vertical Markets For Print

31- EDUCATION

This module is a vertical market primer focused on the education market: childcare, K-12, post-secondary, and corporate education. Key trends and opportunities for printing applications are identified.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition of The Print University. I am Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and as always, my colleague Pat McGrew, McGrewGroup, is joining us today. We are talking about the education market. I think this is an interesting one because we can all relate to this in some way, shape, or form.
    • [00:00:15] Pat McGrew: Whether you have kids or not, you probably went through school, so you have some understanding of the fun of K-12. Maybe you have done some post-secondary work. Maybe you went to college; maybe you did not go to college but to vocational school. Education markets are really interesting because they really do break out into the things that most people know and understand, which are K-12 and college, university, and vocational.
    • It actually starts before Pre-K, right? Childcare is also an education market unto itself. Corporate education is a massive industry. There are learning specialists who only concentrate on that space. It is everything from training people on how to use specific products and services to ongoing industry-specific education. 
    • If you are a lawyer, you have to gain a certain number of credentials every year, a certain number of credit hours of education every year. Real estate is certainly the same thing. Pretty much any professional certification usually requires it, so this is a massive industry unto itself.
    • Education markets have a lot of commonalities as well. There is a combination of on-premise and off-premise learning. I know K-12, and they really prefer you to be in the classroom where the teacher has eyes on you. We also know that over the last few years, more and more, we have seen hybrid models. That is true in pretty much all the other areas as well. 
    • Childcare, the pre-K space, is a little trickier. It is hard to get your three-year-old to pay attention to a screen and try to learn something. To be fair, over the last few years, an awful lot of innovative ideas have come out of that as well. Sending course packets to the home and asking the caregivers, the babysitters, and the grandparents, to sit with the child and work through things. Lots of opportunities for print and lots of opportunities to create meaningful experiences in print for every kind of educational opportunity.
    • [00:02:04] Ryan McAbee: Every caregiver over the recent years is going, "Yes, we would like them back in person." 
    • [00:02:08] Pat McGrew: In person would be really just fine. The thing is, we have seen the rise of online schooling at a lot of different levels that probably will be with us. I think we are migrating into that hybrid learning universe where there are students who found they learned better on their own with the guidance of people online. There are people who found they did not learn a single thing online. There is an attempt to accommodate all of those people. I know most of the major universities and community colleges, vocational schools, have gone back to in-person as much as they possibly can. There are still a lot of online offerings in those.
    • The corporate folks who really prefer to get you into a classroom to teach you, to make sure that you are learning what you need to do, have had to adopt hybrid models as well. 
    • [00:02:51] Ryan McAbee: It is interesting how it is all evolving, and there is no clear direction. I think it is going to be a model, not an if/or. It is going to be a blend of all of this going forward, whether it is online, remote, on-premise, or in person. The thing that I was just thinking about is that, a lot of times, this model is almost like a nonprofit. These schools, especially if it is a for-profit school, have to engage the community to get enrollment. They also are probably seeking donations and other support from the community to be an ongoing entity as well. 
    • In terms of the market size, just in the US alone, it is a huge market, obviously. We are covering basically almost a person's cradle-to-grave life cycle if you want to think of it like that. From pre-K all the way up to as long as you are working.
    • [00:03:28] Pat McGrew: Lifelong learners, right? There are lots of lifelong learners. 
    • [00:03:31] Ryan McAbee: It is really hard not to be in that category these days, as everything moves quickly with technology and advancements in general. But the market size here is nearly 2 trillion - with a T. If you compare and contrast that with some of these other vertical markets we talked about, this is even larger. It may be one of the largest we discussed.
    • [00:03:47] Pat McGrew: It is not surprising because the funding comes from so many different spaces. A lot of pre-K and K-12 education has federal and local funding sources and may also have some contributory sources. Commercial education, for-profit education, and internal corporate education typically have high investment levels. 
    • [00:04:08] Ryan McAbee: If you look at this enrollment breakdown, you have the bulk of it in US K-12. That is your grade school level institutions. Because we have all these different kinds of for-profit entities in this space, there is probably more opportunity with those than there was even in the traditional sense of a school that there was more government funding for print opportunities. 
    • In terms of trends, we need to decouple what is K-12 versus post-secondary. You could even argue corporate follows their own different trend sets. K-12 is an interesting space because of this hybrid learning approach that we now have. I jokingly say that the kids these days do not know anything about snow days. If it snows, you may not physically go to school, but you are in school just because of this remote learning capability that we have. Because of that, there are opportunities for more coursepacks. Planning ahead for when things happen like that to shift the learning.
    • [00:04:55] Pat McGrew: In other modules, we have talked about in-plant printing versus commercial printing. K-12, for many years, was the home of many in-plants. They began as copy repro departments to create course packs, and I am old enough to remember mimeographing things for the multiple choices for tests. In many school districts, they run very sophisticated in-plant print shops to meet a lot of their needs for course packs and for anything else a teacher might need, as well as signage and way-finding signs for a campus. They can do it all themselves. 
    • Just as many schools and school districts choose not to do in-plant and do look to the outside print community for the print products that they require. It is always worth doing a little bit of research on the school districts that are near you in that K-12 space. If they are open to buying from the outside, they can be a constant source of print needs.
    • [00:05:45] Ryan McAbee: When it comes to the K-12 space, whether you are an in-plant or working with an in-plant or if you are an outside provider, the fact that educators are asked to do so many roles and so many things - you want to make it absolutely easy for them to order and request the print and know that it is going to arrive whenever they request it to be there. Otherwise, you probably will not have very high adoption because it is going to be one of those other things they have to dedicate time to. 
    • [00:06:08] Pat McGrew: One of the most innovative solutions I saw for K-12 was a school district that had adopted a program of only printing two weeks' worth of content for each student at a time. They were trying to track which students were learning at which pace. Every two weeks, they had a test. So they got the test on Friday, and on Monday morning, they would be delivered fresh new course packs for the next two weeks. It was based on the test. If there were things that had not been absorbed and could not be reiterated back on a test, those modules were included in the next week as well, so that they could repeat and get some additional exposure. The faster learners were not held back. They were given fresh, new material for the next two weeks. 
    • I think it probably put a burden on the teachers, but they really liked it because each student got to actually learn at the pace that was appropriate for them. The local printers who were providing the work learned how to work weekends. 
    • [00:07:02] Ryan McAbee: It probably also helped the teachers gauge the progress in a better way than some of the other tool sets that they had previously. I would imagine. 
    • [00:07:08] Pat McGrew: It kept people from reading ahead or getting too far behind. There are some really innovative things that you see in K-12 education, and certainly, in post-secondary some of those same techniques will work. Also, in post-secondary, there is an interesting phenomenon that students often are responsible for buying their own materials. There is always a race to how cheap material can be produced and how cost-effectively it can be produced. It is an interesting market to serve.
    • [00:07:34] Ryan McAbee: The post-secondary has shifted as well, where obviously, over the years, there is more digitization of the content. It has swelled to a large reuse market, where you can buy previous copies that other students have learned or used in terms of textbooks. In talking with some university students, the printed course packs became the in-between substitute to merge with online learning.
    • We traditionally think of post-secondary as an 18 to 22-year-old demographic. There is a huge swath of older adults that are also in post-secondary, or continuing education as it is often called. They may prefer to learn in a non-digital way and be more reliant on print. Just opportunities with these trends they will look for.
    • [00:08:14] Pat McGrew: Absolutely true.
    • [00:08:15] Ryan McAbee: In terms of these print applications and things that they commonly would need, we talked about course packs and things of that nature. What are some others here that really stand out for you? 
    • [00:08:23] Pat McGrew: You think about all the things that maybe you held onto in your hands when you were in school.
    • It is not just course packs. When we talk about a course pack, it is a very specific entity. It is a packaged set of materials that relate to a specific course. It might include practice tests. It might have worksheet reading material, worksheets. It might have one page that is a series of locations where you can go online for additional material. It might have articles reprinted from journals. They are a packaged piece of education. 
    • In a lot of schools, they do not do course packs. They are constantly trying to adjust to the class that they are teaching at the time. Teachers have some of the hardest jobs in the world. They will be making handouts on a regular basis. They find that this particular class that they are teaching is connected to a certain story, so they create handouts on the fly, or they see an article in the newspaper or in a magazine that they want to share, and they bring those things in and they want to hand them out on paper. Again, a lot of people read paper and absorb better when things are delivered to them on paper.
    • Primers we typically think of for the lower grades. These are large-format books that are a combination of education and practice. Then you get into your traditional sort of sixth-grade and above textbooks. Textbooks are a specific thing, but even those are changing.
