By Ed Avis
Tony Militano may be the most international president the International Reprographic Association has ever had. Militano, who will take over as president of IRgA on September 18, was born in Canada and still lives there. But he also has lived in Italy, his parents’ home country, and he hitch-hiked throughout the Pacific Rim in his younger days.
But that’s only part of Militano’s story. Over the past three decades he has built Carbon Copy Digital from a four-person repro company to a major western Canadian firm with three locations and 85 employees. He’s also a real estate investor and father of three sons. And now he’s about to become leader of IRgA.
“I love this business, and even after all these years, I’m still enjoying it,” Militano says.
International Pull
Militano’s parents immigrated to Winnipeg, Canada in the 1950s from two tiny villages near Reggio de Calabria in far southern Italy. Like many immigrants, they were seeking better opportunities. But the Militano family valued their Italian roots, and when Tony was 9 they sent him and his two sisters to Cosoleto, his mother’s hometown, to learn better Italian and soak up the culture for a couple of years.
“It was a real adjustment for me,” Militano remembers. “It was a very agricultural area – olives and grapes – and very poor. They called me ‘the Americano.’ They didn’t distinguish between Canadians and Americans. But it was a great experience.”
Militano’s next international adventure came more than a decade later. He had graduated from Red River College in Winnipeg, worked in the publishing business for a couple of years, and was a salesman at Riley’s Reproduction & Printing in Calgary when wanderlust struck.
“I wanted to travel the world,” he says. “So I left my job and hitch-hiked around the world for a year and a half.”
Militano’s journeying took him to Hawaii, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Hong Kong, and many other countries along the way. When the adventure ended he found his way back to Calgary. Riley’s welcomed him back.
“They just counted it as a leave of absence,” he remembers. It was perhaps an undramatic conclusion to a life-changing journey, but his return to Riley’s became an important step in his eventual career rise.
Reprographics Success
Militano enjoyed numerous promotions at Riley’s after his return, eventually reaching senior management. But after 14 years there, he decided his continued career success would be better served as a shop owner.
“I had some great mentors at Riley’s, and learned all about the reprographics business,” he says. “And in 2000 I started looking for an opportunity to own my own business.”
Tony Militano
Tony Militano
He discovered Carbon Copy Digital, a tiny firm in Calgary that had been started in 1979 by an interior designer. The original owner was running the business as a sideline and was ready to sell. Militano sensed possibilities and made the purchase.
“The timing was perfect. Economy was really starting to take off,” he says. “In three months I moved the business to a bigger location. Then I used my knowledge and contacts and started growing the business from within.”
Even 9/11 didn’t slow the firm’s growth. Militano says the economic downturn that followed that tragedy allowed him to acquire some small competing firms in Calgary. In 2002 he made a larger purchase – the Calgary office of IKON Business Solutions. IKON’s office was around the corner from Carbon Copy Digital, and Militano moved his growing firm into IKON’s space.
In Alberta, being a big player means having locations in Calgary and Edmonton, which is just 150 miles north of Calgary but has a substantially different business base. “Calgary is a Fortune 500 place, with a lot of head offices. Edmonton is more service-oriented, with a lot of government offices,” Militano says.
Carbon Copy Digital had Calgary clients with business in Edmonton, and those clients wanted Militano to open an office in that city. Furthermore, Militano knew that doing business in Edmonton would allow him to diversify his client base away from the energy industry – his mainstay in Calgary – to government services and other clients.
So in 2003 he bought a building in Edmonton and moved some key staff to that office. It was a smart move.
“Edmonton has been a huge success. The general manager I moved there originally still runs the operation,” Militano says.
The 2008 housing crash, which devastated reprographics businesses across North America, hurt Carbon Copy Digital’s business. But oil prices recovered more quickly than housing prices, so within six months Carbon Copy Digital was back to where it had been before the crash. In fact, in the year or so after the crash, Militano undertook a $3 million uplift of his Calgary office. They moved into the renovated space in 2010.
“We were lucky compared to most of North America,” he says. “In 2009, 10, and 11, when a lot of our peers were suffering, we were in really good shape because of oil.”
But the 2015 oil price crash has been more difficult to weather, Militano says. “What we’re going through now is much more drastic than 2008. But we’re surviving. We just focus on what we can control. Some people are saying this is a necessary cleansing; the cost of doing business, including labor, was getting out of line and expensive.”
Diversifying Business, Too
Traditional AEC work only makes up about one-third of Carbon Copy’s business these days, compared to about two-thirds in 2008. The difference is made up in a variety of other services, including signage and other large-format color work; scanning/archiving; mail services; and facilities management.
Militano envisions the latter becoming more important. “We have some unmanned FMs, mostly on cost-per-copy program,” he says. “It’s been very successful for us. As businesses on AEC side become more decentralized, and clients can do more from their office, I think that’s a growth market and opportunity for us.”
Militano has adopted some strategies from the non-AEC side to his AEC business. For example, summary invoicing – whereby the client receives an invoice with one total amount on the bottom rather than a detailed list of items – is common in non-AEC areas, and he has found that some AEC clients appreciate the simplicity of it.
“Doing it that way gets away from the commoditization of the business,” he says. “When a client looks at the total price and thinks, ‘That’s fair,’ he doesn’t get into the per-square-foot or per-sheet discussion. Outside of the AEC business that’s just how it is, and I’ve been trying to do it more with AEC, too.”
A Busy Man
Of course, Militano’s life doesn’t exist only in reprographics. He also is a real estate investor and dad to three boys, ages 9, 12, and 14. And he’s building a new house – his former house was destroyed in the 2013 flooding that ravaged Calgary.
“I’ve been blessed that the success of Carbon Copy has allowed me to get into the other businesses, and has helped me provide my family a good life,” he says. “And I’ve made some great friends in this industry.”
The in-coming president’s involvement in reprographics associations stretches back to his days at Riley’s, when he was a member of ReproCAD (later ReproMAX). He became involved in IRgA in 2005, and joined the board in 2008. As he ascends to the presidency, he says one of the biggest challenges he anticipates is the need for more young, up-and-coming leaders to get involved.
“You don’t see a lot of young talent coming forward,” he says. “They are out there, and we need to work on getting them involved and into leadership positions in the association. I’m confident they would find the involvement as worthwhile as I have.”