Gilbert Guzman
By Ed Avis
Pope Reproduction and Supply in Amarillo, Texas recently joined APDSP. But actually the company was a member of IRgA many years ago, so it’s kind of a homecoming for Gilbert Guzman, the company’s owner.
“We were members long ago but kind of lost track of the association,” Guzman says. “I thought it was time to see what’s going on in the repro world again.”
The roots of Pope Reproduction go back to 1956, when it was called Pope Photo Records, Inc. Guzman was working for a competing company in the late 1960s when he learned that Pope was for sale.
“I was very unhappy where I was, so when I found out they wanted to sell, I inquired,” he remembers. “But they wanted a whole lot of money for it.”
Guzman went to the bank and was turned down for a loan, but a week or so later a friend in the printing business offered to buy the company and make Guzman part owner.
“He said, ‘I’ll buy the company and you give you a percentage and we’ll go from there,’” Guzman says. “So he put up the money but was never active in the business.”
By the late 1970s Guzman decided he wanted to own the whole business. His partner
was taking money out but not otherwise involved, so Guzman offered to buy him out. It took him a decade to pay off his partner, but by 1988 the company was his.
“Then I could make my own mistakes,” Guzman laughs. “It was a lot of hard work, and lot of sales. I used to travel all over the Panhandle. But I really got lucky finding some clients who otherwise wouldn’t have found me.”
For example, Guzman remembers driving home from a sales call in Oklahoma when he pulled off the highway in the small town of Hooker, Oklahoma to buy a Coke. As he was leaving the grocery store he noticed an architect’s sign on the building across the street.
“I walked over and the architect said, ‘No one ever comes to see me here. I do all my business in Oklahoma City,’” Guzman says. “So he became a customer of mine from then on, until he retired. Now I’m doing business with second and third generation architects and contractors.”
The business was all diazo in those days. In early ‘90s Guzman jumped into plain paper with a system from C4 Imaging that output three D-size copies per minute. He remembers one day soon afterwards that he got a call from someone at Texas Tech University in Lubbock who needed 50 copies of a large set of drawings, plus 50 more at half size, for a new health sciences center they were building.
“He said, ‘How long will it take?’ I said I have no idea. But he gave me the job,” Guzman remembers. “We worked nine days around the clock to produce that job. Now we have two KIP 9000s, and could have done that job in a day and a half with no overtime!”
Guzman is devoted to KIP products, and he’s a KIP dealer. He has five KIP printers, including two that print in color. He sees color as the future of his market.
“The architects are starting to come around to color,” he says. “We’ll get a file from an architect, and he’ll say that such-and-such drawing must be printed in color. But then the general contractor will say he wants it all black-and-white to save money. We say, ‘The architect says it’s in color, and that’s how it has to be.’ You have a $40 to $50 million job they’re building, and the general wants to cut their print budget? What percentage of the budget could that possibly be?”
The AEC market is still Guzman’s bread and butter, but he’s also working to stay up with the times. In addition to printing in color, he says he’ll be attending the APDSP convention in Las Vegas in October to network and learn what’s new, including social media.
“We understand younger people are all into social media,” he says. “We’re trying to figure all of that out.”