Careers in Print: Pre-Production

[00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition of The Print University. Today, we are going to be talking about careers in print, specifically for the front of the house or what we call pre production. Joined by Pat McGrew, as always. Pat, I know that you have a lot of restaurant experience. Front of the house versus back of the house.

Educate us on what that kind of is for people that aren’t familiar with that kind of terminology, because I think it applies here, too. 

[00:00:26] Pat McGrew: It does. Think about your McDonald’s, right? You’re going to go into a fast food place and there’s everything that’s behind the counter. It’s all the people who are making your hamburgers or your fish sandwich or your chicken nuggets, your milkshakes, whatever, right?

That’s the back of the house. You’re no you’re McRib. Yeah, you’re lovely McRib. They’re the people who are serving you. They’re the back of the house front of the house is everything on the other side of the counter. It’s where people are sitting. It needs to be cleaned up things like that in a typical restaurant.

It works the same way. We have our kitchen and our kitchen staff who make the lovely food and, make the drinks and stuff front of house. Is everything that’s customer facing your print shops the exact same thing and people laugh at me when I make analogies between restaurants and print shops.

But honestly, we have workflow conversations with our cooks. So it’s because it’s all about raw materials turning into a final product. And so the back of house of a print shop is full of these people who are making stuff happen. These are the people who ensure that the file things that are sold, jobs that are sold that the files arrive or that the specifications are delivered.

So we can be designed that it goes through every 1 of the processes. And these people are superheroes. I promise you, you get your cape every single day. If you have if you are a printer or if you are new to a print shop, I promise you, you get your cape shortly. If you don’t have one already, I’m sure it’s in the mail because you are.

You are charged with doing a lot of things that you probably never realized were part of the job. 

[00:02:06] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, and that’s an interesting thing to point out about this episode. It could be, if you’re watching it and you’re not inside the printing industry, this will give you an idea of kind of what who does what.

If you’re already inside of a print shop, this will give you an idea of hey maybe You know, that kind of role sounds interesting. Maybe I’ll try and, migrate over to that at some point. 

[00:02:26] Pat McGrew: Might help you understand what the people you’re working with are doing too. And sometimes we assume things about the different jobs in a print shop.

We assume we know what a CSR does. We assume that we know what the salesperson does. We assume that we know what all these roles do, but often we’re not actually right. 

[00:02:45] Ryan McAbee: That’s right. Because unless your shoes are being filled in that role, it’s hard to really know without you walking a mile in their shoes, so to speak.

So we’re talking about the front of the house. This kind of is a org chart of what a typical company may look like. When you have the chief sales officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer, chief technology officer, and chief people officer. That’s a lot of chiefs. Basically that would be in larger establishments when you get down to, a mom and pop print shop, all those kinds of functions, they compress and people are doing multiple things typically.

 Regardless, you do have some key roles across the board. There’s usually some kind of sales component involved. Now that’s Salesperson could be the owner. If it’s a really small shop, it could be inside sales where it’s mainly telephone based sales. It could be external sales and they could be 1 person or it could be 25 people. It just depends on the size and scale of the business. 

 That’s definitely the administrative part, the management part, the sales aspect, and also the customer service roles. Anybody that basically interfaces with the customer before it becomes a job in the shop, that’s what we consider pre production.

 We have about four key roles here, Pat, that we’re going to walk through. We’re going to put that superhero cape on and we’re going to say what superpowers these people need based on our experience that we’ve worked with them in the past. So it’s going to be a fun episode.

[00:04:02] Pat McGrew: We’re going to start with sales. We’re going to start with sales because even though we don’t identify them as pre production, if somebody’s not out selling, you don’t have any work to do. And the thing is that even in a pure web to print environment, if you’re a pure online sales printer, that the sales role typically still exists from the standpoint That someone is responsible for understanding what is being sold, coordinating how things will be priced, understanding who the target market is, because not every printer serves every market.

Some very specifically serve, say, trade events or education or government or manufacturing. There are all sorts of specialties, although there are general commercial printers who serve. A variety of niches, which means that when you have a salesperson boy, this person they’ve got to be a detective.

They have to understand all the personalities of all the different people who they are trying to sell to. And if you think about the people in your own life, think about maybe your grandparents, your aunts, your uncles, your teachers the people you bowl with the people who are on the sidelines of your kid’s little league.

Games these that you would immediately identify a lot of personality types and they all exist in the print universe as well as buyers and these buyers need to be handled differently. Very often they have different needs, different wants, different expectations based on their own demands, the demands of their organizations.

