Print Solutions Magazine

It’s a hot summer afternoon, and Tim Mehl isn’t going anywhere.
It’s not for a lack of trying.

If he could control Great Lakes weather the same way he controls his printing company’s operations, then Nyanza’s main sail would “draw” full, its bright spinnaker would balloon, and the sailboat would zip across Lake Erie at seven or eight knots. Last year, Mehl (pronounced “Mail”) and his sons David and John were crew members on the immaculate 42-ft. boat (shown here) when it defeated more than 60 others to win a race in the Lake Erie Interclub Cruise, an annual series of five races to ports in Pennsylvania, New York and Canada. Nyanza, owned by a friend of Tim’s, represented Erie Yacht Club, where the Mehls are members.

When Nyanza sails in heavy wind, “It feels like you’re sitting on the hood of a Cadillac going 60,” Mehl says. But now, she’s becalmed in the July heat.

Fortunately, the antidote for dead air is Ed “Brub” Mehl, Tim’s garrulous 81-year-old father. Sitting near Nyanza’s stern, he offers a blow-by-blow account of Erie’s shipbuilding and commercial fishing history. He points to landmarks and casts out names of local companies—General Electric Corporation, Reed Manufacturing Company, Lund Boat Works—and marries them with anecdotes. Tim and David talk about maneuvering Nyanza once the wind returns.

Beers go down some hatches, and Tim receives a cell phone call from a company whose current supplier didn’t meet a project’s demands. He hangs up and coolly remarks that winning its business would bring significant revenue to Dispatch, the Erie-based printing manufacturer he runs with his brother, Joe.

During his history lesson, Brub doesn’t mention the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. At the helm, Tim has the quiet confidence of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who defeated the British on Lake Erie and lifted the nation’s morale. “The breeze will come back,” he says. Then, he points toward Erie’s downtown and says to his father, “Don’t forget the Hammermill plant over there.”

Like many manufacturing businesses in the region, the plant is a thing of the past. Hammermill Paper Company ran the pulp and paper mill from 1898-1986, when International Paper (IP) bought it and produced brands Beckett, Hammermill, Springhill and Strathmore at the site. In May 2002, IP shut down the plant, citing a soft market and the chance to save more than $36 million a year. The Erie Times-News ranked the closing as the city’s top story of 2002.

Hammermill was a prominent customer for the Mehl family business, which today is in its fourth generation of ownership. Brub’s grandfather co-founded it in 1851, the same year Erie became a city. In its early days, the firm printed the Erie Dispatch newspaper and ran a separate shop that provided bookbinding and engraving services. Brub’s father ran the company before passing the torch to Brub, who retired in 1989. Today, Tim serves as CEO of the $6.5 million business, and Joe is chairman.

Finally, a puff of air. Cheering abounds, and Nyanza begins cutting through the water. Through his glasses, Tim spends the next hour focusing on sails and sea, calculating currents and wind speed until making landfall at Erie Yacht Club.

“Fathom” is a nautical term meaning six feet in length, but an act of Parliament once defined it as “the length of a man’s arms around the object of his affections.” Judging by Tim’s frequent grin during the sail, Nyanza’s wheel qualifies as such an object. “Our family has a tradition of sailing, and it’s something we’ve always enjoyed together,” Brub will say later. “Tim is a quiet person, but he seems at home when he’s onboard. He calculates quickly and almost always makes the right move.”

Tim’s next move will be ascending to DMIA presidency, a 1-year term he begins next month at DMIA’s 2005 Print Solutions Conference & Expo in Orlando.

An aerial photo of Nyanza sailing into Port Dover, Canada, hangs on Tim Mehl’s office wall. The photo is near another one showing the boat Chaos, which he, his wife Susan, and their sons David and John sailed for 15 years.

Tim doesn’t use his former boat’s name to describe today’s printing industry, but sitting calmly in his office chair, he says success isn’t simple for manufacturers. Many are struggling to stay afloat at a time when margins are shrinking and customer demands are rising. Flexible distributors can turn on a dime, but it’s comparatively harder for manufacturers to make money.

Tim should know. He’s a self-described “numbers-cruncher” who’s in charge of streamlining Dispatch’s operations and increasing its revenue. “We have to continue to concentrate on solutions instead of products,” he says. “That’s our biggest challenge. But along with capitalizing on new technology, it’s also our biggest opportunity.”

The company has a long history of taking advantage of opportunities. In 1917, the business that printed the Erie Dispatch split from the one offering bookbinding and engraving services. Brub Mehl’s father sold the newspaper side to concentrate on the “job shop,” eventually adding letterpress capability and selling catalogs, brochures, sample books for paper companies and annual reports. The firm added offset printing on Brub’s watch in the mid-1950s. A decade later, the company bought business forms manufacturer Kim Kraft.

