PUBLICATION CENTER

By Wayne Willis

I guess I need to give you a little bit of history. My shop has been around for about 25 years. We started with fleet graphics back then and have pretty much stuck with that market. We know how to make big decals.

We have screen printed since the beginning and bought one of the first Gerber plotters. As time went on the screen presses got fancier and the plotters followed suit. And anyone in the shop could do just about anything that needed to be done. Granted, some were better than others, but everyone could get product out the door when push came to shove.

And then came digital. We sat on the outside for awhile and watched. Then we started sending some work out to be done. It didn’t take long for us to figure out this digital thing might catch on.

The Henshaw Effect

Eventually, the time was right to buy equipment and bring this process in-house. We then needed someone to run it, and I had just the employee. Let’s call him Henshaw. Though he’ll never read this, you never know.

Henshaw was a young kid with a pretty good education. He knew the graphic programs and was great on a computer. He was young, inexperienced… and cheap. Perfect. We sent Henshaw to all the classes and brought the tech people to our shop for training.

While all this training was going on I would hang around and pick up what I could. I learned just enough to be dangerous. This is complicated stuff! If an image looks good at 100 ppi at full size, shouldn’t it look three times as good at 300 ppi? Why can’t I hit that Home Depot orange? Why can’t I hit any of the same colors I could hit last week? Ask Henshaw.

Eventually, Henshaw had gained enough practical knowledge and experience to produce some really nice work for us. We were starting to get pretty good at this digital fleet stuff, so good that we needed someone to start running that machine on the evening shift.

Who’s going to train this person? Henshaw. And he did. He would RIP the jobs for the evening shift and all they had to do was keep it fed. Load, unload, clean up, and go home. We were in good shape until the power flickered one night. We lost the jobs in the queue and nothing was run that evening.

I explained to Henshaw that my evening shift operator needed to learn more; he needed to be another Henshaw. But Henshaw soon explained to me that it couldn’t happen. This person just didn’t have what it takes to really run this equipment. And neither did the next person. Or, the next.

I was in trouble. Henshaw was very important and he knew it. We were getting great quality work from him, but he was holding us hostage. He wouldn’t share all of the tips and tricks he knew with my other employees… tips and tricks that he had learned the hard way. Tips and tricks that I paid for with lost material, time, and wages.

He was near the top of our pay scale and wanted more. A real pain in the butt. I had created a monster! And yet I nearly cried when he asked to take a vacation. How could I shut down the digital department for a week?

The Henshaw Solution

I think you can clearly picture the problem. I had let this situation develop and by the time I realized I had a problem it was too late. All of my digital eggs were in Henshaw’s basket. And even if he had not tried to take advantage of his position it was still a problem.

What if a meteor fell on his head as he was walking his basset hound? My digital department would be out of commission for a long while. This type of situation could develop nearly anywhere in your business, but the digital area is particularly susceptible.

It’s new technology. Most of us old owners don’t know enough to train anyone. And it keeps changing on us. In most cases if a person claims to have experience with wide format digital imaging and they are out a job, you might want to do a background check.

My solution was to hire two more operators for the department. They have had all of the training and are now getting the experience.

One will spend the day at the computer, engineering, pre-flighting and RIPping the jobs, fiddling with production orders and recording all the data. The other will be in charge of the actual equipment – cleaning, loading substrates, and monitoring the printing.

The next day they switch. And when a problem pops up they can both work on solving it. As the department continues to expand I will add more digital operators.

And Henshaw? He no longer works for me. He is now a policeman in a neighboring city. I hope he doesn’t subscribe to this newsletter.

Wayne Willis is the owner of Excel Graphics in Indianapolis.