So we need somebody who is good at reading people. It becomes really important to be able to read the person, whether they’re on the other end of the phone, the other end of an email, or you’re sitting across the desk from them, it’s important to be able to read between the lines, and that means really active listening, and if you don’t know what active listening is look it up in your favorite search engine, because it is a very specific style of listening that encourages you to really listen to the words, but also listen to how they’re being said, And how they’re relevant to the conversation, the worst thing that any salesperson, no matter what they’re selling can do is not really listen to the person who’s trying to buy from them that imagine going into a car dealer and say what I really need is, SUV.

I’ve got 2 kids. I got car seats. I got to be able to handle 3 adults, 2 kids strollers. And the first thing is perfect for you. Yeah. Or the, the two door sedan, right? Where you’re gonna be trying to haul car seats outta the, from behind the the front seats and the passenger seats.

So that’s, think about those experiences and that’s what you don’t ever wanna happen when you’re selling. So I think of it in terms of rivaling Sherlock Holmes, right? The persona of Sherlock Holmes was always that. He didn’t actively look at things, but he absorbed everything. He could tell that a door had been unlocked with a lockpick because he could see the scratches.

And so that led him to certain assumptions. He knew how many steps it took to get from place A to place B. And if somebody said, Oh, I was there in 30 seconds and he knew it couldn’t be done, it gave him some leads. You’re doing the same thing. You’re listening to what a customer says they want. But then you need to bring your expertise to the table to help them understand what’s possible.

And that means you have to be able to tell them stories about why what you’re offering them is what they really want, as opposed to what they might have vocalized. And it’s a high pressure job. 

[00:07:39] Ryan McAbee: Yeah it’s that active, it’s understanding the person across from the table, across the email, across the zoom, which is more and more common these days for what I’m hearing from the sales folks that it it’s really lessened the in person aspect because of what we went through in the past few years and then knowing how to speak to that personality.

So this goes into if you, your assessment profiles to understand if they’re a high D, if it’s a disc assessment, all that kind of stuff, but then it’s that, that active listening to that. That’s that reaffirmation. So you have to retell what you’re hearing to them to confirm that’s what they want.

But then that’s that deductive reasoning. Is that really what they want or it’s probably something else. Let me suggest that. And then being able to really, and this is really the art to this role is the storytelling aspect because you want to be able to know your products, your capabilities inside of your print shop of what you’re offering and can offer.

And basically present that in a, almost a story format so that they can understand exactly with you and you can captivate them and say, this is it. 

[00:08:36] Pat McGrew: And you want to be able to help them understand other possibilities than what they might’ve thought of. And you might call it upselling, but at the end of the day, it’s really right selling.

It’s making sure that the product that they’re that they finally agree with you on is the product that’s going to move their print requirement as far forward as possible their communication issue as far forward. So it might be that they come to you asking for a specific size sign. But they’ve never actually measured where that sign supposed to go.

They’ve actually not thought about the purpose of the sign your requirements for design are different. If it’s 1 of those feather signs, planted in a grassy verge versus something hanging off the side of your building or on a billboard direct mail comes in all sizes, shapes and forms and has different purposes.

So all these things need to be part of it. So master storyteller, if there was only one thing that I looked for, I bet that the number one thing I looked for in a salesperson, if I was hiring, I want that ability to tell a story. Sell me ice if I’m sitting in Alaska. 

[00:09:41] Ryan McAbee: And to remove the jargon and the layers of that, that are confusing to anybody outside the industry too, because we’re guilty of that a lot inside of the industry with as all industries 

[00:09:50] Pat McGrew: are, right?

Many printers say, Oh I got this four over four job in. Did you really? And so unfortunately in the current model of most print buyers, many of them would have no idea what you were saying. Yeah, absolutely. And if you don’t know what it is, it means for color on both sides of the page.

And that really 

leads 

[00:10:07] Ryan McAbee: us to the next person in the chain of events, typically, and that’s the customer support representative. And boy, do these people wear a lot of hats in the shop because not only are they. Tasked with interpreting and confirming what the client wanted that they communicated to the salesperson and then the salesperson relaying that internally, probably to the customer support representative, but they’re also the helicopter hovering at 10, 000 feet from that.

Order as it’s coming in all the way through to make sure that it’s delivered and gets out the door on time and handling all that client interactions when the client emails, phones up, whatever, says, where’s my job? They’re the ones that are fielding that kind of question questions that come in. And so they have to definitely be on their feet, multitasker to the nth degree.

And they really typically are. More of those people personalities a little bit more extroverted than introverted probably just because you’re having to communicate so much with not only the internal staff in the print shop, but also the external clients and vendors and whoever else you may need to in the course of the work.