    • It used to be that all the books might be printed at the beginning of the year for distribution everywhere they needed to go. A lot of schools are now going to assemble themselves. They subscribe to different kinds of programs that allow them to pick and choose the content for a given semester or a given year. They work with local printers to get that content printed and delivered from a service. There are a lot of those kinds of opportunities.
    • Then, of course, we say posters. If you walk into most schools, there are posters everywhere. While I come from the era where we did it on poster board with a magic marker or maybe a little bit of art paint, it is much more sophisticated these days. Very often, schools have relationships with local quick print companies that can provide high quality, nice looking posters for use in the school, but also the community spirit kind of things. The school spirit kind of thing we have down on the lower right. 
    • We talked a little bit about school pride. We are close to four or five different schools where I live. You see the signs everywhere. One of the new things that we started seeing, especially during the pandemic, is that as we get close to homecoming, everybody has yard signs about the homecoming games that are coming up. Then as we moved through prom season, my favorite one -  "Dave and Jasmine are going to the prom together" - and it was a yard sign in somebody's front yard. I did not know we announced that but OK. Then as we get closer to graduation, "Jacob is graduating; celebrate with us." We are seeing a lot more use of that kind of yard signage for personal use for the different school milestones.
    • [00:11:04] Ryan McAbee: The ones that I saw recently were interesting for the seniors. They were graduating; it would say what school they were moving on to for university. I had not really seen that until this year, but you are right; it has been in a proliferation of yard signs for different milestones. 
    • The other interesting thing that I have noticed in the K12 space is the events that the schools put on. They are typically annual events that happen. They might have a 5K as a fundraiser, and it is usually coordinated with the parent-teacher association or that equivalent for the school. They will have a lot of signage outdoors that is used for mile markers and wayfaring.
    • The other kind of interesting thing I saw recently, Pat, was printed display boards that described gift baskets, and there was a QR code that was tied to a backend. As you were going through the school, you could just scan the QR code if you liked what you saw. It was a kind of blind donation. You would just keep bidding and then keep going up for the school. Kind of a neat approach to that.
    • [00:11:51] Pat McGrew: Innovation, right? You can never discount the power of direct mail and brochureware and flyers. These things will never go away. The value proposition is there.
    • If you have kids in school, you will have things arrive in your mailbox explaining all the ways you can help them be better students and help the school district grow. They tend to be very effective. School calendars are very effective. 
    • [00:12:13] Ryan McAbee: If you have not already, go watch the module on binding techniques. With these print applications, especially in the school domain, I feel like you are going to find a lot of stitching or stapling but also a lot of coil binding and spiral binding pictured here. Know how that works and what the benefits are, one versus the other, if you are selling into this environment. 
    • We covered a lot of ground in terms of the educational space. How big it is. What they do. What kind of unique applications can you offer them from a print perspective. We hope you enjoyed it and will see you here for another episode at The Print University.

32- FINANCIAL AND INSURANCE

There are many segments to the financial and insurance industries. This module discusses the segments and the key market statistics, trends, and opportunities for printed applications.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, I am Pat McGrew from McGrewGroup, and with me today is Ryan McAbee from Pixel Dot Consulting, and together we are The Print University. Today we are going to talk about financial and insurance markets because these people print a lot of stuff. It is the stuff that shows up in your mailbox. It is the stuff that goes to regulators. It is the stuff that they use to help their customers create safer workspaces. There is so much print that comes out of financial and insurance organizations that it is just flat amazing, Ryan. 
    • [00:00:35] Ryan McAbee: It is, and it is probably one that everyone can relate to the most. In your mailbox, you are getting your bank statements on a monthly basis. More than likely, you are getting all of the insurance statements. The Explanation of Benefits, or EOBs as they are called, if you go for a doctor visit.
    • It is one that we are all familiar with, but we probably have not given a lot of thought about how it arrives in our mailbox. 
    • [00:00:53] Pat McGrew: All the stuff that happens ahead of time. Financial services markets are interesting because we think about them as being banking or credit union oriented, which is all the stuff we know. It is where we do our personal financial business with brokers, brokerages and wealth management, people who manage our retirement accounts, our investments accounts if we have them - IRAs, CDs, things like that. Then insurance is often considered part of that financial services market because so much money changes hands.
    • We have insurance policies on our homes, our cars, our life, our businesses, our jet skis, our boats, and our personal watercraft because that is how we protect them. As a result of that, insurance companies spend a lot of time communicating with us. Sending checks to us. Sending us regulatory notices. Some insurance companies actually have bank subsets - pieces of the insurance industry that are banks. Some banks have pieces that are actually insurance companies and wealth management companies.
    • This triangle of financial services companies is all interrelated. In many ways, they have a lot of the same kinds of print requirements because they are regulated by the government. They have to play by government rules, whatever those rules are for the products that they are serving. They also have to work not only with national and federal regulations but also with state and provincial regulations.
    • It is a complex industry. 
    • [00:02:11] Ryan McAbee: It is multilayered. The other thing that is often lost because we do think of the largest names in this space - the big national or multinational banks - there is a lot of scale here, a lot of variation. You can have very localized banks and across the board, insurance, brokerages, et cetera - very localized ones that serve a very small market.
    • Then you can scale up from there until you get to those largest institutions where they are banking, financial, and everything else. With that, their print volumes obviously change. Their print needs to change. How they go about the work largely remains the same in their needs and the regulation part, as you mentioned, Pat.
    • I would just encourage people to think about that scale and the different opportunities available to you as a print provider. It changes a little bit. Often some of the largest institutions may have their own printing arms or printing in-plants, whereas the lower tiers or the smaller ones do not.
    • [00:02:55] Pat McGrew: If you think about the market size, we are trying to estimate the market size based on numbers that we can get access to. To be honest, this is probably an underestimate. If you look at the length and breadth of things like credit unions, both state-based credit unions and company-based credit unions, and association-based credit unions, tend to be smaller institutions, but they are everywhere.
    • Banks might be state, regional, national, or multinational. If you bank with HSBC, you are banking with the Hong Kong Singapore Banking Corporation, which should give you a hint. That one is an international one. The market size - we say 3.72 trillion based on estimates that we get from statistics and SIFMA - is probably, in reality, touching more money than that. Even 3.72 trillion is a lot. 
    • Credit cards are part of this financial services market. Credit cards happen in several ways. It can be a store that decides to issue a credit card to you based on your credit worthiness, and someone manages all that for them. Visa and MasterCard and JCB are some of the biggest ones that are global. Visa has associations with different banks. These days you might have a loyalty Visa card. You might have one from a place where you do business a lot. You might have one from the company that you work for. Visa is the single largest global payment card out there. MasterCard is also pretty big. JCB is pretty big. There are other big ones as well. What you should understand is that there really is just a massive amount of money traveling through these markets. Where there is money, there is print.
    • The more important thing to walk away from this chart with is this is an area that will always grow because the population is growing. As the population grows, more people have access to capital markets. They have access to bank accounts. They have access to credit which means there are more people to communicate with. This is regulated communication; there will always be print components. 
    • [00:04:43] Ryan McAbee: We will get into this one when we talk about the print implications, Pat, but the other important thing for this vertical market space is that you have a complete customer journey and life cycle here.
    • You have the precursor, which is “I need to find the customer” to do the financial banking or insurance. That is the marketing aspect. Then you convert them to a customer, and you have all of that communication. 
    • There is a lot of opportunity from beginning to end in the customer journey. 
    • [00:05:03] Pat McGrew: There really is. When you start to look at all of these trends - you can stop the recording, and you can read through these to get all the detail. Again, across banking and credit unions, and financial services companies that are handling your wealth management, your retirement management, and your insurance, we find a lot of things.
    • There are fewer people today that are interested in working in offices than perhaps there were three years ago. When you start to see organizations reduce staff in different areas, it means that they need to automate. They have to in order to keep things going.
    • If you look at consolidation as a topic where it is not just mergers and acquisitions, and the rise of integrated marketing where we are using multiple channels, not just print and staff reductions, is there one thing that you would call out for people to be paying attention to in the print operations?
    • [00:05:51] Ryan McAbee: I would say, based on mergers and acquisitions, that it is always going to lend itself naturally to opportunities because one of those entities in the merger is going to have to go through a rebranding. Think about all of that print opportunity when you have to change over all your collateral, all of your marketing, and everything that goes into your transactional statements. That is always an opportunity. 
