Robert Hetrick’s printing career started in the mid-1980s, when his brother got him a job at Quik Print, a now-shuttered franchise in Baton Rouge.
“It was just a lot of down-and-dirty fliers: one color, two colors,” he tells Business Report in a new feature in the current issue.
Four-color printing was reserved for the big boys like Franklin Press—now primarily a direct-mail company—or Baton Rouge Printing.
In 1991, Hetrick and Al Boudreau, his friend from Denham Springs High School, started Printing Tech in a 700-square-foot shop. The business has grown into one of Baton Rouge’s leading commercial printers, housed in an 11,600-square-foot warehouse facility on South Harrell’s Ferry Road.
According to some predictions, various culprits, from office printers to email, should have killed off the printing business by now. But commercial printing remains a thriving, if not exactly booming, industry.
“Printing is a shrinking business,” Hetrick says. But by keeping up with technology, providing personal service and diversifying their products, local printers like his company remain viable.
Evolving with the times often means investing in new technology while profit margins tighten.
Publicly available data on the printing industry presents a mixed but not alarming picture. Almost 50,000 printing businesses employed 454,540 people and did about $85 billion in sales in 2016, industry research firm IBISWorld says, while average annual growth between 2011 and 2016 was down 0.5%.
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