Healthcare workers wearing face shields made by APDSP member firm DRsi in Seattle.
On Tuesday, APDSP sponsored a roundtable conversation about the Covid situation and how it affects reprographics. The panelists – Jen Fuller, owner of DRsi in Seattle and Bellevue, Washington, and Chad Sealey, director of sales and marketing for Sharpe Co. in North Carolina – shared their experiences with the crisis. Among the topics they discussed was applying for federal aid and making safety supplies. Joseph Szobody of ReproConnect joined the conversation at the end to share what he has learned about online bid submittal. Below is an excerpted version of the conversation.
To listen to a recording of the entire event, click here.
Ed Avis: Jen, please share what your firm is doing during this time.
Jen Fuller: We're in Washington state, and unlike a lot of other states, the governor clarified construction is not considered essential here. There are a handful of projects that are essential specifically, supporting health care, food, et cetera. But not all construction. We do have a lot of competitors that are operating business as usual and will print anything you want, but I feel strongly that we need to support and follow the Governor's order. And so, we have asked our clients only to send them projects that are in support of essential businesses and projects that have been deemed as essential. Our volumes are way down. We have one or two people in the shop to run those orders when they come in versus our full staff has 24 people.
Have you applied for the federal aid?
When the PPP got finalized, I did apply for that immediately. I work with a small local bank. They were not taking applications on Friday the third when the SBA opened up that program, but they were ready to go on Monday the sixth. So if I remember the timeline, I sent in my application actually Sunday afternoon, so my banker would have it first thing Monday morning. I received word that I was approved on Tuesday the seventh, and then I actually got the funding on Saturday the 11th. So we are good for the next eight weeks to continue to employ our team even though most of them are not working, and use some of those funds to cover other ongoing expenses like rent and leases and things like that.
Was the application for PPP difficult?
It wasn't too bad. It was basically just having to pull your payroll records. When I applied, the information was still coming out as to what was included and excluded in that definition of payroll. Our Medicare taxes, what about social security? It was clear that benefits, health insurance was included in that. I just put together a spreadsheet column by column. Here's my gross wages. Here's my social security contribution and my unemployment contribution, so on and so forth. And then I requested an amount based on the total of all of those things. I did get approved for the full amount that I had requested, which was a broader definition of payroll expense that included all of those taxes and fees for workers comp and unemployment, et cetera. It wasn't that onerous.
I saw an image of face shields your company made. Tell us about them.
We got a new Colex flatbed cutter router in January. When Coronavirus hit, a very savvy person on my team noticed that other shops that had cutting equipment were able to make face shields. So we were trying to figure out if there was a way we could contribute. We don't have any selling capabilities, but my team found a design for these face shields you see that they're wearing that's just made out of sheets of PETG. And the nice thing about these is, a lot of the face shields I've seen online require the headband to be 3D printed. This one is just a strip of PETG, and it's got a bunch of holes cut out of the back basically so they can size it to their head. And then the shield itself connects on with the screw posts we've been using for our plan sets, and that's it. They're ready to go…. So we've been able to donate these to a few health care facilities around here… We're going to continue making them as long as we can afford. And at the same time, we're looking for buyers even if we just sell them at cost just to enable us to continue doing it.
Ed Avis: Chad, tell us what’s going on at Sharpe Co.
Chad Sealey: We recognized the need, as Jen was saying, with the abilities of our router cutter to manufacture protective devices or tools for our retail and customer-facing industries such as banking, convenience stores, grocery stores, who were deemed essential businesses that needed to stay open. We started out manufacturing plexiglass sneeze guards, which gives you a clear barrier between you and your customer. It started with a request from banks for their loan officers who were continuing to work….The loan officers still had to bring customers in by appointment to finalize paperwork and signatures and whatnot. And they wanted to offer a layer of protection for those employees. So we designed a clear quarter inch plexiglass sneeze guard for their desktops, and that has since turned into ... a design to accommodate call center cubicle walls. And we are in the process of making a retail version for cash registers and banking windows to allow the passing of merchandise and paperwork under the plexiglass, back and forth between the customer and the employee.
I'm meeting tomorrow with the owner of several hair salons who we are going to take a look at her space and see if we can custom-design some plexiglass dividers for her booths within her salon.
Are you also making face shields?
