Scouting Out The Right Path
Every Boy Scout knows the words "Be Prepared." This motto has also driven Robert Mettee to keep the BSA in-plant a step ahead.
by Bob Neubauer
If everything had gone as planned, Robert Mettee might be an auto mechanic right now. But fate—and his fellow students at the Baltimore vocational technical school he attended—sent him hiking down a different trail.
"I was trying to get in the automotive class, and that filled up," he recalls. "My second alternative was printing."
So he signed up—and quickly discovered he had a knack for it.
"I graduated at the top of my printing class," Mettee says. "It came so naturally to me."
That natural talent propelled him through a series of printing jobs, finally bringing him to the Boy Scouts of America's Printing Solutions department, where Mettee, 44, now serves as manager. Since advancing to that position, he has brought in computer-to-plate (CTP) technology and helped move the 10-employee in-plant to a complete PDF workflow.
Baltimore Beginnings
Neither of those technologies were around back when Mettee got his first job handling prepress at a Maryland payroll processing company. He eventually moved to a weekly newspaper, The Aegis, where he spent three years running a web press.
A friend had moved to Dallas and urged the 23-year-old Mettee to join him, so in 1981, he pulled up his stakes and relocated. He remembers showing up in his suit for an interview at Arlington Printers, where he was promptly asked if he could start immediately.
"So I took off my jacket and went to work," he laughs. He stayed there five years, then spent three at another printing company before taking a job as production manager at a new print shop opened by a friend. There, his skills expanded into estimating.
In July of 1993 he showed up at Boy Scouts of America (BSA) headquarters, in Irving, Texas.
"I was just looking for another pressman's job," he says. He got it. For a year he ran a one-color Miehle, and then switched to estimating. In 1997, when the manager retired, Mettee stepped into the role.
CTP Installation
One of the first things he did was add a Mitsubishi platesetter. The in-plant previously sent its stripping to an outside firm.
"It was costing us quite a bit," he says. The platesetter, he adds, paid for itself in a mere two years.
"It was a wise move for us," Mettee maintains.
After attending a Unisource/IPMA in-plant workshop, Mettee and his boss Dan Buckhout analyzed the in-plant and realized their Miehle was costing them money. They started outsourcing more work and concentrating on 11x17˝ formats.
"We showed a big savings," he says.
The in-plant continues to do a fully loaded budget analysis and justifies itself yearly with reports and presentations.
Printing Solutions added a one-color A.B.Dick 9970 in 2001, and between that and a two-color Ryobi, the in-plant prints a lot of two-, three- and four-color work, mostly training materials, pamphlets and certificates. The shop got into digital color printing five years ago and currently runs a Xerox DocuColor 12.
Always striving to "be prepared" for the future, the in-plant moved to a complete PDF workflow about a year ago, even accepting four-color process jobs this way. This enables Printing Solutions to output the same job either digitally or via offset.
"It really has made us flexible," Mettee points out.
Customers appreciate this flexibility and often praise the in-plant, he says. They especially like the Customer Bill of Rights that Mettee implemented, outlining which information customers are entitled to know.
"We get a lot of compliments," Mettee says. "It just gave them a feeling of confidence."
Though he was not in the Scouting program for long as a boy—he only made it to Webelos—Mettee believes in BSA's mission and is proud of the part the in-plant plays in supporting it.
Outside of work, the father of four enjoys outdoor activities like fishing and boating. He also tries to keep his knowledge current by attending International Publishing Management Association and On Demand conferences. But he admits he couldn't do much without the help of the employees at Printing Solutions.
"People are really dedicated to their jobs," he praises.
