| Henderson Diversifies |
|
|
Publishing / Project Management
On top of adding Web Solutions to the Henderson Portfolio, we
have added a publishing department to help our customers with their
printed projects requiring advertising revenue. If you have a
fundraiser, or an idea but require advertising sales to cover a portion
or all of your production costs, our sales representatives can help you
put this project together. We can partially or fully manage it to fit
your needs. Henderson Printing has always been able to help you with
these projects, and now we have committed a full time department to
develop this growing part of our business. We have worked on many
projects in 2011, such as the World of Outlaws program, the Brockville
Museum anniversary booklet, the Hydroplane Races program, just to name a
few!
We have also created new projects based on our customers needs (Cycling The Arch and The 1000 Islands Booklet, etc).
FlyerMail
Our last addition to the Henderson Printing list of products is
our recent partnership with FlyerMail from Kingston. This is a fast
growing organization that packages flyers in an environmentally friendly
clear bag. These are distributed in residential and commercial
mailboxes and now have added Brockville and the area plus Gananoque to
their available distribution network.
The Henderson Printing team will lead the way and offer the ad sales team and production for our area.
You can get a full colour 5 X 8 flyer Designed, Printed and
Mailed in the area. Brockville is new on the map, but we can offer
delivery services to Gananoque, Kingston, Napanee and Belleville as
well!
|
|
|
|
|
| 35 Years Already! |
|
|
35 Years – And Still Growing
on Abbott Street, in Brockville, ON. Just myself, an IBM electric typewriter, a camera that made paper plates (lousy quality), and a Ryobi Printing press .
Our Job No.1 was one I brought along from Toronto with me from the Association of Kinsmen Clubs in Thornhill, ON.
By Christmas we had our first full time employee.
An old style Heidelberg Letterpress was our first expansion and allowed for numbering and die-cutting, then a second small press and a new paper cutter.
In 1982, I purchased an old 26” Harris Press at an auction (I was the only bidder), then we had to tear out a wall to get it in and put braces in the basement to hold it up. Every time a train passed by our plant, it shuts itself off.
By 1984 we had taken over the entire ground floor of that building, installed a GTO Heidelberg press for top quality work and cleaned up the basement for our typesetting department – which at that time consisted of old style photo type that you cut and pasted with wax and dirty fingers, and lines drawn and redrawn with rapidograph pens.
Although we had done a few small colour jobs on the old equipment, our first big full colour job on the new Heidelberg press was a calendar for the Brockville Chamber of Commerce. 13 colour photos, the colour separations came from Hadwin Graphics in Ottawa and cost us over $5,000. Today they are simply imported from a good digital camera, at no cost.
In 1985 I saw the first Mac Plus computer and bought it. For computer addicts, it had an 8” black & white screen, 1 Meg of RAM, a 35 Megabite external hard drive, which I was assured was all we would ever need, and a black ink laser writer, all for $15,000. Then I found that when I started sending jobs to the Mac for typesetting I received messages back from my staff saying, "We can’t do that”. I soon found myself back in typesetting saying "why not? The book says you can!” Pretty soon I had learned how to run a MacIntosh.
In 1986 at a Print show in Toronto, I saw a Mac running a Linotype Imagesetter, computer to film. I bought that imagesetter within six months. Thank God for that move, for along with constant updating in the computer room, that machine kept us one step ahead of everyone in this area right up until we switched to direct-to-plate.
When the first Mac arrived we had 6 employees in typesetting, camera and plate-making. We now have 3 employees doing that same job for at least triple or more the amount of work, but overall there are more employees.
Printing is one of the most competitive businesses in the country. There were three other printers in town when we opened, all gone now, and there were also seven others that opened and are now gone during that same period.
From 1976 to my retirement in 1997 we had many good years and a few bad ones. However, no matter how bad, no employee ever missed a paycheck and over that period we had only two years where our sales were actually lower that the previous year. Our average sales increase for the period was a little over 17% per year.
I am a firm believer that the customer is always right, even when he is wrong. And we have been known to re-run a few jobs rather than argue with the customer over who made the mistake. We printed the Leeds County Plowing Match program again this year – we did that job for the first time in1977.
Phillips Cables became our best customer in the early years with black & white forms, but by the time they closed we had switched to doing their gold foil embossed stationary for Toronto head office and the last job we did for them was a catalogue for their new head office in West Nyak NY (Carol & I of course had to deliver that one) after which that company was sold again.
But always I had to explain to the plant people that YES, our customers really do need that job yesterday.
Here’s to Henderson Printing and the next 35 Years…….
Lyle Henderson
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn