work that flows to the in-plant from the shop's three designers can come from any of the 120-employee association's numerous departments. The largest volume tends to come from Continuing Legal Education (CLE), which requires a large volume of direct mail and other support material for its seminars and educational events. Through the Publication department, the shop also prints the newsletters and books published by association members. The Membership department is another major customer, requiring a variety of marketing materials, as well as personalized pieces such as member identification cards.

As jobs come in, they are routed to the eight-member print production staff, who operate the digital machines (which include two Kodak Digimaster EX150s, three Konica Minolta black-and-white printers and a Ricoh Pro C751EX color printer) and the offset side of the operation (which features a four-color Heidelberg Printmaster 74, and a four-color Komori Lithrone S29 sheetfed press). Two warehouse employees round out the in-plant's crew.

Ryan has made numerous changes since taking the reins of the in-plant, but the introduction of the Komori—which was added in 2011—is one of the most important, as it allowed the shop to stay ahead of customer demand and keep work in-house.

Even when work gets outsourced, he looks for ways for the in-plant to add value. For example, when the existing commercial printing contract for the association's internal magazine had run its course, he helped bring the publishing department a big boost in quality and cost-savings by shepherding the RFP process.

Major Accomplishments

On Ryan's watch, the in-plant also maximized the association's use of variable data printing with Printshop Mail software, brought postage costs down by automating mail presorting and added wide-format printing for internal sign production. The operation also went through a major warehouse consolidation project bringing in-house warehousing and fulfillment for the Publication department.

"This project really gave the team an opportunity to showcase their abilities as well as contribute a significant costs savings to the association," he says.

The goal, notes Ryan, is to understand where the association is going and to make choices based on what those customers will need next.

"We should be able to match the quality of any commercial printer out there," he insists.

In 2012, he was promoted from print production manager to his current role as director of design, printing and fulfillment services.

Because of his deep experience in both commercial printing and, now, in-plant printing, Ryan has a unique perspective on both. If there's one thing he misses about commercial printing, he says, it's the greater diversity of work. "You never know what's going to come through the door on any given day," he says, "so there are more problems to solve."

While in-plant work may lack the unpredictability of commercial printing, Ryan says it offers something else: a unique opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of his customers' needs based on establishing long-term working relationships.

"Working here," he observes, "there's so much more collaboration with people, because you've gotten to know them so well."