One on One with David Torok

How does a 100-year old printing company map out a robust path of growth for the 21st century? David Torok, CEO of Texas-based Padgett Printing, ought to know. He’s spent the past 17 years guiding Padgett through an extraordinary evolution from traditional print provider to a cross-media powerhouse. Under his leadership, the company grew in sales from $8 million to over $29 million and has become a major digital and offset technology leader capable of producing and mailing 750,000 pieces per day. Torok brings over 30 years of industry experience to Padgett, is active in national printing activities, and has agreed to speak at the NPES Annual Conference early next month. We sat down with him to talk about Padgett’s trajectory and get a preview of what he’ll be sharing at the Conference with members.

How would you describe the changes your business model has undergone during last ten years?

We realized that offset printing is becoming more of a commodity every day, because the press manufacturers have put such quality in and taken the craftsmanship out of it. Paper mills have made their paper very consistent; same with the ink and plate manufacturers. You have high consistency with all this automation – the craftsmanship isn’t there. So if we are going to add value to the product, it has to be more than putting ink on paper. Our proposition right now is that we add value either through the database, through the mailing, or through fulfillment and distribution. Basically after the toner or ink goes on paper is where we start adding our value.

Even so, you’ve put a lot of effort into tooling up the shop to handle a broad range of new jobs and applications.

Yes, we “kissed all the frogs” as they say, and it expanded from there. Today we’re like Noah’s arc: we have two NexPresses, two Digimasters, two Creo CTP, two cutters, two stitchers…we are the king of twos; it gives you redundancy and flexibility.