Brub pounded the pavement, securing new customers, while Tim hit the books, securing a bachelor’s degree in business from Carnegie Mellon University and a master’s degree in business administration from Northwestern University. “I hadn’t decided, but I was pretty sure I was going to come back to the family business,” Tim recalls. “My fascination with the industry then was the continual strides offset lithography was making in terms of high color.”

Brub encouraged both his sons to work for other bosses before deciding whether to join the family business. “I thought it was important for them to get a feeling for how other people ran things,” he says. “They needed to see different perspectives than their old man’s.” Tim worked for a large employment benefits consulting company in Chicago for a year, and Joe joined the printing firm upon graduation from Villanova University.

When Tim decided to move back to Erie, Brub didn’t want to play favorites. So he and Joe played with Tim’s mind, holding a rigorous interview. “Tim sauntered into the office with a coat and tie on, and we ripped him up and down,” recalls Brub, laughing. “Our last question was, ‘What possible good can come from us hiring you?’ He got so mad, he stood up and began to walk out the door. Then I said, ‘How about starting at Kim Kraft?’ That office was on the other side of town from mine. He said that sounded good.”

Says Tim: “I had a good education and did well in Chicago, and I was a little naïve. I figured by the end of the first or second day, I’d be running the place.” Instead, he worked for each department at the company, learning to improve procedures. “It was evident by the early 1980s that traditional forms were going to mature,” he says. “We were successful, but needed different paths.”

Today, Dispatch employs 62 people and offers a variety of business communication products through its four divisions: Dispatch Printing (promotional printing), Kim Kraft Business Forms (medium runs of custom continuous forms, unit sets and cut sheets), Fulfillment Plus (storage, pick and pack, fulfillment, and variable on-demand printing and mailing) and The Front End (electronic prepress services).

In March 2002, Dispatch sold its distributor-based commercial printing business to Dupli-Systems Inc., a manufacturer in Strongsville, Ohio. The move eliminated the need for sheet-fed commercial presses and bindery equipment in the Dispatch Printing division and allowed Kim Kraft to move forms manufacturing operations into that facility rather than renting space.

Dispatch’s traditional products still generate a majority of the company’s sales, but Tim says he thinks a “huge future” exists in variable information and one-to-one marketing. Fulfillment Plus is the company’s fastest-growing segment, and the one that excites him most when discussing the firm’s future. The division’s office includes 31,700 square feet of climate-controlled space, and it’s located a few miles away from the 40,000-square-foot building that houses Dispatch’s three other divisions.

For high-speed, black-only digital printing jobs, the firm uses a Xerox DocuTech 6100 with DigiPath that can produce 100 personalized pages per minute. For full-color digital printing, it uses a Xerox DocuTech 6060 color printer with Creo/Scitex technology that can produce 60 pages of variable data per minute. The firm’s mailing equipment includes a Bryce 20K ink jet machine and a NeoPost S190 inserter/sealer. “Fulfillment Plus has allowed us to be more than just a printer,” Joe says. “Now, we can attack the whole spectrum of procurement.”

Tim says Dispatch has two strategic goals during the next few years—to build a stronger model of fulfillment and digital printing, and to update the company’s workflow and web-enabled processes frequently. “It’s incredible to think that capital expenditures used to be in iron; now they’re in technology,” he says. “We have to keep pushing that curve. If we spend $100,000 on a press, it’s something you can touch and feel. If you spend $100,000 on software, you can’t touch and feel it, but it might be a better investment.”

Tim Mehl is the only current DMIA Board member to rate as an introvert on a recent Myers-Briggs personality test. He’s more apt to listen and contemplate rather than chat and judge, and says he’s more comfortable talking one-on-one with someone than mingling in a group.

“I admire how open he is to other people’s ideas and viewpoints, and I respect his mind a great deal,” says Gail O’Roke, CDC, CEO of Hayward, Calif.-based distributorship Independent Business Group, and a former DMIA president. “He’s intellectual and quiet, so some people might be surprised to know he has a terrific, dry sense of humor.”

That humor was on display during DMIA’s 2005 Spring Management Conference in Tucson, Ariz. He wrote and delivered a speech to honor former DMIA President Mark Trumper, winner of the association’s President’s Award. Most of the event’s attendees knew Trumper’s rags-to-riches story and thought he had the Midas touch for business. (Trumper, CEO of Maverick Label, Edmonds, Wash., has a fast-growing firm with a unique online sales and marketing model.)

