By Ed Avis
Kyle Batsford remembers the summer of 1994 well. He had just graduated from high school, and like many southern California teens, hanging out at the beach was a priority.
“I was spending most of the summer surfing and generally screwing off,” says Batsford, now vice president of Palomar Reprographics in Carlsbad, California and president-elect of APDSP. “My car was the old delivery truck from Palomar, so as long as we had gas money, I just surfed all day.”
But eventually, as the Beach Boys once sang, daddy took the keys away.
“By the end of the summer my dad was tired of me goofing off, and he was tired of my mom nagging him about me, so he finally said, ‘I need a delivery driver and you need a job, so you’re starting here on Monday.’”
And thus began the younger Batsford’s career in reprographics.
A Long History
Kyle’s father, Bob Batsford, had already had a long career in the business. He had started out as a diazo technician in Atlanta for GAF corp. in the 1970s, and eventually became a sales manager at Ozalid GAF. He moved his family to southern California in 1982 to oversee Ozalid’s market there. He eventually jumped to the reprographics shop side of the business, first for Ford Graphics and later Westlake Graphics. In 1988 he bought Palomar Reprographics.
“When he bought it, the company was in the red,” Kyle Batsford says. “Within a year he had turned it around.”
Batsford says one key to his father’s success with Palomar was his early understanding of the importance of diversifying his market base. AEC customers made up the core, but he also sought work from artists, corporations, and other non-traditional markets.
“We also kept abreast of new technology, so in the early ‘90s when color copiers came out, we were one of the first to pick up a Canon CLC 500,” Batsford says. “We did work for Chrysler’s design team, Callaway Golf, and pharmaceutical companies.”
As large-format plain paper copiers came on the market, the Batsfords invested in a Shacoh 3800. They used it to make vellums for their diazo equipment, and bond copies, which they could sell at $3 to $4 per square foot. At one point in the mid 1990s, they received regular large orders from the company developing LegoLand. They used the profits from that client to buy a KIP 3610; before long they were transitioning clients out of diazo prints altogether.
The Son Jumps In
By 1996, Kyle was the shop supervisor, and he ran the reprographics production side of the business. Like many second-generation reprographics professionals, though, he found it challenging to work in the family business.
“You have to learn how to separate the business relationship from the family
relationship, but I don’t think you really can,” he says. “Some days you act like a son, and some days you act like an employee. Eventually our relationship became all about the business.”
Kyle impressed his father enough that he was given more and more responsibility, until becoming the general manager in 2000.
“But I decided about that time that it wasn’t really the direction I wanted to go in,” he remembers. “So I left and looked for other work. I wanted to get into sales, to make more money.”
That lasted about a month. His father asked him to rejoin Palomar, this time as a salesperson.
He excelled in that area, largely because he understood the production side of the business as well, and didn’t over-promise things to his clients. He remembers in many cases selling a job and then going back to the shop and printing it himself.
As the company grew – they had about a dozen employees then and were adding new lines of work, such as large-format color – Kyle transitioned into an executive role. The shop was getting crowded, though.
“There was a light rail project that we were printing for, and we had two or three pallets of paper that we had to move outside every day because our production room was too small,” Batsford remembers.
So the family found much bigger digs, and moved in August 2007. Bad timing.
“Buying that building was probably not the best business decision,” Batsford says. “The recession was just starting, and construction projects stopped. Everyone was watching their nickels and dimes.”
Remembering the value of diversification from Bob’s early days, the Batsfords refocused their business on color, both large and small-format. They bought a digital press to give them entry into areas that previously belonged to small offset printers and quick printers, such as business cards and forms.
Those moves helped stabilize the company, once again proving how important it is to keep a broad service base. In 2010, as Bob Batsford started easing towards retirement, Kyle became director of operations.
Illness Strikes
Even though Kyle was running more and more of the business, Bob Batsford still played an important role. So when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2013, it was a blow. Then, adding to the family’s stress, Kyle’s mother, Helga Batsford, who managed the company’s finances, also was diagnosed with cancer.
“That presented a lot of challenges,” Kyle says. “Dealing with all of that definitely took our eye off where we were going with the business.”
Bob passed away in March 2015. Helga, who was winning her fight against cancer, became president and CEO, though Kyle handles most of the decisions. His wife Julie Batsford now handles accounts receivable, HR, and marketing.
“Being a small business, we all have to juggle a lot of balls,” Kyle says.
What’s Ahead?
Diversification is definitely part of Batsford’s plan for the future. He recognizes that reprographics printing is a shrinking market, and he has been filling the gap with projects such as wall coverings, small-run book printing, signage, and other non-traditional areas.
“We know we’re still important to our clients because they still use us,” he says. “But how much more can we be to them?”