Gary and Julie Crisp meet Marines at the annual Super Bowl party thrown by C2 Reprographics.
C2 Reprographics: Regional Brand with a Community Touch
By Ed Avis
While you’re settling into your couch with a beer to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, one of your reprographics colleagues will be in the midst of his biggest community relations event of the year. C2 Reprographics, a 10-location chain in Southern California, will hold its sixth annual Super Bowl party for Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton on Sunday.
“The first couple of years we kept it kind of quiet,” says Gary Crisp, co-owner of C2. “But in the years since we’ve gotten a lot of coverage for it. This year we’re anticipating between 350-500 people, including 150 Marines and 200 veterans.”
Crisp doesn’t just throw a few wieners on the grill – he provides live music, big screen TVs, cigars, massage services, celebrities, pro athletes, cheerleaders, boat rides, and a full spread of food.
“I said, ‘Let’s make it a perfect day for these guys.’”
The community involvement demonstrated by the Super Bowl party reflects Crisp’s general philosophy of business: That success comes when you serve your community.
“The most important thing we have in place is a covenant relationship with our community, our customers, our principals, and our employees,” Crisp says.
Emphasizing Local
Crisp and his wife, Julie Crisp, founded C2 in 2002 (the name comes from their last names, Crisp times two). Gary Crisp had spent 20 years working for Unilever and Pepsico, and wanted to apply the lessons he had learned at those corporate behemoths on a venture of his own. He also had the help of several local business executives who invested in the business.
They started by opening a franchise copy shop under the Copy Club banner. Before their first year in business ended, however, they discovered the reprographics industry.
“What we quickly learned was that the industry was consolidating,” Crisp says. “Basically, most of the major reprographic firms in the area had been bought out. This created a unique opportunity to offer clients a real choice of vendors.”
The list of large, family-owned reprographics firms in Southern California that had been acquired, primarily by ARC, included OCB, CR, Blair Graphics, Ford Graphics, Universal Orange County, Team, and others. These companies were formidable competitors with serious market share, but Crisp sensed that an independent reprographics firm could attract some clients who preferred dealing with a local owner. In fact, to this day C2 customers can call the CEO or any other key local executive directly on their cell phones.
One lesson Crisp had learned at Unilever and Pepsico was the value of planning, so he immediately created a strategy, a mission statement, and guiding principles. Part of this process was to create an ideal scene of what we wanted the business to become – he saw a chain of 15-20 reprographics shops, an FM division, color imaging capabilities, and a broad range of other services offered throughout Southern California.
The Launch
C2 was born with a store in Orange in late 2002. That went well enough that about a year later the Crisps opened a second location in a former karate studio in Costa Mesa.
The digs were modest, but several months in they received a $70,000 job to handle the reprographics work at a major hospital construction project.
“I looked at my partner and said, ‘We just got into the big leagues,’” Crisp remembers.
Jobs like those allowed them to eventually move out of the karate studio and into a building formerly occupied by Consolidated Reprographics. That location is now C2’s headquarters.
The Crisps succeeded in growing in a crowded market by developing local relationships in the community and by aggressively seeking new customers.
“We set up territories that were one or two miles from a store, and then sent teams into each territory,” Crisp says.
At first they concentrated on smaller clients, knowing that the big players had the larger clients sewn up. But eventually even some of the larger clients came into the fold, attracted by top-notch customer service, high quality, and fair prices.
And other C2 locations followed, including in downtown Los Angeles, Irvine, San Diego, Torrance, and Inland Empire.
Surviving the Recession
C2 was six years old when the hammer that smashed many reprographics firms slammed down.
“We got hit pretty bad in 2008,” Crisp remembers. Sales had been climbing steadily each year, but in 2008 they dropped 26 percent.
Rather than crawling under the covers and waiting for business to return, however, Crisp invested.
“When you invest in a downturn, you’re ahead of the curve when things pick up again,” he says. He looked for acquisitions, and eventually purchased a shop in West LA and a second location in San Diego.
In 2011, C2 acquired Robins Signs, a 104-year-old sign business that added vehicle wraps, sign installation, and other services to C2’s portfolio.
With the addition of those sign services, the company was positioned to take another big step: In 2012 it expanded and re-organized into four divisions: C2 Color Studio, C2 Legal Solutions, C2 Business Solutions, and C2 Reprographics.
Acquisitions weren’t the only things available during the recession: C2 also was able to hire many experienced people who were being let go from other firms during the downturn. Those people were excellent employees who brought great value to C2, Crisp says.
“We have over 1,500 years of combined experience among our employees,” Crisp says. The company employs 125, which means the average employee has 12 years of work experience!
C2 survived the recession stronger than before: Sales run rates are now ahead of 2007 levels, Crisp reports.
The Future
C2 has embraced a future that contains less paper than before the recession. Crisp says electronic plan distribution, scanning, and other digital services are an important part of the firm’s product mix these days.
“The volume of traditional jobs may be smaller, but our margins are strong,” Crisp says. “Our digital business is now approaching 15 percent of our total business, and there’s a very low cost of goods.”
The company is looking at more digital services, Crisp says, but also more print business. Grand-format printing, for example, is an area he would like to explore.
“That’s a big business and it’s not going away, because you can’t easily put that onto an iPad,” he says.
He’s also seeking a larger share of the traditional reprographics pie, and hopes to continue expanding to more locations.
“Right now we have an aggressive acquisition strategy because there are a lot of firms in our space that would be a good cultural fit but have limited exit opportunities,” Crisp says. “What we look at is two things – from a financial standpoint, does this firm make sense? And second, what is the culture of this company, what are their values – does it fit with us?”
Will the acquisition tables ever be turned on C2? Crisp says probably not.
“We have no plans to sell the business,” he asserts. “I’m constantly being called on, but there’s no interest there. We see ourselves as a regional brand with a very large horizon in front of us. We continue to attract the very best people in the market, and given our independence, I think we do things better than our competitors.”