Print Solutions Magazine

This is an edited version of the inaugural speech delivered by DMIA President Timothy J. Mehl, CDC, CEO of Dispatch, a manufacturer in Erie, Pa., at DMIA’s Print Solutions 2005 Conference & Expo in Orlando, Fla.

One of the most important measures of your professional success should be the number of opportunities you create. If you look up “opportunities” in a dictionary, you are led to believe that an opportunity is a favorable event that happens by chance. This would imply that successful people are lucky. I disagree. I think an opportunity is the result of innovation and hard work.

My theme for the coming year is “Create the Opportunity.” Over the next 12 months, I would like each of you to concentrate on creating an opportunity for your company.

As you probably know, each DMIA president promotes his theme in a monthly article in Print Solutions Magazine. I will, too, but plan to take a different tack in focusing on my audience. I know for sure I can count on one person to read every word of every article I write. That person is my mother, Pat Mehl, who celebrated her 80th birthday this past June. Now you may be wondering why is this guy writing monthly articles to an audience of one, and why is this person his mom? Let me explain.

My mom is the daughter-in-law of a printer. She is the wife of a printer. She has two sons, a daughter and a grandson in the printing industry. My mom has heard more discussions, more complaining and even some modest celebrating about the printing industry than anyone I know. She knows our industry. Trust me, with my mom as my audience, I guarantee my columns will be excellent. Here’s why: I plan to get the help of true experts from our industry. I am going to ask these experts to give their insights into how they created opportunities within their businesses and how they took advantage of those opportunities. My goal is to inspire each of you to do the same within your organizations. To Create the Opportunity!

Today, however, I’m not going to talk about our businesses. I’m going to talk about DMIA and the opportunities DMIA needs to create. Most active members agree that DMIA’s biggest value is networking. DMIA’s biggest challenge is to continue to promote and expand our networking opportunities. To do this, DMIA also needs to continue to grow the membership and get more members to participate.

I believe the biggest barrier to DMIA’s growth is our lack of a distinct identity. Remember when all we did was produce and sell business forms? Boy, those were the days. Life was simple. Profits were good. Everyone was happy. And, life was simple for the association as well. That’s because we had a specific product identity. We were the National Business Forms Association. There is nothing confusing about that. We were business forms.

Now, fast forward to today. I couldn’t begin to list the multitude of products and services represented by the members in this room. My guess is none of us could. This multitude of products and services has had a huge impact on DMIA’s identity. So here is the question: What have we become as an industry association? And, more importantly, what do we want to be?

DMIA is an association representing distributors who are, or at least should be, solution-specific. Distributors must offer solutions to end users. DMIA also is an association representing manufacturers and suppliers that are mostly product-specific. This contrast in philosophies is actually complementary and is the power of our supply chain. Most of us prosper in this environment. The problem is that it is very hard to quickly describe the association to a prospective member.

The last time a prospective member asked you to describe DMIA, what did you say? I recently spouted to a member prospect that “DMIA stands for Document Management Industries Association. Our members sell business forms, labels, commercial printing, digital printing, print management services, e-commerce solutions, software, office supplies, office furniture and equipment, clothing, golf balls, and other promotional items. And we also have members that make all of that stuff.”

At this point in the conversation, you should take a good read of the person you’re talking to. Their eyes might be glassy. They might have lost interest. This is a problem!

DMIA needs to create an identity that is easily explained and understood. We need an elevator speech, a speech that encapsulates DMIA’s message in the time it takes for an elevator ride.

So the opportunity for DMIA is to create a new identity that we and prospective members can connect with. This identity cannot be product-specific. Those days are over. Our identity is grounded in solution selling or business process improvement, something that describes the way DMIA members and supply chain partners solve client printing problems. If we can successfully communicate this new identity and describe the value proposition of membership, we will grow the association.

This question of identity will be the primary topic at the DMIA Board meeting in January. Please communicate any input you may have to any board member or to the DMIA staff.

The second opportunity facing DMIA is to improve member participation. And we’re doing it. Consider this…

• Membership has grown in both 2004 and 2005.

• Thanks to Phil Schmidt and Karen Gregg, our Regionalization Program has been invigorated. In fact two of our new Board members, Lisa Finneral and Greg Gill, come directly from this program. We currently have five former RDs on the DMIA Board.

• Online education, the Business Printing Curriculum as well as other WebEx seminars have succeeded.

• The CEO Summit and Small Distributor Summit are highly rated and well attended, and the Spring Management Conference continues to exceed budgeted attendance.

And the list goes on—from our Annual Meeting and Print Solutions Expo to DMIA’s and PERF’s Manufacturer & Supplier Print Conference, online sourcing, web sites, Listservs and publications. They all continue to expand and exceed member needs.

While all this is great, we need to continually move forward, prove value to the membership, improve programs and services and create new programs to replace old ones that are no longer effective.

DMIA’s 2002 President, Mark Trumper, talked about member involvement in his speech in Philadelphia. His theme was “Participate and Prosper.” Mark is one of the most successful people in our industry. He started a distributorship from scratch and built it to $26 million in revenues in 13 years. Then—and this is what makes him smarter than the rest of us—he sold it. A few years ago Mark started Maverick Label, one of the most progressive and unique label providers in the world. Mark is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met. He’ll tell you that a lot of his success is related to his participation in this association. That’s very impressive.