    • I would say on the automation side, this space, probably more than some others, has been forward-thinking in that for a long time. It just changes and evolves in terms of what type of automation. If you think back to retail banking, literally the ATM machine has been around for decades now. That was the original kind of automation, the self-service thing that evolved out of the space, and it just continues. Whether it is chatbots or the number of apps that you can go into to do those kinds of things.
    • [00:06:30] Pat McGrew: You think about using your phone as your banker, right? Which is something that 10 years ago, a lot of people were not really very comfortable with. Today a lot of people do their banking through their phones through apps. There are banks that are only online now that have no physical presence anywhere.
    • All of those organizations, they want to communicate with you online and through apps, because they want you to have a personal experience - are still users of print. There is no elimination of print through any consolidation or any of the automation. That does not mean that print goes away across all these organizations.
    • [00:07:08] Ryan McAbee: We have seen that across studies in the past from multiple organizations. Even if there is an electronic-only option, maybe a third subscribe to that. A third is going to get both, and a third get only the print version of a bill and statement as an example. As you said, I do not think it is a trend where we are going to just automatically switch to going completely electronic.
    • I fall into the camp of both. I get both methods. Any method that they offer, I can go look at it and see what is going on. 
    • [00:07:29] Pat McGrew: Yeah, I do the same thing. You never know when you are going to need the piece of paper sometimes for a quick look. It is easier to look at it on your phone or online.
    • All these different printing applications come in a lot of different flavors. They come in the regulated flavor. Those statements and regulatory notices, explanation of benefits, claim, proxy statements, insurance policies, deck pages, addendums to insurance policies, all sorts of forms populate our universe with personal, financial, and personal insurance information.
    • All of these entities are brands. You mentioned it a moment ago when two entities merge. Typically one brand comes out of the merger and acquisition, and that means that there is a rebranding effort. Not only do they have to do that on storefront signs and billboards, but also on all the regulated information that goes out the door. There are a lot of efforts that go into that. Then there is all the marketing communication that happens. 
    • I bank with a couple of credit unions that love to communicate with me. Credit unions are member-owned. As a member, they want to continue to communicate with me. The banking relationships that I have, the banks want to communicate with me. My mailbox on any given day of the week can have postcards, catalogs, informational letters, and really nice direct mail packages telling me about new benefits or new services, or a new branch that is opening in an area that I might be interested in.
    • There are all sorts of things that happen that are consumer-facing. There is a lot of stuff that happens inside the four walls that require printed communication as well. There are employee handbooks. There are employee manuals. There is education. My favorite are pitchbooks. This is where the bank or the credit union or the insurance company is trying to sell its services to someone. I worked with a PSP at one point that a hundred percent of their business was producing pitch books for their clients. They were constantly out pitching new insurance policies, new and different products, and services. The pitch books can be like this, right? They are big. It is basically your PowerPoint deck with some other material included in a three-ring binder with a pretty cover inserted into it. It is big business, and people still do a lot of business by leaving pitch books behind.
    • Then there is all the office signage and the things that go along with that. It is a lot of stuff. 
    • [00:09:39] Ryan McAbee: The reason they are doing that from a marketing perspective is that, more than any other kind of industry, they really understand the lifetime value of a customer. If they can get you to transition away from whoever is your current provider, they know that you are going to be with them for probably years, if not decades. 
    • I know my bank; I have been with them for decades. It is just a transition cost that I do not want to pay. Why move away if it works? So they know that. And that is the reason they will invest in these marketing materials. 
    • The only other thing to keep in mind, if it is externally driven or targeted, is that you still fall under a lot of the same regulations as the transactional side. There are rules about how you can market products and what you can say. You cannot be forward-looking and all of this kind of stuff.
    • It is one of those spaces where you definitely have to get some deep knowledge in how they operate and the regulations around it.
    • [00:10:20] Pat McGrew: The ability of the print service provider to have team members who are aware of all those regulations is important when they are going to work in this industry. Some of the smartest people I know around compliance requirements and signage requirements and customer communication requirements, and security, work inside a print service provider because they have to do it for all of their customers who are in that industry.
    • What is the last thing we want to leave people with? There are opportunities here. No matter where you are, there are going to be local credit unions, local banks, smaller insurance companies, and insurance agencies that might have multiple insurance company relationships. All of whom need to communicate.
    • Your goal should be looking at who you are serving today and how you might be able to take the products that you can produce and offer them to organizations who profile like this in your community, your state, and your region. 
    • [00:11:09] Ryan McAbee: Ones that naturally match the capabilities that you currently have. It is not that you cannot crawl, walk, or run, to get started in this space and then continue to grow and get more knowledge and more business around this. 
    • I think, Pat, that was well said in terms of summarizing everything.
    • We hope that you have enjoyed this episode and will join us here in a future one at The Print University.

33- HEALTHCARE AND PHARMACEUTICAL

Healthcare and pharmaceuticals are a huge and growing market space. We discuss the trends, statistics, and opportunities for print service providers beyond transactional documents.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another edition of The Print University. This is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and of course, I have my colleague Pat McGrew from the McGrew Group. Hello Pat! We are going to talk about another vertical market opportunity and what that industry looks like. We are grouping them together, but it is healthcare and pharmaceuticals, or pharma, as we often shorten it too.
    • What is so interesting about this space? 
    • [00:00:20] Pat McGrew: It is a diverse space because it encompasses everything from direct mail marketing communication, and transactional communication, all the way through to packaging. Signage, posters - there is this vast array of print material that gets encompassed in healthcare and pharma.
    • A lot of it has to do with the fact that this industry has some well-defined areas. If you think about the people that might buy print, there are a bunch of them out there. And I think it is worth taking a look at who those people are. 
    • [00:00:50] Ryan McAbee: Like some other verticals that we discussed, this one does have regulatory requirements in many different aspects - whether it is just the client care part of it and the communication with the client of disclosures on medication interactions and all of this kind of stuff, right?
    • [00:01:02] Pat McGrew: Yep. Packaging, labeling, Instructions For Use, all that stuff. 
    • Let's talk about the people that are out there that are using these print products and need these print products. Healthcare providers - this is a short list of who you might be dealing with -.there are individual doctors, and then there are medical practices, and there are therapists. There are all the different urgent care and surgical centers. The freestanding ERs are a big business as well. Full hospitals and then specialized hospitals, so day surgeries, places that specialize in spinal care. People that specialize in your kidney health - there are all the dialysis centers out there. There are just tons of different specialties that used to be embedded inside hospitals. Over the years, all those specialties have moved out into their own buildings and their own entities. Rehab facilities of all kinds. Then assisted living and nursing facilities get bundled into this as well because a lot of the same kinds of regulated communication go on constantly. 
    • There is a constant set of communications that goes back and forth between everyone who uses the services of these providers and the people who are providing the services.
    • Then there are all those insurance people. We have another module where we talked about financial services and insurance in terms of home and life, your car insurance, and your toy insurance. Healthcare insurance is a huge business on its own. There are national healthcare insurance providers, and there are regional and local providers.
    • In many states, the state is also a healthcare insurance provider because we have ACA. The people involved are a wide range from corporate to state to private insurers. There are all the people who are brokers. If you have turned on your television anytime in the last year, you have probably seen the Medicare commercials. The ones that tell you to apply for Medicare Advantage or that you can get special additional benefits if you go through a Medicare Advantage provider. All of those organizations are actually still regulated because they still have to play by government rules with regard to Medicare and Medicaid. There are lots of them. And they are all communicating, so they are all sending out marketing material, and they are all communicating with the people who actually sign up with them.
    • Then we bundled pharma in here because pharma gets delivered into the healthcare industry. Pharma is every drug. It is every single drug, whether it is an over-the-counter drug or it is a prescribed drug. To some extent, prosthetic devices are part of pharma because they are regulated in the same way. They drag their own print behind them because not only are their instructions for use and packaging that goes along with these pieces, but there are all sorts of people in the mix in pharma.
    • There are pharmacists at your local pharmacy. There are benefit managers. There is a mid-layer that communicates between the pharmacist and perhaps your provider. Then there are the people making all the drugs and the people doing the packaging and the printing of the instructions for use that go with the drugs.
    • It is a massive industry. 
    • [00:03:55] Ryan McAbee: It is probably the most layered industry in terms of having local feet on the street, but then all the in-betweens. The national insurance companies and healthcare providers and brokerages, and everything else.
    • We have been talking about a very US-centric approach here. Depending on where you are, it may be more of a National Health Institute approach - a nationalized medication and healthcare system. There are aspects of that in the US as well, but it models a little differently in terms of how they approach things. 