Instead of doing the expected—complimenting Trumper’s hard work and business acumen—Mehl began the speech in a pseudo-bitter tone: “Some of you call him Mark. Some of you call him Trump. I call him Lucky.” The audience laughed hard, and kept laughing as Mehl mentioned how “lucky” Trumper was to advance during his early days in the industry, how “lucky” he was to launch his own distributorship at a young age, how “lucky” he was to sell that company for a small fortune and how “lucky” he was to have a great wife and two charming kids. Then, this line created a roar of laughter: “You see, Lucky over here has accomplished more in this industry in 30 years than my whole family has accomplished in four generations!” Mehl ended the speech deftly, saying dedicated people who work hard and have great leadership skills and street smarts seem to have the best luck.

The speech wasn’t a personality departure for Mehl—many people who know him say he’s quick-witted—but he doesn’t often showcase his sense of humor in public. “He is perceptive of people and can read them easily, which bodes well in this business,” Brub Mehl says. “He’s a detail-oriented leader with financial strengths. He always has his nose in the books.”

That works at Dispatch, because Joe Mehl isn’t the epitome of organization, Tim says. “We couldn’t be more different in our styles,” Joe says. “I’m Mr. Outside, making sales calls and being the marketing guy. He’s Mr. Inside, improving operations and worrying about silly, minor details such as the financial health of our company. He’s black or white—there’s no gray area, and he doesn’t mince words. I’m probably a little softer. He gets things done.” Says Tim: “Joe finds delegation easier, and that’s my biggest weakness. I can be an oppressive manager, and like to get wrapped up in the details of a project. He hates that. He can see the big picture, but wants other people to build the parts. This is all good because if we were the same type of manager, we would have killed each other by now.”

Leon Bujnowski, Dispatch’s MIS manager, has worked at the company for more than 30 years and is chiefly responsible for developing the e-commerce software that integrates with the firm’s back-end operating systems. “People who work this long together don’t see eye to eye about everything, but when that happens, the important aspect is knowing why you don’t see eye to eye,” he says. “That’s one reason I enjoy working here—Tim and Joe give everyone respect.”

The brothers created a flat management structure at Dispatch: Four managers comprise the only other layer of management below themselves. Gae Campbell, the company’s customer service manager, says one result is open communication company-wide. “We have a lot of pride in how we operate,” she says. “Our distributors know what the best solutions are, and Tim reinforces the need to partner with them. When we thrill them, we’re doing our jobs. When we make a mistake, we’re accountable.”

The Planner at Risk and Rest

Almost every room in Tim and Susan Mehl’s house features a breathtaking, panoramic view of the southern shore of Lake Erie. Their backyard backs up to private Manchester Beach, where waves gently break 100 yards away from their stone patio. It’s a picturesque spot for a summer sunset, which is an hour away. Tim, Susan and David Mehl eat salads and reminisce.

When Tim was 11 and Joe was 14, they raced as a 2-man team every Wednesday night and Sunday morning at Erie Yacht Club. Their 14-ft. dinghy and good teamwork propelled them to a Junior National Championship title in the 1960s. Conventional racing wisdom says to begin such a race with a “starboard-tack start,” with the bow heading right, because those boats have the right of way over ones with bows heading left in a “port-tack start.” But just before the beginning of the race, the wind shifted in a way the racers didn’t expect. Sixty-nine boats began with a conventional start; Joe and Tim, a tactician even before his teen-aged years, didn’t. The Mehls basically lapped the field.

Inside, sailing trophies won by David and his brother John occupy rows of shelves in a hallway near the kitchen. John is a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, and it’s likely he’ll be the fifth-generation Mehl to work for the company. David is a former youth sailing instructor at Erie Yacht Club’s Reyburn Sailing School, and was a member of Boston College’s sailing team. He says the fastest sailors are the most focused, able to change strategies depending on the elements.

Tim makes a parallel to the printing business: “Change is an opportunity, and companies have to be willing to take calculated risks, at least ones that they know will benefit customers. That’s how we feel about digital printing.”

On the horizon, the sinking sun hides behind a cloud as a sailboat slices west across the water. Its mainsail is majestic against the orange sky, and its mast casts a shadow on the water.

Tim is anchored in a patio chair, his arms resting behind a head that always seems to be planning. He’s staring at the sailboat, seemingly deep in thought. Perhaps he’s contemplating Dispatch’s next move. Maybe he’s guessing what sea change the industry will bring next. Or possibly he’s planning what to say in Orlando when he’s introduced as DMIA’s president.

One thing is certain: He and Dispatch aren’t about to be caught adrift or motionless. Tim will wrap his mind around whatever good idea comes next. Stagnation is something he just can’t fathom.

Darin Painter is managing editor of Print Solutions. Email him your comments at dpainter@PSDA.org.

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