I bring up Mark’s story because we are almost opposites. He is an innovator, a true entrepreneur. My brother Joe and I are fourth-generation printers. We have a whole different set of problems than Mark. But, I too can tell you that this association has made a huge difference with our company. That is the beauty of DMIA. It offers so much to such a diverse crowd.

We need to communicate DMIA’s importance better to our membership. The membership needs to understand the true value of DMIA participation. Most of us joined this association to find sources. Distributors joined to find manufacturing partners. Manufacturers joined to find distributor customers. And suppliers joined to find manufacturer customers.

After joining DMIA and finding our sources, most of us who participate came to one of DMIA’s educational programs. DMIA has been great at education. But what most of us found when we attended meetings is that the best value of membership is the networking. The shared ideas and the business opportunities that are presented by hanging around the industry’s elite are incredible!

Somehow, we need to better communicate this outstanding value proposition. If we can create that opportunity, participation will increase and our association will prosper in the years to come.

I’ve told you that Dispatch is a fourth-generation company. It was founded by my great-grandfather more than 100 years ago. Our main product line back then was printing railroad bills. Dispatch evolved into a commercial printing company. In the early 1970s we started producing business forms with the acquisition of Kim Kraft.

I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the most recent two generations of our family business. My father is E.J. Mehl. By the way his nickname is Brub. Time is too short to explain the origin of that nickname. I will tell you that he’s been an inspirational mentor. Brub is 81, and, like my mother, is also in great health. One lesson learned is that his good health is, in part, due to very good succession planning. That, by the way, is something many of us should be addressing. My dad retired over 16 years ago at age 65, and has never looked back. He’s also never looked better.

My partner and brother, Joe Mehl, is also here today. Inasmuch as we balance business, friendship and family, my nicknames for him change moment to moment. Some of those nicknames are gracious. Some are endearing. Some are neither. We balance each other well. Joe’s the outgoing, gregarious sales guy who identifies opportunities. I’m the introverted, operations guy who concentrates on implementation. I’ve seen Joe give speeches to hundreds of people with no notes or any reference materials. I, on the other hand, have a teleprompter. That, by the way, proves that he’s more talented than I. It may also indicate that I am smarter!

Like many other printers, our company struggled in the late ’90s. We opened a digital print division and fulfillment center. We made the decision to close our traditional commercial print division in 2001. Remember, commercial printing was our heritage. Closing that division created a huge culture change. We parted company with many employees whose skill sets no longer fit our new model. We’ve now hired new people whose aptitudes are more appropriate for our new offerings.

We closed the commercial printing division just after 9/11. We sold those assets for 50 cents on the dollar. Believe me, the transition was painful. The losses we incurred in the commercial division prior to and as a result of this closure made a mess of our balance sheet. Fortunately my father left us with a balance sheet that could weather that storm. Still, there was considerable stress both inside and outside of the organization. And, as a consequence, I almost ruined a perfectly good marriage.

Why would I tell you this story? My point is that during this time, the one professional constant that I could count on was our membership in DMIA. The friends, the advice and the business opportunities that arose as a result of our participation in this association served our company well through this difficult transition. That participation also kept me personally in touch with industry changes and helped me keep focused. Quite truthfully, DMIA helped me keep my sanity.

You have heard so many members get up here and tell you that for everything that they put into DMIA, they got more in return. I’m going to put it another way. My participation in this association has been almost entirely self-serving. The ideas I’ve gotten, the cooperation, the leads, the customers and most importantly, the friendships have sustained me.

We have a wonderful tradition of good education, great meetings and fantastic publications. The association is more fiscally sound than ever. That is something most associations cannot say, especially in our industry. But this past success does not insure our future. We need to create new opportunities within DMIA. We need your help to create a new identity, to grow membership and to promote participation.

In our earlier years with Dispatch, my father would often get tired of Joe and I proposing grand ideas and failing to take action. He would simply ask the question, “Are you guys going to fish or cut bait?” That reminds me of two years ago when DMIA President Phil Schmidt concluded his inaugural speech with a story that is still relevant and needs to be re-told.

As the story goes, a boyhood friend in Phil’s hometown named Verlin Haynes loved to fish. Every day he would catch his limit when no one else was catching anything. One day, the local game warden went fishing with Verlin. He wanted to find the secret to his success. They were in the middle of the lake when Verlin reached into his tackle box, pulled out a small stick of dynamite, lit it and tossed it into the lake. Following the explosion, Verlin proceeded to scoop up all the stunned fish. The game warden was beside himself. He jumped up and down in the boat and screamed, “What in the world are you doing? You know that’s against the law. I’m going to have to arrest you.” After the warden ranted for several minutes, Verlin reached into his tackle box and pulled out another stick of dynamite. He lit it, handed it to the game warden and calmly asked, “Are you going to talk, or are you going to fish?”

To create opportunities, sometimes we need to challenge tradition. We need to alter course and change cultures. And, sometimes when you do a gut check, and you know you are right, you might need to bet the ranch. Please help me go forward this year as we help ourselves and this association “Create the Opportunity!”

Timothy J. Mehl, CDC, is CEO of Dispatch, a manufacturer in Erie, Pa., and DMIA’s president.