    • [00:04:22] Pat McGrew: Even there, you will often find private insurers and private facilities and a lot of this communication. A lot of the things you will hear us talk about play no matter where you are. There are doctors everywhere.
    • Yeah, so it is a weird market size too. We call it a 3.3 trillion market size across healthcare, hospitals, nursing homes, and facilities. But again, this is probably not a complete picture. In reality, if you look at all of what is touched, it is probably much larger.
    • Most of us know at least a doctor or a nurse practitioner, or a pharmacist. These are the people that populate this industry. They are everywhere. Sometimes they are employees of the services that they are working for. Sometimes they are contractors to those services.
    • The number of companies that are serving the market, 6.4 million, could actually be low when you start to think about all the independent contractors. Typically anesthesiologists are independent contractors, right? A lot of physical therapists are independent contractors, so there are a massive number of people out there.
    • All of those people have to play by regulatory rules. They need to apply for certifications, maintain certifications, and they have to communicate with the clients that they serve, as well as all the doctors that they are interacting with and the regulatory agencies that guide them. 
    • [00:05:36] Ryan McAbee: What is interesting here on the labor part is there is a whole community of traveling professionals as well. Traveling nurses is a concept that is in the space. 
    • I was surprised here that 40% of this market size was actually ambulatory healthcare services. That is a big number.
    • [00:05:50] Pat McGrew: It is a growing area. This is not necessarily pandemic-driven. This is actually just growth and lifestyle driven to a very large extent. Doctors who are the traveling doctors, traveling nurses, and traveling specialists. The idea is that providing rehab in the home, and providing health services in the home can actually be more beneficial than having someone go to a facility for those services.
    • The more people accept that as a good thing, as something that they want to do - it actually changes the pricing model and the costing model. Especially in rural areas, you are very likely to see traveling rehab specialists, traveling doctors, traveling nurses, and traveling specialists of different kinds that call on vast areas because the people are few and far between. They do not necessarily have access to that kind of specialist service, in their local town.
    • [00:06:40] Ryan McAbee: In terms of opportunity here and the growth that is expected, is there a big demographic tailwind or basically momentum that is happening in most of the world? Definitely, in most of the developed world. And the fact that we have an aging population base to begin with naturally leads to generally more healthcare services that are going to be required.
    • [00:06:57] Pat McGrew: We have a very active bubble that is moving. A 60-year-old person today is still very likely to be working, likely to be active, quite mobile, quite happy to travel, and quite happy to do all sorts of things. Also, today's 70-year-old is likely to still be working and likely to be very active.
    • The bubble is not only moving for the Baby Boomer but also at the beginning of the following generations, which are very large. My high school class was the last large class that graduated in our school district. Everything behind it was lower until a few years ago when it started to grow again. Those things are happening. People are much more active and much more healthy than they were even 20 years ago.
    • They are users of healthcare and pharma-type services. Users are at a higher level than perhaps 20 or 30 years ago because they are actively working hard to stay healthy. 
    • [00:07:47] Ryan McAbee: As you said, that is extending out too because, generally speaking, life expectancy rates tend to have been changing. What are some key trends in terms of growth opportunities and just how the industry has been changing, and how it relates to the print? 
    • [00:07:58] Pat McGrew: You are going to find that this is the same as a lot of the other industry verticals. We talk about the number of providers in healthcare growing.
    • The number of healthcare companies is growing. The number of healthcare individual contractors and providers is growing. They are constantly recruiting. It is still going to continue to grow and drag paper requirements behind it. The merger and acquisition that we have talked about in other industry verticals and labor challenges we have talked about in other industry verticals absolutely play here. Hospitals by hospitals; doctors practices by doctors practices; pharmacy practices by pharmacy practices; rehab. And practices consolidate. Some of it is for economies of scale, and some of it is to provide access to a wider range of services. It is not unusual to see a professional group of doctors buy an X-ray provider, or buy a pharmaceutical benefits manager provider.
    • There is that kind of consolidation where they are trying to bring more of the services under a single logo in order to have a bigger story to tell to the clients and services to the clients. The growth is partly organic, but it is partly M&A as well.
    • [00:08:59] Ryan McAbee: On that healthcare provider side, you have the public hospital or medical provider, but then you have all the privatized ones that are for-profit entities that are really doing that M&A pretty aggressively. Then you also have these independent ones that provide those specialized services, whether it is diagnostics, image scanning, that sort of thing. 
    • Each one of them has different kinds of marketing needs and different kinds of client interaction needs. You can go into any town usually and find that independent place to get your MRI or your PET scan. They would have to market differently than the big hospital that is in town or the hospital system. 
    • [00:09:31] Pat McGrew: Absolutely. We see this growth all over the US and in other countries as well, is that they are marketing actively, but they are trying to price appropriately as well.
    • They do not want to be seen as being overly priced for the convenience part of the service. They want to be seen as a quality provider just closer to where you are and maybe with faster access than a hospital emergency room. The other kind of marketing that we see a lot here in the mountain west from these providers is trying to understand when it is time to go to the local urgent care and when it is time to actually go to the hospital.
    • We actually get marketing, direct mail marketing from a lot of the providers in our area that tell us when to go to them and when to go to the hospital that they are affiliated with. There are opportunities for communication for all these people. 
    • [00:10:14] Ryan McAbee: Another one that strikes me is the education that goes out for the different plans and often choices that you can make with Medicare as well.
    • [00:10:21] Pat McGrew: Massive amounts of communication go out in that space. There are lots of these printing applications, right? It is not just the transactions. You go to the hospital, and you get a bill that you need to pay - transactional communication. The communication with your insurance company,  notices that you get with regard to your interaction with every doctor you saw and every specialist you saw, whether you went to an urgent care or you went to a hospital, or you went to your local doctor's office. Even if you go to your pharmacy, you are probably going to wind up with paperwork because of prescription drug coverages. 
    • Then there are Explanations of Benefits. We have talked about those EOBs. There are policies and claims checks to pay you back for out-of-pocket expenses that might have turned out to be covered.
    • I think the vast majority of print communication in this space, though, really does come down to marketing and selling. Much of the other transactional communication, as it is known. Some of that has gone online through electronic medical records. Some of that transpires without actual paper, but marketing, signage, and packaging - all of those things are still very much paper-based.
    • [00:11:24] Ryan McAbee: It is a natural break here because, on the transaction side, it requires expertise on the print service provider side. If you are a smaller provider or just a group of medical providers, you will use a managed print service to outsource. 
    • Then on the marketing side, though, it is more of a local effort. I think about my dental provider here; they do sponsorships of local, sports teams and school events and so on and so forth. They have that promotional kind of print. They also do a lot of marketing. They do it in the coupons that show up in your mailbox. And they also do it through direct marketing. 
    • [00:11:52] Pat McGrew: Think about sponsorship signage at the local baseball diamond or the local football stadium. There are a lot of these opportunities, but the only way you find out about them is to go out into your community and talk to the people who buy them. Very often, they do not know what they need until you talk to them.
    • If they are buying, they may be buying just from the last person who called them. There is not any reason to believe that you cannot crack any of the places that you know are buying print, buying signage, or buying packaging from someone. 
    • [00:12:20] Ryan McAbee: I think that summarizes the print opportunity here for healthcare and pharma.
    • It is a big industry, but you have many different layers that you can approach in it to be able to be that trusted provider of their marketing communication services.
    • We hope that you have enjoyed this episode, and we look forward to seeing you here at a future one at The Print University.

34- MANUFACTURING

There are many segments in manufacturing industries that have print requirements, from user manuals to packaging. We share market stats, key trends, and opportunities for print within this market vertical.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to The Print University. This is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and of course, I have my colleague here, Pat McGrew, from McGrewGroup. Hello Pat! 
    • Today we are talking about the vertical market of manufacturing. I think it is one of those we do not often think about as an industry to target for print applications or printing needs because it is off in the distance, not in the center of town. It probably is in a nondescript, unmarked building, and you are wondering what they do. It is the takeaway that I often have as I ride around town and look at these different buildings where manufacturing happens. 
    • When we talk about manufacturing, what are we really talking about here? Because there are a lot of different things that people can make, right?
    • [00:00:33] Pat McGrew: You and I have talked before about making stuff. Sometimes we are making stuff for someone to use directly, and sometimes we are making stuff that is going to go into other stuff that is going to eventually become a product. It is an interesting world of manufacturing.
    • [00:00:47] Ryan McAbee: Anybody that knows you, knows you love cars. That is a good example of stuff that goes into it to make the final stuff right. 
