A Man With a Plan

AT AGE 13, Jim Sabulski was already looking for a job.

“I set out to work because I liked being able to buy what I wanted,” declares Sabulski, now manager of Print and Mail Services for Misericordia University, in Dallas, Pa. “I didn’t like having to ask my parents for money.”

Initially, Sabulski had difficulty finding an employer in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., willing to take a chance on a kid. So his mother asked a friend who had just opened a print shop if he had any work for her enterprising son. He did.

“He had me hand collating six-part carbonless forms, thousands upon thousands of them,” Sabulski recalls. Paid $3 an hour, he worked happily after school, and was soon entrusted to run some bindery equipment.

His second foray into printing came at age 19, when Sabulski sought a job via an employment agency.

“The man there told me to turn around, walk out the door and go directly across the street to Schmidt’s Printery, which was seeking a bindery worker,” he laughs. At Schmidt’s, he also learned how to run a one-color press.

Sabulski got his big break when, unfortunately, owner Ed Schmidt experienced a bad break: a heart attack.

“He called me from his hospital bed and asked if I could get some jobs out the door,” Sabulski continues. He taught himself to run the press, fulfilled all the orders in the pipeline and even took on new business.

“When the owner came back a month later, he was amazed to see that I had kept the company afloat,” he says.

While working, Sabulski decided that he wanted to earn an English degree. “I wanted to be the next Great American writer,” he reveals, “but I didn’t want to accrue debt.”

In 1991, he ran into a friend who was attending college tuition-free because his mother worked for the school.

“That’s when the bells went off,” Sabulski relates, “and I started looking around for a job at a local college.” He found that Misericordia University was in need of a press operator and print shop manager.

“So I took the job, not so much because I really wanted the job, but because I wanted to go to school for free,” Sabulski acknowledges. “The print shop was the size of a private office. We had a small Multi 1250 and a small Xerox copier, and that was about it. We’d have to roll a table into the hallway for job pickup. I didn’t have a computer.” His only staff was a part-time worker.

Sabulski began taking classes in 1993. He also moonlighted for another print shop whose owner, Marilyn Ney, became Sabulski’s mentor.

“I picked her brain and learned how she charged for things,” he recollects. “She helped me become more of a true manager, rather than just a production person.”

Sabulski began bringing more work in-house and the savings added up. The in-plant began purchasing equipment. The shop moved twice, and Sabulski was given additional responsibility for copier fleet oversight and for the university’s branch USPS post office.

Sabulski encouraged management to change its chargeback system. “We used to only charge back for materials, but now include everything, such as labor,” he explains. “We were charging back less than $100,000 a year, but are up to $550,000 in our last fiscal year.” He currently supervises a full-time press and bindery operator, a full-time graphic design/production artist, a copy center manager and a delivery person.

‘A Very Valuable Asset’

In 2003, Misericordia’s president brought in a consultant to evaluate the school’s non-core businesses.

“After a week-long, incredibly in-depth analysis, The Klasnic Group reported that we were ‘a very valuable asset to the institution,’ ” he states proudly.

Sabulski graduated cum laude with an English degree in 2001, and has published articles in IPG. He and his fiancée Nancy have been together for 13 years and have two children, Sidney Lynn and toddler Caleb James. Sabulski is a certified graphic communications manager (CGCM), is working on a Master’s degree in Organizational Management, and occasionally teaches at a vocational technical school. He has spent 19 years at the university.

“I had every intention of getting my degree and leaving,” Sabulski admits, “but, as you can see, I never left.”

Now, Sabulski is looking into further expansion. He would like to get into sign engraving, add classroom space to the shop and also start a student-run T-shirt factory.

“All of these things still on the table—all the new and unfinished business—are what still keep me here today,” he concludes. IPG