[00:11:16] Pat McGrew: This is a role that won’t go away. Even in full end to end workflow automation, there will always be a requirement for a CSR because very often they’re the person who needs to translate out of salesperson into actual production capability. These are the people who are the they’re the EMTs of the shop.

They’re the ones who were sent. To find missing pieces to resolve problems. Oh, it got put into our automated workflow, but we just realized that we sent the wrong file or the customer realizes that something has happened that makes it impossible for them to allow that job to go. These are the people who will.

Get into the systems, make sure that things are done the way they need to be done. We’ve we’ve been in many shops, Ryan, you and I, where the details of the CSRs would make a feature length motion pictures. We had a CSR once tell us that it takes her anywhere from. 10 hours to translate what the sales people give them and get it into their print MIS system because every salesperson has their own shorthand and their own way of doing it and they’ve been doing it that way 25 years and they have no plans to change and we’ve been in shops where the CSRs are that they’re the combination educator, mom, dad, and I don’t know what else they and say is sometimes salesperson too, because sometimes they’re the ones having the conversation with a customer because a salesperson sold something that they don’t actually do.

And the CSR takes on the role of trying to solve that problem so that they still can keep the job. Yeah, these, a CSR in the best circumstances are the people who know your shop end to end up to down back to sideways training new CSRs. It’s time consuming because it’s very hard to create the best CSR using the baptism by fire approach.

Typically, they really do need to shadow a CSR for some time. And sometimes the best way to train them is to have them spend some time in every role in the shop before they take up their position at the CSR desk. 

[00:13:30] Ryan McAbee: That’s an interesting thing you just pointed out because it’s a great comparison to an air traffic controller.

And that’s exactly how they train. When you go to ATC schools, it’s called you’re getting simulated environments to learn how to use the tool sets and all this kind of stuff. So that’s like you said, walking in under and maybe working in the different divisions inside of a print shop.

At our departments and then also they do that shadowing aspect. So they have an experienced ATC person hovering over the shoulder as they’re presenting these different scenarios and stuff. So it’s very analogous. The the other thing that when it comes to customer support person, and this is more for a print shop owner.

I, it’s my personal opinion that there’s a high correlation with the number of steps on a pedometer that a CSR takes in a day, the higher you get, the less automated and the more processes that you need to have in place because you don’t versus one that’s on the lower end of a pedometer reading because they have systems in place, they have processes in place, so they don’t need to get up and move to physically check things.

So just my theory, you might want to test it out. 

[00:14:34] Pat McGrew: I think that’s a really good point. The more they’re walking around well. This is, at the point where wireless headsets became available, we saw CSR has acquired those that was one of the 1st buys because it made it possible for them to keep on talking to people while they were walking through a shop.

I don’t know that was good, but at the end of the day, the more you can automate your processes, the better off you are, but. I know that it will be that there’s a long tail to getting every print shop in the world automated. So this is a role that’s going to be imperative and just requires really great training and respect 

[00:15:10] Ryan McAbee: to.

Yeah, absolutely. Moving on. We have an estimated role. Now, this is one of those roles inside of the printing world that it’s just getting more challenging to find people who are experts in this role who want to be in this role. And really, it’s those people that are fantastic with numbers. They know the 10th decimal.

That’s not me. By the way, I can tell you beyond 3. 14. I think it’s the 1st 3 and that’s all I can do. But it’s really those, the people that have the attention to detail. They’re good with numbers and what they’re really doing in their functional role is they’re taking that information from the sales people and the customer support representatives and they’re feeding it into a print management system that is aware of all of the costs that you have in a print production site.

That’s everything from the equipment to the labor, to the materials that are going to be used. And they’re using that tool, that print management tool or print MIS solution or ERP, you have different names. They’re putting the request that came in from the client into an official estimate that then they’ll click another button and turn it into a quote that gets sent back to the customer that has all the detail with the pricing.

And that’s how the customer makes the determination to know whether they want to proceed and go forward or not. So what other kind of key superpowers do you see in this estimator role? 

[00:16:28] Pat McGrew: So think about that. Estimator needs to know if the system is failing him or her, because sometimes you’ll look at what comes back from the estimation program, and it just doesn’t feel right.

The price looks too high. It looks too low. Something is just not right. And in those cases, if you don’t have that person with these superpowers, if you don’t have those interpretive skills, equivalent or rivaling Sherlock Holmes, a job can be pushed out, a quote can be pushed out, it causes you to lose money, or it causes you to bid too high for the work, and as a result you lose it, right?