    • [00:00:52] Pat McGrew: It absolutely is. Think about all the things that go into a car. We have vehicles as equipment on our list.
    • Everything that drives, or everything you can fly, or everything you can take out on the water and play with that has an engine, manufactured by equipment and, in some cases, becomes equipment itself. Vehicles are equipment. Construction equipment - your cranes, all of the different kinds of conveyor belts that you see in manufacturing.
    • The luggage conveyor belt that brings you your luggage. Everything is equipment. Equipment is also in agriculture and landscaping settings. Out in the fields, there is equipment to help pick things, help grow things, and plant seeds. Even in the landscaping space, the things that drill the tiny lines to put in sprinkler lines; that is all equipment. 
    • We also have equipment in warehouses. Think about the robotic arms. We showed one here in the picture. Robotic arms and automated guided vehicles are becoming quite common in warehousing environments. That is all equipment. More and more, we are starting to see robotics creep in to do some of the physical work that people used to have to do to pick and pack things. 
    • Equipment is anything that is being assembled for the purpose of doing a job.
    • [00:01:58] Ryan McAbee: Basically helps us do it faster, quicker, cheaper, more effectively.
    • [00:02:02] Pat McGrew: Exactly. Then a lot of that stuff winds up in stores. We talk about FMCG, which is fast-moving consumer goods. If you have bought a coffee maker, an oven, or a refrigerator - all of that is manufactured. You might buy it in one of the big box stores. Those fast-moving consumer goods stores, whether they are serving the appliance market, the home decor market, or where you buy your food or your furniture, all of those companies are dealing with equipment. 
    • They have forklifts moving pallets. They have all sorts of equipment that helps them stack and pack things on the shelves efficiently. They have equipment that they are using for monitoring temperatures to make sure things that are in freezers do not become water, or the things that need to be kept warm are kept warm. All of that is equipment. If you look across all of the different stores that you have ever walked into, cash registers are equipment. 
    • Then there are all these infrastructure solutions out there as well. Elevators are equipment if you want to get right down to it. All the different specialty devices that go into helping us raise drawbridges, right? Railroad crossing arms. It is all equipment. If you sat down for a moment and just took a look to the left and a look to the right, you are probably surrounded by equipment without realizing it. Everything, including the laptop or the desktop or the phone that you are watching this on was manufactured by somebody. 
    • [00:03:21] Ryan McAbee: Pretty much anything that is outside of nature had to be manufactured or created. The desk that was used.
    • We are going to get into the multiple opportunities for printing across the manufacturing space. When it comes to consumer goods, that is a big component for package printing, whether it is folding cartons and flexible packs, labels, et cetera. Lots of opportunities here for print that we will get into. 
    • It is a big market, right Pat? We are talking almost 9 trillion with a T, and that is because there are all scales and sizes. There is your neighborhood manufacturer. We have some in town that do nothing but explicitly make thread for automobiles. That is how specific it can get. That business probably has 20-odd employees in it just for that one thing.
    • Then you get into these global entities on the consumer package side. We have talked before that some of the component suppliers may not be marquee names, like a public company, but they are also very large businesses. There are a lot of different segments. As you see here, Pat, there is a breakdown of where they come from.
    • [00:04:14] Pat McGrew: Exactly. Take a look at the two charts that are on the bottom of the screen. The six circles are from an IBIS World recent report that shows the percentage contribution to that 8.8 trillion number. So how much is food and beverage? How much is petroleum, coal, plastics, and rubber? How much is transportation and machinery? 
    • Think about where you live and the manufacturing that is around you. And the kind of businesses that are supported in your local geography and where they sit here. It will give you an idea of what opportunities are because there is a lot of manufacturing in each one of these spaces, and it is not all of it. These are just the top six. 
    • Then go over and look at the right side of the screen as well, where we talk about where the number of employees are most prevalent. Healthcare and social assistance is a big area. You think of that as being very people-oriented, but it is also very manufactured item-oriented - walkers, assistive devices for standing and sitting down, assistive devices for hearing, assistive devices for talking. Everything from the high end of highly complex wheelchairs all the way through to the simpler things like magnifying devices for reading books.
    • There are a lot of people in each one of these areas, as you see on the chart, and there is manufacturing that goes into every one of them. Notice that in this chart, which is also an IBIS World chart,  manufacturing is called out as a separate entity. They are talking about all the people who are out there working in the environments where this stuff is made. It comes in at number five. There are a lot of people. 
    • [00:05:41] Ryan McAbee: It is a big part of the market. The other thing worth mentioning here, since we are talking numbers, is that it is a cyclical kind of business. It largely follows the economic growth rates. The Gross Domestic Product or GDP number probably gives you a good indication of whether these businesses are doing extremely well at that given point or may need some opportunities to grow their business. It is something worth paying attention to.
    • Speaking of key trends and challenges that we have seen recently in the manufacturing space. There are quite a few. Once in multiple decade challenges that we have seen recently. Right, Pat? 
    • [00:06:08] Pat McGrew: We have had a confluence of challenges. You have probably heard the term supply chain, and you may not actually know what it is, but we all know it is bad. Right now, supply chains are the cause for us not having our favorite foods in the grocery store and maybe not being able to buy the car we want to buy. The supply chain is literally that step-by-step set of relationships where component parts are made, they are forwarded to the next organization, and they are combined to create some new component. Maybe those components are sent on and sent on. Think about cars. All the things that go into manufacturing the car, from the seats, the steering wheel, the lug nuts. Everything is manufactured and then forwarded into final car assembly. A lot of those supply chains are coming up against some interesting challenges right now. 
    • [00:06:55] Ryan McAbee: One of those challenges, obviously, in the automobile space and really touching a lot of different manufacturing areas has been the chip supply. Another thing that we have obviously heard about with every business has been problems with recruitment and retainment of employees. That is the labor market, and that also impacts the ability to manufacture.
    • [00:07:11] Pat McGrew: It absolutely does. When the supply chain is broken, it puts more pressure on the labor market in two ways. One is you start trying to figure out ways to use different kinds of parts in your assembly process, and your labor; your teams are then pressured to try and learn new ways to do things.
    • Weather disruptions in the supply chain can cause you to ask your teams to stay later. All of a sudden, you get a delivery of something that you have been waiting on for three weeks, and you need to get your part done. Alternatively, it could cause you to send them home because you cannot get the parts that you need. Weather is a huge disruptor of supply chains.
    • We know that a lot of people took advantage of the pandemic to retire and are not coming back into the businesses that they might have left.
    • [00:07:52] Ryan McAbee: Or resign or retool. 
    • [00:07:54] Pat McGrew: We have seen a lot of quiet quitting. We have seen a lot of resignations just to go run an ice cream truck. There are all sorts of reasons people give. Then there are a lot of people who have simply decided to change industries because they have reached a breakpoint in their life. It means that there is a massive demand for both unskilled and skilled labor, and it is very hard to find.
    • We talk to printers all the time who are challenged with finding people who want to be trained to come into the industry. It is not likely to get better anytime soon. Some of that is because of the current economic cycle that we are in. 
    • [00:08:24] Ryan McAbee: One thing that you mentioned there to call out specifically is that printing is a manufacturing process.
    • All of these things that you see on the screen, as an industry, we have also been dealing with. Whether it is the supply chain with getting paper sourced from the mills or any parts components for your equipment. Labor is definitely front and foremost on most print service provider owners' minds.
    • Then we have this leaning into the economics thing. We could probably put that into a big bucket of market volatility, but market volatility comes in multiple forms. We have volatility from the economic side. The fact that all of the banks across the globe are increasing interest rates, which affects borrowing costs. It costs to borrow money for equipment.
    • You also have the volatility from other elements. The supply chain would be one more form of volatility. Also, it is going to be the forecasting component because, as you manufacture something, there are lead times to that. You have to forecast, "is this going to be in demand at this point in time?" - or do we need to produce more? Do we need to produce less? It is always a little bit of a game there to figure it out. 
    • [00:09:16] Pat McGrew: It absolutely is. The financing rates, and availability of capital at any interest rate, impact every piece of manufacturing, from car manufacturers to robotics manufacturers, to the people who are making the printing presses and the finishing equipment that we use.
    • It brings us to competition, naturally. One of the things that has been happening across all manufacturing is that we are starting to see some sea changes, some real innovation in manufacturing again. A new industrial age is coming upon us. We have been talking about the Internet of Things, IoT, and Industry 4.0 - a term that they use in Europe to talk about the integration of more automation and optimization, and efficiency in manufacturing processes.
