Todd Westphal: Working to Keep His In-plant Relevant

Todd Westphal

Even though he’s been in the printing industry for more than 40 years, Todd Westphal admits he just sort of fell into printing.

“When I first got out of high school, there was a kind of a recession taking place at that time, so there weren’t a lot of jobs out there, and I really didn’t know what I wanted to do,” recalls Westphal, now publishing section chief for the State of Wisconsin’s Bureau of Publishing and Distribution, in Madison.

He knew about printing from friends and family members who worked in the industry and decided to take a printing and publishing course at the Madison Area Technical College. After completing the program in 1983, Westphal started out at a printing company, running a small one-color press making letterheads and envelopes.

“That got me started in it, you know. And from there it just kind of grew. I went from doing some real simple printing to getting into prepress. I had a friend whose father owned a prepress company, and I got involved in that and became ... what they used to call a stripper back in my day,” Westphal says.

Westphal spent four and a half years at that company before he moved to Four Lakes ColorGraphics where he worked for nearly 22 years, watching the company evolve from manual work to desktop publishing.

Starting All Over

Around 2009, things started to go badly for him when the company was purchased by a firm from India.

“All of all the work went over to India, and then that company was eventually sold to a company in the Philippines,” Westphal explains. “So, when that company dissolved and I lost my job there, I basically had to start over because nobody was hiring during the 2009-2010 timeframe because we were in the middle of the 2008 recession.”

In April of 2010, Westphal became a contract worker for a staffing and recruiting agency called Spherion, which happened to work with the in-plant for the state of Wisconsin.

“After about four years of being a contract worker, there was a supervisor position that opened, and I applied for that and became a state employee for two years as a supervisor. And then the section chief retired, and I competed for that position, and I’ve been in the section chief position for the last seven years. I worked my way back up,” Westphal says.

From the Private to the Public Sector

Westphal says working for the private sector is much different than working for the state.
“Things don’t happen quite as fast in the state system,” he acknowledges. “It took a little change, a little learning. There was a learning curve, there’s no question about it.”

The most difficult part of his job at times is dealing with people, he says, because he works with full-time state employees as well as managed service contract staff so finding a balance within all of that can pose a challenge.

To keep his staff motivated, Westphal believes in getting his hands dirty and being on the floor of the in-plant with his employees.

“I don’t work remotely; I am on site every single day,” Westphal says. “So, I think that helps a lot because I’m talking with staff constantly. Every day I go around and chat with everybody, whether they’re state workers or contract staff, doesn’t matter. I make sure I talk with them, I ask them how they’re doing, and I ask them what they need. I’m constantly getting their feedback.”

Another challenge he can’t ignore is the need to keep the in-plant relevant. Westphal, who is a member of the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association, says that at roundtables and other talks, state in-plant managers all discuss the topic of relevancy.

On the government side of things, he says, budgets are always taken into consideration and cost cutting is crucial.

“So, you have to make sure that you are relevant,” Westphal points out, “so you are not part of those people on the chopping block.”

Staying Relevant

During his time as publishing section chief, Westphal is proudest of the fact that he expanded the in-plant’s wide-format printing services with the addition of a Mimaki JFX200 flatbed printer and a 64" Ricoh Pro L4160 latex printer. The in-plant was also an early adopter of production inkjet technology when it installed a Ricoh InfoPrint 5000 GP continuous-feed color inkjet press in 2019.

When Westphal started working for the state, he says it had a fleet of Xerox digital presses. But under his leadership the plant transitioned to Ricoh and has been using Ricoh products for the past decade.
Westphal has plans to expand the in-plant’s wide-format services in a bid to stay relevant.

“At some point, some of our volumes in certain areas will go down, and I want to find something that can fill those holes, and wide-format has become a big part of it. We’ve had training for some of our people to do wide-format installations, car wrapping, wall and floor graphics and window graphics,” Westphal says.

Because it’s a government agency, Wisconsin’s Bureau of Publishing and Distribution cannot sell its services to the private sector. Still, the in-plant constantly markets itself internally at leadership meetings and via email blasts.

As he looks toward the future, Westphal doesn’t see any drastic changes, but he does have a wish list of new equipment, and he hopes to implement a print management information system.

“We’re talking and dealing with a lot of other states that have a similar system that we’ve been looking at, and we’re getting their feedback — what’s working, what’s not working, you know, that kind of thing,” Westphal says.

As for himself, Westphal jokes that in two years he may find himself retired on a beach with his wife.