So those are the things that it requires not just that number crunching, but that emotional intelligence to know when something doesn’t look right and something might not look right. Because in the inventory management system, if it is not being updated in an automated way. If every time new pallets of paper or rolls of paper come in, that data is not captured and automatically fed into the inventory management system, and it’s not automatically shared with the estimating system.

Maybe somebody put a number in, and maybe that number isn’t correct. Maybe they’re off a decimal point. Maybe they’re off, they typed in seven, and it should have been a one. Right there, there are all sorts of things that can happen, especially when manual data entry is involved. But even when it’s automated, if.

A mistake was made by the paper merchant and how they delivered the data and it happens because people are people and things happen that the wrong information can be entering your estimating system. So this person has to be confident enough in their understanding of the processes that will be applied to the job and the.

Job print time, the substrates, the use of ink or toner, embellishment, finishing, all of those things to be able to say, Nope, that number’s wrong. We need to go back and redo this. So they are a critical piece and they are basically the gatekeepers to your profitability. 

[00:18:37] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. And what you’re talking about is experience with kind of a gut feeling interaction.

And, it can be even that the, maybe the system’s not incorrect, but if you think about it some of these estimates can get quite complex because we’re talking about many different pieces that are going on to the same estimate. So they may have requested brochures and flyers and a wide format poster and a stand to put it on and all these different components.

And it may just be that they, they realize, Oh, that price It doesn’t look exactly right. Oh, I forgot to add one of the components to the estimate, that sort of thing. So you’re absolutely right. Accuracy is key in this role. And that’s why it’s really a detail oriented role is one of the superpowers here, but also just being a well versed in numbers and liking that sort of thing.

That leads us to the next logical place in the pre-production world, and that’s with a scheduler slash planner. Now, they often, these terms are interchangeable. A scheduler would basically be doing the function like on the board. And many places still use a physical board like this, but it’s literally moving the job.

From department to department saying, yes, we’ve now finished in prepress is now heading to printing and so forth. A planner is a little bit before that step because they’re making sure that you have the resources particularly materials But also the equipment is available and the people are available to run that equipment They’re planning to make sure you have those in place before they actually hit the production floor and the schedule So that you’re not saying, oh, where’s the paper?

I can’t run this job now. So now we’ve got to shift the schedule around. So those are the two distinct roles, but there’s a lot of different superpowers in this role as well. And this is a skill set also that’s getting harder to really hire 

[00:20:17] Pat McGrew: for. It is because it requires someone with. A strong but friendly personality.

This is someone who has to be able to get along with everyone from the salesperson to the CSR to the production staff because things happen. Machines break down no matter how tightly the planner has scheduled. If something breaks, if a machine goes down, if something happens, it’s back to the drawing board.

Right? And any time you can’t get a job out on time, there, there’s an issue, right? That there’s a customer satisfaction issue. There may be penalties. There are all sorts of other things that come up. So when we say that their job is to make order out of chaos, we’re not kidding because think about the multiple streams, even a shop that might have only 10 orders coming in a day.

They’re still having to juggle those, get it printed. Get it finished, get it packaged up for delivery, right? There’s a lot of work that gets done there. And excuse me, so that the planner and the scheduler both have to be masters of the equipment available to them. They have to understand print speeds.

They have to understand, substrate that a print speed on a given press might be different for heavyweight paper than lightweight paper. The same with finishing. Finishing lightweight paper might be slower than finishing middleweight paper. Heavier weight paper might go back to being a little bit slower.

How many processes does it have to go through? Does it have to be folded, creased, perfed grommeted grilled, what all has to happen to it? And they have to understand how much time those processes will take for the size of the order that’s being placed and they have to do something.

That’s even more delicate. They participate in the process to decide how much overage to create. And very often that is a coordinated conversation between, the estimator, the CSR, the salesperson, the scheduler and the planner, but most print jobs do print some overage and you want to minimize it, but you probably need to do it.

If you are worried about things wrecking and finishing, that’s like the most common reason that you need some print overage and that is it becomes an art and a science to try and figure that out for a given type of print job for a given customer, depending on how you know how they handle their approvals.

[00:22:47] Ryan McAbee: And just to explain print overs a little bit, it’s where you’re running more quantities than you actually, the customer requested and that you need to satisfy the request because, like Pat mentioned each finishing process after you get done printing, whether it’s cutting, creasing, folding, stitching, all these other things, they require a minimum number of sheets to set the equipment up to make sure it’s being finished correctly for that single step.