    • Printing is a manufacturing process, and we talk about this quite a bit. When we start looking at companies that have been around for a long time producing the same product day in and day out, reliably; they are starting to feel pressure from more innovative organizations who can do the same work at less cost because they have automated it. They have made it more efficient. Companies that are not keeping an eye on requirements for innovation can find themselves losing that competitive fight. 
    • We are a global market, right? So competition can come from Sri Lanka as easily as it can come from St. Paul. Almost anybody can be in competition with you for the manufacturing products that are being delivered.
    • The same is true in the printing industry, right? There are online printers everywhere who are happy to deliver to you in very short timeframes. Everybody has to be keeping an eye on who is looking for their piece of the market, which drives that market volatility. It does keep things always a little bit uncertain, and when the markets are fluctuating, it is even more uncertain.
    • See what we have at number six: cost of innovation. It does not mean you do not innovate. It does not mean you stop investing wherever you possibly can. You should be looking for more efficient ways to do whatever you do. And manufacturers do this all the time. They are constantly reviewing how they are building things. The ones that want to stay in business, right? The ones that are trying to stay ahead of the curve. They are constantly looking at the things that they can do to be better at what they do. 
    • [00:11:14] Ryan McAbee: So many of these interrelate with each other and ultimately drive how you compete. How you run your business.
    • It is worth knowing these kinds of trends and what is happening at any given moment because that is the market that these businesses operate in. That will naturally lead to what kind of printing opportunities and applications you can present to them to purchase at any given moment.
    • We have a lot of different categories here and a lot of different opportunities for printing. What are some of the more interesting ones or things that we may not commonly think of?
    • [00:11:39] Pat McGrew: Hidden in plain sight is the fact that manufacturers use transaction communication. The things that we think of as regulated communication, where data is involved, and there are tight timeframes. We use print and mail capabilities to communicate with other businesses that we are doing business with and perhaps sometimes with consumers, depending on where in the manufacturing chain they are. Not just invoicing and statement applications but regulatory notices are really big.
    • Any manufactured product at any stage of the supply chain is regulated by somebody in the government. At some point, they may need to issue recall notices and manufacturing defect notices. There are all sorts of reasons that notices might need to go out. Those are typically printed and mailed. Usually, that is the requirement by law. You do not get an emailed recall notice as a rule. 
    • Things like checks. A lot of commerce is done through EDI these days, but there are still applications where checks are required - sometimes refunds. Especially class action suits that require payments out to a lot of individuals that might be done by checks.
    • Instruction manuals across all of these areas. Instruction manuals, instructions for use. Have you ever opened a pharmacy box and pulled out that very tightly folded piece of paper that when you open it up, you almost need a magnifying glass to read? 
    • [00:12:51] Ryan McAbee: Those have the most amazing folding techniques to watch.
    • [00:12:54] Pat McGrew: And the equipment. The equipment that does it is crazy. It is like watching an origami machine.
    • Then all of these organizations have requirements for employee identification, employee communication, employee identity information, as well as corporate identity information. There is everything from the branding stuff to the employee care stuff and to the final consumer of the goods stuff that has print associated. We talk about fast-moving consumer goods, all the things that you buy in stores; it is the packaging, the instructions in the box, but it is also all the marketing that goes along with it.
    • I love buying a new coffee maker and looking at the instruction menu. They can be very interesting to read. Sometimes they are printed on really light stock.
    • Think about infrastructure as well. Every manufacturing site has to have signage, right? "Hazardous voltage over overhead." "Watch out for the lift trucks." "Do not walk down this aisle because only robots may go down that aisle." The regulatory notifications and signage that are required. That is within the manufacturing environment.
    • Then there is that piece we carve out, which is the sales process. Where we are actually trying to market the goods that we are manufacturing. We are also trying to create excitement about the products that we are manufacturing. We have to get people excited about our link belt trailer and our little tiny component in our microchip in our server. There are tons and tons of material that is both business-to-business and business-to-consumer to consider. Everything that you know and love about sales collateral, from promo products to brochureware, is all included.
    • [00:14:18] Ryan McAbee: That sales process really depends on all that enablement material where you are in the supply chain. It can happen in a business-to-business sense if you are in the beginning stages of a supply chain. Then, of course, when you get to the final product, you are going to be more in a business-to-consumer marketing position, right?
    • [00:14:32] Pat McGrew: We often get asked, "How do I go find these people?" If I am a printer and I want to go market to my local meat packing plant, or my local equipment assembly plant - who do I talk to?
    • I often tell people to navigate their way to the procurement team because, in the past, those were really tight relationships. They had their favorite people that they bought from. There has been a lot of turnover in this industry, and procurement departments of manufacturing organizations are likely to be very data-driven. If you can come up with a model for the communication that they need, you can meet their cost requirements, and maybe offer them some innovation - do some things maybe they have never done before, offer them alternatives to things that they need to be printed whether it is a sign, floor signage, or it is brochureware - typically, they will listen and put you on their list. It is definitely worth spending some time dialing for dollars. Talking to the procurement groups within the manufacturers. Then if you are looking around and there is a whole industrial estate full of companies that are smaller manufacturers, it never hurts to go knock on the door.
    • [00:15:31] Ryan McAbee: Another avenue you could also pursue, and it is a little bit different probably than the manufacturing side; their internal marketing team could be another option. 
    • To summarize, any type of printing application in the wide world of manufacturing you could offer, depending on who that particular manufacturer is. It really comes down to knowing what market they serve and operate within. What kind of product they are creating, and then how do they fit into that bigger supply chain story? Are they beginning component supply, or are they in the final assembly part of it? That relates to what partners they have in the space, which may also lead to print opportunities. 
    • There are many ways to tackle the opportunity with manufacturers. We hope you have learned a lot about the manufacturing space and join us next time on a future episode here at The Print University.

35- NON-PROFIT

Non-profits come in many varieties based on their mission and charter, but one theme is consistent. Every non-profit is focused on raising money, which is an excellent opportunity for print and direct mail.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hi, I am Pat McGrew with McGrewGroup, and I am with my colleague Ryan McAbee from Pixel Dot Consulting. Hello Ryan. How are you? 
    • [00:00:09] Ryan McAbee: Good morning! Pat, it looks like we are talking about some vertical markets, but I have a question for you. Within a business, in terms of who you sell to, you can go vertically or horizontally. We are talking about the vertical approach here. How would you describe what that means for those that may not have heard the term? 
    • [00:00:22] Pat McGrew: Sure, these are all the industries that buy print. In a lot of ways, it is hard to find a business that does not need to buy print at some time.
    • We do tend to categorize different kinds of verticals because there are some high-level generalized needs that many of them have. Today we are going to start with non-profit, but through our time together, we will also talk about manufacturing and financial and education. We will go through a few of them because some of them have unique needs.
    • Non-profits are one of those groups that are an unusual vertical. There are different kinds of non-profits. We use the term non-profit, and sometimes you will hear people say not-for-profit. We are really talking about the same thing. We are talking about organizations that typically have some different purpose. They are not retail; they are not selling a product. They are not selling a service. 
    • Instead, they may be in the education space. Very often, we see public and private schools typically not-for-profit, although there are charter schools that might be for-profit. In general, there are not-for-profit vocational schools. Most colleges and universities are considered not-for-profit. There are also publicly held IPO-oriented commercial universities in the market. They will still tend to behave in the same way because the basics they do in the education space are pretty much the same. They all have alumni associations, and they all have the things that they do. 
    • We have institutional non-profits, and that is everybody from the World Wildlife Fund and Doctors Without Borders, all the way through to a lot of the healthcare organizations. Many of them are not-for-profit; as are many membership and professional organizations.
    • If you belong to a professional organization: engineering, manufacturing, or educational association - many are non-profits. Legal services, research companies. Conservation is a really big area. As I mentioned, World Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club, and places like that.
    • And, of course, the arts. Most museums are non-profits. There are non-profit galleries in the marketplace. Many of the art-oriented educational community programs, too.
    • Think about where you live. The community programs that might be helping the homeless. The programs that might be helping with afterschool education and afterschool childcare are very often non-profit as well.
    • It is a really mixed bag of people. None of these people are looking to make a profit to return to shareholders. What they are looking to do is break even or make a profit to return that profit back to the group. 
    • [00:02:48] Ryan McAbee: The mission, the purpose, or the patrons of the non-profit. 
    • [00:02:50] Pat McGrew: A good point there. Churches are generally non-profit as well, so the length and breadth of churches are very often non-profit. Sometimes churches and non-profits may have philanthropic organizations that are attached that are also non-profit. 
