By Ed Avis
Reprographics firms are often family-owned, and these days it’s usually the second or third generation that is in charge. But every once in a while, someone comes into the field from the outside, with zero experience. That was the case when Dan Lienemann and his wife Wanda bought Des Moines Photocopy Co. in 1994.
Dan was an accountant for an oil firm in Houston and Wanda was a paralegal for a top lawyer at the time. The couple was newly married and drawing up plans for their future. Dan was from Lincoln, Nebraska and wanted to raise their future family in the Midwest.
“My wife was a native Houstonian, and I don’t think she thought I was serious about moving to the Midwest,” Dan says. “But I called my dad, who owned a CPA firm in Lincoln, and said, ‘I know you have a lot of contacts. If you hear of anyone looking to hire or expand their operations, can you let me know.’”
Two weeks later, Dan’s dad, Del Lienemann, Sr., called with a proposal. One of his clients, the owner of Des Moines Photocopy Co., wanted to sell her business. His dad had done the accounting for the business for 35 years and it always made a decent profit, despite the fact that the owner was running the business from Lincoln. Del knew the books of the company intimately and suggested that having on-site ownership could spur the company to an even better financial position.
“So, my wife and I quit our jobs in Texas and moved to Iowa where neither of us had any family, to take over a printing company that we had no idea how to run!” Dan says.
Dan and Wanda took over in January 1994 and began learning the business by trial and error. The five existing employees showed them the ropes and helped them understand how everything works. It was, as Dan describes it, “on-the-job training for the owner.”
Des Moines Photocopy Co. was your basic blueprint firm at that time. Diazo printers dominated the workspace, and a used Xerox 2080 was the only plain paper copier. There were no computers – invoices were all handwritten and the discounts for each customer were kept in a Rolodex.
“My wife and I had worked for much bigger companies, so this was like going back in time,” Dan says. “Because I knew we would be vulnerable if a key employee with a lot of knowledge left, we purchased a POS system from MV Software and started the process of automating accounts payable, accounts receivable, inventory, etc. Our first big purchase was to trade in the 2080 for a used 5080, and that was a huge purchase for us.”
Eventually the young couple got into the groove of the business. They changed the name to Action Reprographics in approximately 2002. Around the same time they dipped their toes into the color business with a Roland inkjet printer. At that time, they focused the color work on their existing AEC clients, such as architects who ordered color renderings for proposals. They also had transitioned out of the diazo business; they relied on several KIP plain paper copiers to handle their plan printing.
They also joined the RSA around that time, which Dan credits as being essential to the growth and success of their business, due to the education, support and advice fellow members provided. He is currently serving as the vice president of the RSA and will transition to president in 2024.
The recession that rocked the reprographics industry in 2008/09 took longer to affect Des Moines. In fact, Dan remembers several “monster jobs” around that time that required them to run double shifts and which brought in extra revenue. They used those extra funds to diversify and take their business in a new direction.
“We were hearing at RSA meetings that repro work was slowing down,” Dan says. “We knew we needed to do something other than just reinvest in more repro equipment, and wide format color was really being talked about by a lot of RSA companies. So, we invested in color. It was literally like ‘the Field of Dreams’ – build it and they will come.”
They bought an Arizona 550 GT flatbed printer, a Zund cutter, a larger Roland inkjet printer, and a GBC laminator. They put all that equipment into a new space they rented and created a new name for that division – Vital Signs Display Graphics. Their tagline is “We bring your color images to life.”
“We opened Vital Signs in 2011, and one of the first customers we ended up getting was 3M,” Dan says. “We did small packaging for them, oddball stuff, when they only needed 200 boxes. Their bigger printers required a minimum run of 20,000, so we were able to help them with their smaller projects. Doing work for 3M really legitimized Vital Signs in the eyes of the public and those projects helped us learn the equipment and push our own limits.”
The move into wide format color proved to be essential to the company’s future success. Before 2011, gross sales of the business were almost entirely made up from traditional reprographics. Today the company’s revenue has almost tripled what it was then, with 65 percent now coming from the Vital Signs Display Graphics division. They now have 11 employees.
Dan says another key to the company’s success – in both traditional and color work – is that they try to stay up on technology: “In the last three years basically every piece of equipment is brand new,” he says. Today on the traditional side of the business the company has two Pagewide 8000s, several small-format Canon printers, and a Contex HD Ultra scanner. And The Vital Signs division has an HP R2000 flatbed printer, an HP Latex 800W printer, and a Colorado 1650. They still use the Zund cutter they bought in 2010, but they’ve added all the upgrades as they became available.
When COVID hit, the company was coming off its best year ever in 2019. “Then the bottom fell out,” Dan remembers. Printing COVID-related signage helped a bit, but it was still a rough period. They split their employees into two teams, and one worked at home while the other worked in the office for a week and then switched; this way if someone caught COVID, only half the staff would have to quarantine. They also brought in a Clorox industrial disinfectant system to clean each weekend. The precautions paid off -- no one caught COVID until mid-2021, when things had pretty much returned to normal.
Today construction has largely recovered in Des Moines, but the print volume remains down. Fortunately, the company makes some revenue from their ReproConnect digital planroom. They charge for posting the jobs, setting up files and digital downloads.
What does the future hold for the company?
“Probably the areas we are looking at is 3D scanning, and maybe purchasing a wide-format scanning device for artwork,” Dan says. “We’re always trying to stay informed and trying to understand how technology can benefit the company in the future.”