The Color Boom

It's safe to start calling Terry Fulcomer a financial guru.

With six employees and a base budget of $750,000, the Prince William County graphic arts and print shop supervisor just scored a Heidelberg NexPress 2100, along with a Heidelberg Digimaster 9110.

The key to his wisdom?

Insourcing.

Roping in 15 to 20 percent of the in-plant's income, insourcing work from other counties and municipalities is essential to this very successful shop.

But it wasn't always such a booming in-plant. Fulcomer says when he first started at the shop, most of the equipment was archaic and the quality of work was very poor.

"I've spent 10 years in this shop," says Fulcomer, "but when I first got here, the county said they were thinking about outsourcing it. I said 'Give me six months, and let's see if we can't turn some of this around.' "

With a nod from the county, Fulcomer immediately picked up a high-speed duplicator to carry the in-plant through Fulcomer's tenuous beginning. And three years later, the shop had its first windfall—a color printer.

"This was the first opportunity for folks to get color on demand," he says. "It just took off. The demand exceeded our capability."

The shop subsequently picked up a two-color A.B.Dick 3500 press and DPM 2000 platesetter. But with the demand so high, says Fulcomer, "it got a little too complex to do color separations. We needed to be able to print from a file. Period."

So the in-plant put together a package deal with Heidelberg for the 9110 and the NexPress, which allowed Fulcomer to get a great price on both.

For a small in-plant like this one, scoring these two machines at even the lowest price might seem impossible. That's why insourcing is so essential to this Virginia in-plant. Fulcomer expects a return on investment in only 18 months because he's banking on his outside customers' desire for color work. To lure them in, the in-plant was able to cut the cost of color prints from 60 cents to 28 cents. So far, it's paying off.

"Right now, we can't keep up with the people who want to do things in color that they couldn't do before," he says.

To illustrate the value of color, Fulcomer describes an experiment his shop conducted with the NexPress 2100.

"We sent out a black-and-white flyer offering some freebie, and we got a 10 percent response. We sent out the same flyer in two-color and got a 22 percent response," he says. "When we sent that same flyer out in full color, we got an 89 percent response."

For Fulcomer, one of the best reasons to work with the NexPress is that his customers provide their jobs in PDF format, making them responsible for creating their own copy. It's a nice bonus that keeps things moving along at the fast pace the shop now enjoys.

"We've got 415,000 impressions already," said Fulcomer when interviewed in January. "And we're not even in our busy season."

Word about the in-plant's color capabilities has spread like wildfire through Virginia's countryside. Fulcomer says he has had to do very little marketing—almost all of his new insourcing business shows up because of one of his current customers' recommendations. And for the small in-plant, things seem to just be getting better.

"The county is very supportive," says Fulcomer. "It helps a lot to have your boss see where you're going with this."

The county is so supportive, in fact, that Fulcomer has in the past been named employee of the month, and the shop has won several awards for its higher-end work.

Now, he says, the challenge is streamlining all of this volume.

—by Mike Llewellyn