    • [00:03:05] Ryan McAbee: It is likely that no matter what size town, whether you are in a very urban or very rural setting, there is some sort of non-profit within your sphere.
    • [00:03:13] Pat McGrew: Yeah, the Fraternal Order of Police is a non-profit. Think about American Legion environments, right? Veterans of Foreign Wars, Typically they are non-profits, and those are everywhere. You will be able to find somebody in your surrounding area that is a non-profit, and they all need print.
    • [00:03:30] Ryan McAbee: It is a sizable space or vertical market, as we see here. There are around 2 million just in the US, and the size is measured not in the millions, but in the billions with a "B", so they are very big.
    • [00:03:40] Pat McGrew: It is big. It is because there is such a mix. You can have non-profits that are 12 people doing good in a suburban community. They are probably not in the billion-dollar range. You start looking at like the Gates Foundation, a multi-billion dollar adventure all by itself. Doctors Without Borders is a global organization and definitely high need in terms of what it takes to perform its mission, which means that they are constantly fundraising. So print…
    • Americares, Red Cross, and the ones that we have listed on the screen are the top ones in the US right now by the amount of turnover within the organization from a revenue perspective. 
    • In your particular community, you may have exposure to all sorts of other ones. League of Women Voters is a non-profit. The Rotary Clubs and the Lions Clubs are all non-profits. There are a lot of them out there with a lot of different ranges in terms of what they turn over in terms of the money they handle. 
    • [00:04:34] Ryan McAbee: I found it surprising here that nearly 40%, which is a little less than half of this entire space, can be categorized as religious organizations, schools, and foundations.
    • When you lump in the religious foundations, those are probably some huge numbers depending on where you are. I found it kind of surprising that just in those three types, you find the bulk of non-profits. 
    • [00:04:53] Pat McGrew: Yeah, absolutely. It is a really interesting group. This is another one of these cases where we are bringing you a slide that has War and Peace written on it. We certainly encourage you to freeze the frame for a little bit and read through what we are talking about. 
    • What we wanted to leave you with is that there are trends. If you are serving non-profit clients, or maybe that is the specialty of the organization you are working in, it pays to pay attention to the trends and know what is going on.
    • We know about the digitization of giving. Does that mean that everything is going to be on an app on your phone? No. Actually, what that means is that they are still heavy users of direct mail marketing, in all of its many forms, including brochures and leave-behinds. They are very smart about understanding that real-time payment is an important thing. If they can make it easy for someone to be moved by a message and push a button, to hit a QR code, to immediately get into a payment site and make an immediate donation, they tend to have much more success than if they are asking someone to write a check tear off a remittance slip, put it in an envelope and mail it.
    • [00:05:56] Ryan McAbee: Minimize friction for donation, basically for any recipient. 
    • [00:05:59] Pat McGrew: Absolutely. The other thing that non-profits have gotten very - I am going to use the term aggressive, but in the nicest possible  way - aggressive about is things like matching funds. Most of the mailers that I get from the non-profits that I support remind me that I should talk to my employer about matching fund opportunities.
    • Sometimes they have a big donor willing to match funds, and they will do special mailings. "Hey, if you make a donation within this period of time, all those funds will be matched." There are many things that can drive additional direct mail. 
    • In the end, you want to keep watching for how the not-for-profits that you are working with are changing to meet the needs of the constituents that they serve. They may want to become more adept at doing personalized communications with their donation solicitations. They may want to create campaigns that run on a cadence so that they are constantly in front of people. Maybe they do not actually know that it is an opportunity. These are some trends that you can follow, and that you can bring to your clients to help them grow their use of your services while they are growing the donations coming into their organizations. 
    • [00:07:05] Ryan McAbee: If you are a printer, there are a few key things that work in the non-profit space. One is to understand the non-profit's mission and also the goals that they are trying to reach. Second to that is to understand how to work with data because, ultimately, you have to reach a person on the other end. The non-profits really live based on donations from the general public, but also their patrons and donors repeatedly give and contribute to the organization. Then more and more these days, that multi-channel aspect. You are receiving these through print, direct mail, through SMS. How popular has it become in recent years to say text and donate $10? It is a low barrier for most people to give, and that stacks up over time.  
    • [00:07:43] Pat McGrew: Remember that all these people are also candidates for all sorts of other print products. Many non-profits also run events, so it is your opportunity for signage and brochures and promotional printing promotional giveaways: caps, t-shirts, mugs, and key chains. 
    • We break it down into non-mailed and mailed. On the non-mailed side, the one that I was talking to someone about recently, was volunteer kits. They were literally doing it in large branded envelopes, but it could have been small folding carton boxes, could have been pouches. Just bringing together everything that a volunteer needed to work a specific kind of event, like their name tag, and their lanyard that said that they were part of the event.
    • When you think about it, there are a lot of things that go with events, and customers have different things that are more important to them. Your ability to either print directly or have a path to printing all of the things that can support events is really good.
    • When you jump over into mail, it is the thing that we all know, right? It is the direct mail solicitations. We have a number of modules where we talk about the direct mail space. 
    • Do not forget newsletters. Newsletters are really easy to put together. Even though many organizations went to email newsletters because they felt that it was saving money, I think we have seen a return of the printed and mailed newsletter, because that printed engagement really does tend to work more effectively than email newsletters in most organizations. Books, promo brochures, and all of these things can be part of the non-profit space. It is always worth sitting down and working out a year-long plan if you are serving non-profits. Sit down with the folks who are on their marketing team or their board of directors and say, "Hi, you have a whole year here. Let's create a cadence. Let's create a story. Let's look at where your events are and how we can create a budget-friendly plan to support all of the things you want to do this year by keeping your requirements in front of the constituents you are trying to serve." 
    • I would also argue that in the non-profit space, they are more receptive to a drip or a continuous marketing campaign because that is their lifeline for engagement with their donors, and also making sure everybody understands their mission.
    • Yeah. Again, because they come in all sizes and shapes, the way you engage with non-profits has to be tuned to the style of non-profit that you are talking to. 
    • [00:09:52] Ryan McAbee: Very good point. To wrap it up for us, Pat, what are the key takeaways here for dealing and working with non-profits?
    • [00:09:57] Pat McGrew: Get to know your non-profit. Get to know who in your area are non-profits. Then talk to them and understand their needs. Understand their size and their mission. Walk in the door with a plan that can work for a non-profit that includes things on the screen, mailed and non-mailed print products.
    • Pay attention to the trends and just pay attention to your community because some messages resonate better during the holidays, and some during the non-holiday seasons. Be smart about keeping your ear to the ground for what the non-profits in your community are doing, and you will figure out what to bring them.
    • [00:10:33] Ryan McAbee: Great points, Pat. We hope you enjoyed this episode, and we will see you all on future ones here at The Print University.

55- GOVERNMENT

Across local, regional and national segments, governments require a lot of printing. We discuss the different segments of government, key trends, and opportunities for print.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Print University. This is Ryan McAbee with Pixel Dot Consulting, and of course, I have my colleague at The Print University, Pat McGrew, the McGrewGroup, and we are continuing our journey through vertical markets. This time we are talking about one that you may not naturally think about, which is the fact that the government has to print stuff, right Pat?
    • [00:00:23] Pat McGrew: Government with a capital G turns into a lot of different governments with little Gs, right? It is everything from your local town or city to your county or your parish, to your state, to your region, to your country. Then there are all sorts of districts and other entities that are also governments unto themselves.
    • Here in the Mountain West, it is common for us to have fire districts that are really their own government because of how they have to work. Water conservation districts are quasi-governmental entities as well. There are all sorts of those that do communicate. They may have taxation authority which means they have to communicate with you, and you have opportunities to communicate with them. Then there are the national, regional, and federal groups of organizations, departments, and agencies that function as well.
    • There might also be some non-governmental organizations. We call them NGOs that behave like governments in terms of how they communicate and the kinds of communication that they are involved in.
    • [00:01:28] Ryan McAbee: With all these different levels and layers, there is always a process for how they procure or request the print. I know that often we think about this as only like an in-plant space because they must have their own print shop, right? But it goes a lot deeper, and there is a bigger decision tree, making the process more than what meets the eye here, right?
    • [00:01:50] Pat McGrew: Yeah, we learned, especially over the last few years, where a lot of local and county-type organizations needed to send people home and still needed to get print out the door. Just how many of them were in-plants, and how many of them had regular contracts with local printers to get the work done? They did not operate their own in-plant. At the state level, most states have an in-plant that handles some percentage of the printing that they do. Almost all of them outsource some of their work to one or more entities that have specialties or volume capabilities they do not have.
