The Power of Humor, Health —DeWese

Let's first have the Pledge of Allegiance.

Now let's sing the Mañana University fight song. We need to hold our heads high, despite the loss our football team took at the hands of the Pennsylvania Correctional Institute for Women. I honestly thought the warden would keep his word and search the women before kickoff. Our players are recovering nicely though, and we hope to remove all the stitches before our next game against the Merry Dell Home for the Aged.

Now for my lecture.

Some of you students have made great progress toward attaining your Ph.D. Just imagine how thrilled your mama will be when I hand you a diploma that tells the world you hold a doctorate in print sales and marketing. Freeze that beautiful graduation image in your educated brains. It's a picture of motivation. You're gonna need all the motivation you can get 'cause these lessons get harder.

My lecture today is once again about bringing in, and then keeping, business.

This is important nowadays, with all the screaming and hollering about widespread unemployment. Republicans point at Democrats and ask, "Where are the jobs?" Democrats yell back, "Your guy lost the jobs and now we can't find them." What confounds me is that amid all this blame, neither side is SPECIFIC about what it will do to actually create jobs.

Depending on what type of printing you sell, roughly speaking, for every $200,000 in new business that you generate, you support one new job back in your plant. That can vary greatly between high-speed, webfed printing and slower sheetfed printing. It varies greatly from print segment to print segment, and within the niches of the segments. It can also vary depending on the amount of finishing required by your customers. It will vary a lot if your plant is diversified and you sell, for example, fulfillment services. But, for now, let's just use the $200,000 figure as being enough to support one employee in your company.

Humor/Health Connection

I know three printing salespeople who sell more than $20 million annually. This means, using my simple math, these folks support, give or take, 100 jobs each. If we listed these men individually on the most recent Printing Impressions 400 list, they would rank around #230 next to Victor Graphics in Baltimore and Shapco Printing in Minneapolis. If we lumped them together and called 'em, say, Super Trio Graphics, they would be selling around $65 million and rank about #81, below Continental Web Press in Itasca, IL. Admittedly, these salespeople are selling web work. Five million dollars annually would be a better number for sheetfed sales.

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