T.J. Tedesco: The Reports of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

T.J. Tedesco

I was thrilled to attend PRINTING United Expo 2022, my first printing industry event since drupa 2016. It was like seeing an old flame after many years. Contrary to some good natured ribbing, ‘I thought you retired,’ or worse, ‘I thought you were dead,’ like Mark Twain, I’m pleased to announce, I’m neither. Through the eyes of an uncle who hasn’t seen a niece or nephew for years, I saw the printing industry with clarity that only elapsed time can bring.

But first, I must digress and tell you about my personal journey. If you’re tempted to skip the next few paragraphs, do as you wish, but they do set the table for the takeaways below.

My Story – This Is Unavoidable, Sorry!

Some of you may remember me as a long time columnist in Printing Impressions and a few trade publications that no longer exist. Others may recall my half dozen or so books published by PIA/GATFPress. Some may be former clients of my old marketing agency, which had a nice two-decade run. Newbies won’t recognize my name at all.

When I started my agency in 1996, we were 100% dedicated to the graphic arts industry and remained that way for nearly a decade until a couple of chance encounters led us to stick a toe in the healthcare industry. In 2010, a Silicon Valley healthcare IT client experiencing meteoric growth had a significant ‘financial event’ in the high-eight figures. Shortly thereafter, another healthcare client exited, and their leaders, a pair of early 30-somethings, pocketed mid-seven figures each.

This was becoming interesting. I finally figured out that the foundation of these healthcare successes and others like them were innovation and differentiation. Our agency’s healthcare clients looked different than our printing clients. Try as we might, innovation and differentiation were difficult to achieve in the mature printing industry. Conversely, our clients in the burgeoning young healthcare IT industry had selling propositions like:

• World’s first patient safety and compliance software solution with installations in 1/3 of U.S. hospitals
• Leading physician documentation system with physician adherence consistently over 90%
• A small monitoring device with an algorithm that lets parents know when their kid is experiencing repetitive motions that may indicate the onset of a seizure
• Alarm management software that reduces ‘alarm fatigue,’ the ubiquitous din of medical device alarms constantly firing in just about every US hospital wing

The common denominator for success in healthcare is significant differentiation with limited competition. Contrast this to the competitive landscape of the typical printer, finisher, and mailer: limited differentiation and an ocean of competition. In printing, we were swimming with the sharks, in healthcare, we were splashing in a bathtub by ourselves. To be fair, we did have our share of graphic arts industry successes: one notable client with 500 employees sold to a publicly traded company for 12x EBITDA.

By 2013, the last year my company was based in metro-Washington, DC, we had transitioned to being 2/3rds healthcare, 1/3 printing.

In early 2016, I was invited to join a Silicon Valley ‘specialty drug’ management startup as one of three cofounders. I did, and shuttered my agency shortly thereafter. Specialty drugs are the ones you see advertised on TV with lots of side effects and no prices. The average consumer and physician doesn’t know the psoriasis, arthritis, IBS, oncology, and MS drug therapies being hawked cost $50K to $750K (or more) per patient per year. Frequently, little or no clinical data supports the use of these very expensive drugs and often there are lower cost, more effective, better proven, therapeutic alternatives.

Bottom line: many patients are prescribed the wrong drugs and it is VIVIO’s mission to fix this heinous problem while extracting significant waste from the ridiculous $4.2 Trillion U.S. health system. Early this year, my work with VIVIO was done and today this innovative, rapidly growing company has 1/4 million members under management, and only one direct competitor.

Back to Printing … Finally!

Above are some examples of success I have personally experienced. Yes, it’s hard to innovate and differentiate within a mature industry like printing, but it’s not impossible. I saw examples at PRINTING United Expo, and it was like a breath of fresh air. Now that you know my background, without further ado, here are my takeaways from Las Vegas:

• Let’s start with a softball. There was palpable pent up demand for getting together in person after three of the weirdest years we’ll ever experience. (No sh_t, Sherlock, but the journalist in me is compelled to state the obvious.)
• While niches for promotional and informational printing still exist, I was glad to see they were dwarfed by on-demand, wide-format, alternative substrate, and packaging printing. This is exactly what we knew was coming a decade ago, but it’s great seeing it happen.
• Diversification of PRINTING United into complementary sub-industries like apparel and promotional products is brilliant. Print as the product is a business model I like much better than print promoting or describing the product. Why? There is no alternative for the former; eWorld is a powerful alternative to the latter.
• Sustainable printing. It’s the right thing to do and there’s mounting evidence that customers care.
• Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s keynote session was strangely on target and worrisome at the same time. A lightning rod for controversy, DeJoy, and his take-no-prisoner’s approach, seems as promising as any to fix the decades-old USPS mess. It’s a shame his predecessors so badly bungled the obvious transition to package delivery. As the lead author of "Direct Mail Pal" and five or so follow-up editions, I feel it’s fair for me to say it’s unsettling to see the Postmaster General of the United States chasing innovation by others, primarily Amazon, in an area as important and large as package delivery. Clearly, he has a long way to go, but given the importance of his position, I wish him luck.
• In my functional area, sales, marketing, and customer success strategy, I saw too little accountability. Pretty pictures, attractive websites, and clever messaging are just the start, ROI is always the goal. This isn’t hard to calculate folks, net income over investment cost, times 100. Also, always know your pipeline counts: Suspects, Leads, Opportunities, New customers, Repeat customers. Accountability and measurement are everything.
• We desperately need industry numbers. I understand there’s controversy about what counts as printing these days, but still, we should know how many people work in printing and the size of our annual shipments. Recalling some old PIA stats from memory, in 2007, industry shipments hit a high mark of $210B and by 2014 or so, this was down to $130B. If we must redefine what counts as printing, so be it, but let’s restate the numbers, and be consistent. Understanding trends is important. Business leaders need accurate data to make intelligent investment decisions; without it, we’re flying blind. Let’s get this sorted out, and fast.
• Now for the biggie. Yes, there are pockets of innovation in printing, but this needs to be more of a rule, not the exception. Anyone who attended the keynote session, Future of Print & Personalization, with Chris Ozols from Printful and Ronen Samuel from Kornit, experienced a terrific example of what’s possible with enough work and focus. Our industry needs more stories like Printful, founded nine years ago because a motivational poster company struggled with unreliable print suppliers. This growth chart is a thing of beauty; heartfelt kudos to the global team at Printful.

Credit: https://www.printful.com/news

Bringing it All Together

Am I announcing a full return to my first flame, printing? No. Although I recognize the importance of maintenance and survival, I no longer have interest in helping companies achieve small rates of growth by doing the same thing, but slightly better. This is not a knock, rather the opposite. Innovation is challenging and isn’t for everyone. Stable small- and mid-sized companies form the backbone of the American economy, and we should be appreciative of the talented people in our industry who run these types of companies well.

On a personal level, the search for micro improvement is what I did 26 years ago and I’m not reinventing the wheel. I’m currently working on the type of macro change that only innovation and differentiation can bring. Are innovation and differentiation possible in print and related industries? Yes, but it’s hard.