    • When you get down into the smaller governmental districts and entities, they may or may not have ever had an in-plant. They might have had what we refer to as a CRD - a copy repro department, that had a really giant photocopier. Maybe they had some sort of printer that they could send files to. As a rule, most of them, or many of them, also have relationships with local printers to get the bulk of the work that would not be appropriate for a high-speed photocopier to get done. 
    • Signs, banners, that kind of stuff, as well as, announcements and communications that they want to send out to all of their population.
    • [00:03:05] Ryan McAbee: You are right. The outsourcing component really is driven by, like you said, the volumes. Also, the fact that they may not be able to physically produce whatever is being requested, and it has to go outside to someone who can. There is a response time aspect or turnaround time, or SLA, where the in-plant may not be able, because of the volume they are already producing or because of the schedule that they are under, to do that. That will be another reason for outsourcing.
    • When it comes back to that process, though, there is that decision tree where it can either be done locally at an in-plant. It may be fed up to a larger state level, or national level. There is always an opportunity for the outsourcing component as well. You have to understand the different levels of government that you are going to and what that process looks like, because there may be some government regulations or laws on the books that say they have to do it one way versus the other in terms of procuring. 
    • [00:03:58] Pat McGrew: It is worth knowing that, if you are interested in doing work for your local or regional or state government, it is worth understanding how they buy print. In some areas, you will find that there is a list you can get on as an available provider. You provide all your credentials, and you are on the list, and they just rotate through the list. Literally, every job that comes up goes to the next one down the line. If they cannot do it, they go down the next line. It is very democratic in a lot of ways. 
    • In other areas, there is a vetting process, and you have to provide your financials. You have to go through an interview process to get put on a list that the procurement people can use. It might be set up so that you are only permitted to bid on certain types of jobs, and you might actually have to bid on them. They might not just naturally come to you. They are done in blind and unblind processes. 
    • Then there are situations where it is who you know that gets you the work. Participating in things like your local Chamber of Commerce and other business-to-business groups helps. The SBA hosts a lot of activities that introduce you to your local government entities, as well as other local business entities. That is how you can start to wiggle your way in. Learning what the process is for the government where you are is the first step in the process. That can be a phone call to your local Chamber of Commerce, which can usually guide you through the process. 
    • [00:05:24] Ryan McAbee: Once you are into their system, their network is sticky. It is not like it is going to change greatly year after year. Once you are in, you can start receiving the bids or making the bids, and you can also start receiving the work. It tends to be, as long as you are fulfilling the service under the expectations that were set, you are going to keep receiving a portion of that work or have the opportunity to receive it. 
    • [00:05:45] Pat McGrew: This same process applies also at the federal and national level. There are procurement lists, and there are ways to get on government bid sheets. It is all pretty much handled the same way, but it is down to you understanding who you are trying to do business with and how that entity does business. That is why we have a US federal government budget of 6.27 trillion. That covers all the key spending areas. That is not just print, but print is a huge part of it. The government printing office is a massive entity. It is responsible for all of the government printing. That is printing that happens regularly as a matter of course, but it is also for special project printing. The Government Printing Office always has the opportunity to job shop things out as it sees fit. There is a process for getting on their procurement list as well.
    • In the state and local space, you will see that the dollars are not quite as big, but it still has a big B out there - 4.5 billion is sort of the smaller state, smaller population. 2.865 billion is the state budget for California last year, which is the largest budget of any of the 50 states. All of these areas that you see as key spending areas drive print.
    • Education drives print. Healthcare drives print. Welfare communications drive print. Crime, safety, transportation, administration, research, all these things drive print. Where the print within the state gets done has to do with how the agencies decide to be part of the state procurement system, the national procurement system, and their local procurement. 
    • [00:07:21] Ryan McAbee: These numbers are large because if it is a type of print that you need to touch each citizen in that jurisdiction, that is a scale thing. You are not talking about sending one piece in the mail, you are talking about delivering quite a volume. 
    • [00:07:34] Pat McGrew: If you are in a middle-of-the-state county in Montana, your requirements are a little bit different than if you are in the middle of the state of California or the middle of the state of Texas or the middle of the state of New York.
    • You know where you are and what the scales might be. There are clearly massive amounts of opportunity if you are interested in participating in that kind of printing. 
    • [00:07:55] Ryan McAbee: Now, some of this has been federally mandated at some level, and there are many different layers of this at the state and even local levels, but there is this digitization effort. If things can be made electronically available and information flow out, we will do that. In many cases, that has been a slow transition process, and in some instances, probably found that it was not really reliable or did not work that well for types of needs that were out there from the government entities. So print still carries on, right Pat? 
    • [00:08:24] Pat McGrew: It does because print will follow you. If you have an address and you move, you can file a change of address form with the postal service, and your mail will follow you - so communication will follow you. If you change your email address and you forget to tell people that you changed your email address, your email does not follow you. All bets are off.
    • The other thing in this space is to remember that we also have ADA compliance requirements for communication. The government is especially sensitive to that. They know that there is a percentage of their constituency that might need special help in receiving communication, large format text, braille text, and different kinds of assistive text that they might need access to. Providers of that also find that there are opportunities in this space as well. 
    • [00:09:11] Ryan McAbee: All very good points. The trends lead to the fact that you still have different types of products in terms of print applications that happen in this space. You have the mail where you literally need to reach the citizens and whoever is in your jurisdiction you are representing. Then you have all of the other things that can happen that are not mailed or going into the postal systems. This is obvious, honestly, where I see a lot of opportunity for outsourcing in the work that we have done with some government in-plant institutions. 
    • [00:09:38] Pat McGrew: Yeah, there is always communication. I was actually at the State of Colorado last week, and I was delighted to find how many brochures they produce to help explain not only their business. How they serve the state. They actually do marketing material to other departments about what the state printing services are and how they can get access to them. The state printing operation not only prints but also holds outsourcing relationships with a lot of key organizations throughout the state capable of producing on their behalf.
    • They do a lot of interesting brochures that show how to work with them. Then they are also the producers of the reports, signs, event collateral, and promotional items. They do a lot of interesting printing there at the State of Colorado, but they also outsource. 
    • Think about what happened when we went into pandemic lockdowns, and we needed to all of a sudden throw signs on doors. You can only come in if you are wearing a mask. You have to stand six feet apart. All of that had to be printed, and a lot of it was mandated by the states and the federal government to tell us that we needed all this signage. There is always normal signage: hazardous material signage and biohazard signage, and just security and safety signage that is being printed at the state and local level all the time.
    • [00:11:00] Ryan McAbee: That is a good point. I think that you need to stay in the know, right? Especially if you are talking at a local and state level. There are events that happen. Obviously, you mentioned the ones that related to the pandemic and the distancing signage and so forth, but there could be other things that are legislated that cause a shock. 
    • I know the State of Colorado had one of those not long ago where they had to get a certain amount of print out the door because there was just a regulatory change. If you know this kind of thing, you can then step in and raise your hand and say, “Hey, I could probably help you with this change that is going to be pretty difficult for you to do on your own.” 
    • [00:11:31] Pat McGrew: At the very least, you can get on the bid lists. You can get on the list to be considered when the next opportunity comes up. Again, keeping track of what the opportunities are and how to get access to them. 
    • Remember, all of these entities send out mail communication all the time. Mail is regulated. A lot of the regulated notifications they have to be very careful with. Things like newsletters, reminders, and license reminders. Get your new deer hunting license here, new wolf hunting license. Your new bear hunting license, your new fishing license. 
    • [00:12:01] Ryan McAbee: Only in the west!
    • [00:12:03] Pat McGrew: Yeah, only in the west. But moose hunting and elk hunting and all that other stuff. All of your hunting licenses. All your fishing licenses. Your license for your ATV. Your driver's license and your vehicle licenses, of course. In any given state, there are a whole array of licenses that you may need just to go out and have fun. Your boat might need a license. Your Skidoo might need a license. Access to state parks versus access to federal parks. All those licenses are typically printed. 
    • Remember, when we talk about printed communication, we are talking about all kinds. Sign and display, all of those types of printing. We are also talking about label printing because most of these hunting licenses and park permits are actually label printing. Ballot printing is a specialty unto itself. Then bills and invoices, newsletters, and things like that. So there are lots and lots of opportunities. 
    • [00:12:51] Ryan McAbee: I think to close it out here, just know that the government, and the NGOs, and the multiple layers from the local level all the way up to the national level, there are opportunities be that that company that they can outsource and get print needs provided to them.
    • We hope you enjoyed this episode here at The Print University, and we look forward to seeing you on the next one.

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