Change? Copy That

Change? Copy That

Entrepreneurs by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

Eileen Rosenzweig has orchestrated several comprehensive changes at the printing store she runs with her family. What hasn't changed is her aggressive and fearless attitude, not to mention solid sales increases.

Eileen and Tim Rosenzweig had a nice little printing business going for themselves in the mid '90s.

At least that was before a sense of overwhelming panic set in.

Sitting among a crowd of fellow Sir Speedy franchise owners one day in 1994, the couple listened to company founder Don Lowe talk about the future of the industry. In a strong fatherly tone, Lowe told the troops the good times were over: The challenging future of the printing business would be in technology.

Lowe tossed out phrases like digital color, e-mail orders and setting fees for storing files. And he said shop owners who refuse to get a line of credit - fast and with a lot of zeros - to pay for the necessary new equipment wouldn't survive.

"I was so terrified," Eileen Rosenzweig says 12 years later. "I just kept looking at my husband, saying, 'What the hell are we going to do now?'"

The Rosenzweigs, high school sweethearts who attended accounting school in Boston together, gave up lucrative corporate America jobs to buy the Sarasota Sir Speedy store from Eileen Rosenzweig's retiring parents in 1987. Seven years into it, the new entrepreneurs were growing the franchise, albeit at a slow pace, but they also had little overhead, few expenses and minimal debt. The $10,000 monthly payments they had made for three years to own the store outright were complete.

Still, the can-do couple bought into Lowe's futuristic theories. They got a line of credit for $100,000. They immediately began using the money to buy equipment. They learned about digital printing and doing business over this thing called the Internet.

The resulting payoff was big: The franchise hit $1 million in sales in 1996. And over the last three years, it has grown 44%, from $2.5 million in 2004 sales to $3.6 million in 2006.

Plus, the growth is based on an average sales ticket of $300, an unusually low amount for the industry. Orders run the printing and copying gamut, from election-season candidate flyers to building blueprints to big consumer catalogs. Having such high sales in a non-major city market "really speaks to the volume" Rosenzweig and her staff are able to produce, says Denise Denton, a spokeswoman for the Mission Viejo, Calif.-based Sir Speedy corporate office.

Eileen Rosenzweig oversees the business mostly by herself. Her husband, who is disabled and isn't involved in day-to-day operations, serves as chief soundboard, advice-giver and listener. Rosenzweig's sister and brother law, Jackie and Michael Sanderson, also share ownership of the business; Jackie Sanderson runs the graphics department.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., the fast-talking, hyper-competitive Rosenzweig learned many of her business lessons by failing first. She's also succeeded by having a knack for reinventing the business, first after the Lowe speech, and again, in 2004, when the capital-intensive printing outlet began floundering.

"If you're not making any bad mistakes, you're not making any mistakes at all," Rosenzweig says. "You can't be afraid of technology. You learn what you can and you jump."

Grandiose ideas

That motto served Rosenzweig well in 2004, when the business went through another struggle. This time, though, it wasn't adapting to Lowe's technology promises, but a total loss of concentration, she says. "We lost our focus with customers and employees," Rosenzweig says. "We didn't know what we were about anymore."

Looking back, she's not sure what kicked off the slump. Missing most of five months to help care for her husband was a factor, but so too was hiring a few bad employees that brought down company morale in the 25-person shop, as well as some bad calls on equipment purchases.

Whatever the reason, the dip was costly. From 2003 to 2004, sales dropped from $2.75 million to $2.5 million. And in midyear, the store went two straight months without breaking even for the first time.

Rosenzweig reacted quickly. In late 2004, she looked at every aspect of expenses, from purchases, to work flow to employee salaries. She discovered her sales per employee ratio was too low. She also found that paper costs had risen to 12.5% of expenses, when it should only be 10%. "That's a big deal in the printing business," she says.

The solution started when she re-wrote her business plans, refining her goals to focus on daily expenses and profits. Not that she and her husband had ignored those aspects in the past, but she concedes she had written in "all these grandiose" ideas in prior business plans.

Next up was hiring a general manager, someone that could run the daily tasks while she set her sights on the big picture. She brought in Brian Doerner, who had worked in management and technology consulting jobs, including a stint with Perot Systems, the company run by former U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot. He had also worked for a Sarasota medical group, where he was one of Rosenzweig's customers.

Doerner helped whittle down the staff to 22 employees and both he and Rosenzweig worked even harder at employee retention. They looked to hire people and fit them into jobs based on personality, instead of the more traditional method of hiring based on a job-need. They set up monthly employee lunches and quarterly employee awards.

And Rosenzweig has always been generous with praise, a facet she says is often overlooked but extremely valuable toward maintaining good employee morale.

A competitive spirit

Rosenzweig did not see her self as an entrepreneur growing up or in the early stages of her life. With a degree in accounting from Bentley College in Boston, she took a job with GE in 1980. For seven years, she worked in the pensions communication department in the massive company.

While a good job with a nice salary, working for such a large company had its drawbacks. For example, as a supervisor, she had to have the names of 10% of her staff on a ready-to-be fired list, just in case the dreaded lay-off call came from corporate headquarters.

A change of scenery came when Rosenzweig and her husband bought the Sir Speedy franchise. And during all of the comebacks and business transformations at Sir Speedy, there was one constant: Rosenzweig's competitive drive.

Past financial growth - the tangible results of that spirit - are seen in the Academy Award-like golden trophies that sit on a counter near the copiers in the front of the store on Tamiami Trail in Sarasota, a few miles south of downtown. They represent six straight top-10 finishes in the chain for sales growth.

When Rosenzweig and her husband first took over the store, her goal was to be in the top 125 of the 450-store chain. When she got that, she set her sights on the top 25. Coming in 26th one year only motivated her more.

And when she spent a few years lurking around the top 10, she became even more relentless: She spotted a top-10 storeowner at a national conference and bugged him about how he did it and what his techniques were.

Rosenzweig has become well known in the national Sir Speedy community. Besides getting tips from other storeowners, she's helped out fellow entrepreneurs, including consoling and advising a franchisee in Houston who lost one-third of his business after the Enron collapse and, along with her staff, offering to house and hire any evacuees from the New Orleans store after Hurricane Katrina last year.

Like gold

Many companies struggle with the balance between who's more essential, the sales folks who bring in the customers or the doers in the background who deliver the product to said customers.

The struggle at the Sir Speedy franchise ended five years ago when Carol Schoff began her tenure as head saleswoman. In the store hierarchy, Schoff is treated like gold, a standard set by owner Eileen Rosenzweig.

"Our philosophy is our number one customer is our sales staff and our number two is our employees," Rosenzweig says. "Then we are able to focus on customers."

Rosenzweig says the theory works because Schoff is a key public face of the business and customers will quickly let her know when there is problem with an order, a critical issue in the printing business, where many orders have stringent time constraints and a sense of urgency. As such, Rosenzweig has set up a system where the production staff knows that if Schoff needs something, it's a top a priority. That message ultimately trickles down to the customers.

The plan has worked, as the store is regularly ranked as a top-performer nationwide. The national chain, too, has recognized Schoff, naming her salesperson of the year for the Southeast region last month.

-Mark Gordon