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“In recent years, I’ve been invited to cocktail parties where the invitation read that the attire was ‘casual elegance,’ ” explains Don Mader, Southeastern Printing’s 35-year-old president. “Even though the phrase is a bit paradoxical, I feel it represents how our company is perceived in our marketplace. We want to be known as a company that is fun to do business with, yet takes continuous improvement very seriously.”
Some of the fun stems from its themed employee meetings and sales contests, such as a birthday party—including a photo cake and party hats—to commemorate Benjamin Franklin’s 300th birthday last year. Also, weekly top performers during Southeastern’s 2006 “Rock ’n Troll—Casting for New Customers” sales contest were lauded with the Fish of the Week Award—including a stuffed toy billfish.
But it is certainly not all cake and parties for the 82-year-old company’s 230 employees. Through a series of five acquisitions since 1999 and strong organic growth, the printer has brought its annual sales tally up to the $32 million plateau. Southeastern employees stay busy providing customers with small- and large-format sheetfed offset printing, flexography, digital printing, as well as full prepress, finishing, mailing and fulfillment services.
Mader cut his teeth in the printing industry 16 years ago in the silk screen realm, reproducing fine art on t-shirts for retailers. From there he formed a prepress house servicing both screen and lithographic printers.
“Southeastern was one of our larger clients in the late ’90s and they were looking for support in their prepress division while switching over to computer-to-plate production,” Mader recalls. “They also were searching for succession management. We realized that we could play well together and I took over as president in 2001. My family and I completed the purchase of the company from its previous owners by the end of 2004.”
By design, Southeastern Printing serves two very different markets in two very distinct ways. Mader notes that the commercial sheetfed lithography division is extremely diversified with no one customer representing more than 8 percent and no one industry representing more than 25 percent of the division’s revenues.
“Given our size, that is somewhat of an anomaly, therefore our sales and marketing efforts are tremendous,” he remarks. “Conversely, our flexography division is myopic in scope with heavy customer concentration; we solely service the beverage label segment of the packaging industry. Our sales and marketing efforts are very targeted and economical for this segment.”
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