So the estimator role that we talked about just before, The management tool, the ManitPrint MIS or ERP, it will spit out a number for overages that it thinks is required, but ultimately it’s the people on the shop floor and the scheduler planner that will say, you know what, we don’t probably need a thousand over, we can get by with 500 or whatever the case may be.

So and they tend to 

[00:23:34] Pat McGrew: know the condition of the equipment. Like one of the things that I’ve seen happen frequently enough that it’s worth mentioning is especially when you’re cutting paper. Blades wear out. They’re not forever, right? And one of the things I have seen happen is blades get duller and duller, causing kind of wrecks and finishing where things have to be reprinted because the cut’s not clean.

It’s especially painful if there isn’t a spare blade around. So that’s where again, making sure that all your inventory process is not just your inbound substrates and ink or toner. It’s also the other consumables that are part and parcel of the print process. It might be cleaning fluids for the press that are required in order to keep print heads healthy in an environment or just your presses clean in an offset environment.

And it’s again the things that the that the finishing equipment need. So there, there are lots of things that can happen and the schedule scheduler plan, or the reason I say they have to be an enforcer with a smile is because they’re responsible for making sure that work gets out the door and that the full capacity of the machines is used as best as possible.

So these people would need to be held accountable if you had. Scheduling on top of one another, Oh this job was supposed to have been done already. And this job is scheduled to come in next. But this one’s only halfway done. Why is that some mistake was made in the decision for how long that job was supposed to take?

That’s why these people have superpowers. They need to know how long things are going to take under the best and the worst possible circumstances. And that’s learned. It again, it’s art and it’s science. And when we say they are fitting 10 gallons into a five gallon bucket, they do it every day.

[00:25:26] Ryan McAbee: They certainly do. And the other thing superpower wise that I don’t know if we touched on specifically, but they have to understand the order of the universe. And what we mean by that is that every job and it’s unique job to job, right? Order to order. That it has a very specific flow and specific processes that are required for it and it alone.

Is it going to go to printing or is it going to jump to cutting first? Or, after it gets printed, is it going to cut, fold, and stitch? Or, is it going to go in some other order with some other equation? So they really have to understand the capabilities that you have from a production standpoint and understand how those fit in and interrelate to each other.

And then of course, probably the biggest super power of all that they have is that they magically have to figure out how to stretch time. And that’s either pulling a little bit from this job time that was allocated for this job and dedicating to the other one, raising the flag when there has to be overtime hours where people have to stay over to finish certain work so that you can meet deadlines.

So that really is 

[00:26:29] Pat McGrew: every understanding the cost that brings right? Because overtime isn’t free. The other thing I think Ryan is worth mentioning is that this is a harder and harder job every year because the equipment. Is getting faster, but it’s not getting faster, all at the same time. Presses are getting faster.

And today, you can run at 1000 feet per minute on a digital press when a few years back, the best you might have done was 500 feet a minute. If you look at finishing equipment, you might have a mix of older and newer finishing equipment in your shop. You have to know which Piece of equipment you intend to be scheduling for so that you can do the timing correctly, right?

There are, there’s a lot of moving parts and that’s that ability to stretch and compress time and juggle things. So they get out the door and sometimes knowing when you’re going to have to send something out of house to get completed to meet your 

[00:27:28] Ryan McAbee: deadlines. That’s true. Called outsourcing is how we typically refer to that.

The other component equipment has changed in his capabilities and speed, which means they have more capacity, more throughput, which means you can print more in a day. But the other thing that’s really changed for the scheduler aspect too. And the reason you’re going to need more. Computer assistance there in automation is because think about it.

We’ve, we went from an era where an average job was 10, 000 plus sheets or whatever the big quantity was now with all the digital transformation and stuff, we can profitably be print, hundreds of sheets or a book of one or whatever the K the thing is. And so we have a lot. The higher number of orders coming through and that’s, that causes more of a scheduling lift or effort because instead of dealing with 10 jobs in a day, you’re dealing with a hundred jobs in the same day, but you still have to figure out how to get them all out the door at the end.

[00:28:22] Pat McGrew: And in some cases the scheduler planner people will also be responsible for batching smaller jobs together on like substrates using like finishing in order to best use the capacity that’s available and that takes some training to know how to do and it takes an understanding of some tools to do it and it also takes vigilance to make sure that the batches actually execute the way you expect them to.

[00:28:50] Ryan McAbee: That, those are our superhero roles inside of the pre production part of a print shop. We hope you join us in a future episode where we’ll talk about the actual superhero roles inside of production that will air in a couple of months. Thanks for joining us.