Yes. Our design's a little bit different than what Jen showed. We are using the PETG for the actual clear face shield, but we are using a styrene material for the headband, a one inch by one inch foam for the spacer that goes between the forehead and the headband. And then a Velcro closure on the headband to adjust for sizing. I believe we have materials to make 28,000. We've already sold 15,000 to customers. And that actually allowed us to get in with some customers that we hadn't been able to get in front of… initially through the donation of some of these face shields.
We've also been selling face masks, the cotton variety. We've got a couple of manufacturers here, a sock manufacturer, and underwear and t-shirt manufacturer that have retrofitted their machines, and make cotton face masks that we had been purchasing and reselling with minimal margin to everyone and anybody who needs them.
Those are some of the things that we've done just to spin and adapt to the situation that we're all facing with the Coronavirus and trying to do our part, not only to support the safety of everyone, but also our new reality that our customers are facing as they plan to reopen and what that's going to look like for them.
Tell us about the floor graphics you’ve been making for retailers.
Floor graphics made by Sharpe Co.
[We are] accommodating the new demand for social distancing tools and resources. This picture that you're looking at is a grocery store chain that we provide a lot of graphics for and social distancing throughout the store. I think they're getting ready to, if they have not already getting ready to make aisles one way to help with social distancing. Some have started using styrene signage that is a suspended from shelving to indicate what direction you're supposed to be going in. Others are using floor decals like you see there. Most of your floor decals have been user registers to help with spacing out customers while they wait to check out.
We've also done sidewalk signage for restaurants to help promote the fact that they are open for takeout and delivery, that they're not closed.
How has your traditional repro work been affected by the crisis?
We've got several large retail customers, some of which have had massive furloughs. A lot of funding has been frozen projects have been delayed or canceled. We have been working modified shifts or modified hours on our small format [division]. We're really seeing that business take a hit over the last month. I believe we've been on a four-hour work day with them now for two weeks.
Our large format, which is the flatbeds to larger graphics, we've seen a hit there, but we are utilizing the equipment from that division to do these Plexiglas sneeze guards and face shields and things of that nature.
The construction business has been pretty consistent. Your traditional bond printing. We've only seen a couple of our seven locations really have a hiccup, and that was really only for about a week or week and a half, and they've bounced back and are actually thriving now.
You mentioned that you can provide safety supplies for resale to other repro firms. Tell us about that.
We are wanting to offer you guys that are strictly reprographics that don't do anything else, the ability to utilize us as a resource for the safety goods. And if you can get your existing construction or AEC customers, if they are interested in purchasing that stuff, we'll be happy to sell you the face masks, face shields, sneeze guards, if that's something of interest, banners, decals, anything that you guys might need or your customers might need, we'll sell them at a discount so that you can make some profit and resell it. (Click here to read about Sharpe's offer to provide safety supplies to other repro shops.)
Ed Avis: Joseph, tell us what you recently learned.
Joseph Szobody: I just wanted to pipe in perhaps with yet another success story, an opportunity that we have really seen explode over the past two weeks, and that is electronic bidding with public agencies.
Now, if the words electronic bidding make you break out in a cold sweat, you're not alone. It probably evokes a lot of images of complicated public bid law and a ton of liability and you would not be wrong. But we have been spending the past few weeks absorbing a lot of that process.
We're having cities and various states calling us up, basically telling us that they are frantically trying to figure out how to move a bid process to the web since they cannot have in-person bid opening meetings at city hall for obvious reasons. And they can't just have bidders email those documents because that violates all kinds of public bid law. Those have to be sealed. So they're looking for a platform that helps them manage a secure sealed bid process.
We have actually had a component of the planning that's done that for the past few years, but it's been on the back burner, and we have now re-diverted pretty much all of our development efforts very quickly into building out a suite of tools for secure, sealed electronic bidding.
So we're working with our reprographers to set up these secure electronic bidding capabilities on their planning that they can then turn around and provide to the public entities as a service, that's a chargeable service, but even more importantly as a service that's growing their client base of public entities, cities, school districts, even park districts, water and sewer divisions, you name it. It's driving projects into the hands of some of our reprographers that didn't previously work with those agencies, which subsequently is producing print orders and a whole lot of download revenue, not to mention just the chargeable item itself for the electronic bid capabilities.
So if that's of any interest to you, give me a ring or drop me an email, joseph@reproconnect.com and we can chat about that.