When he opened his little printing shop 14 years ago, Harry V. Quadracci relied on big printers in Milwaukee and Chicago for business. ”I was sort of the printer`s printer taking in the overflow printing that the big companies couldn`t handle,” Quadracci said.
The only promising account Quadracci had on his own was Fishing Facts, a magazine published in nearby Menomonee Falls liberally laced with colorful ads for fishing lures, rods, reels and bass boats. Then, the 10 employees and one press at Quad/Graphics printed 200,000 copies of Fishing Facts a month.
Today, a fleet of white Quad/Graphics semitrailer trucks crisscross America, delivering 60 million magazines a month. In addition to Fishing Facts, the magazines include MAD, Playboy, Harper`s, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Ms., Black Enterprise and about 90 others. Quad/Graphics is the only printer to produce all three news weeklies–Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report–and brought in a new contract every 11 days last year.
Many of those accounts were once held by the Chicago and Milwaukee printers that helped Quad/Graphics in its lean years, but Quadracci never will tell you that he set out to raid his competitors` accounts. He won the publishers by printing parts of their magazines and working to gain their total commitment to what he calls his kind of quality printing.
”It is the way that our management and staff have worked together that has brought us results,” said Quadracci. ”Together we have learned the cutting edge of technology that sets us apart in the graphics arts industry. We have achieved extraordinary results from ordinary people.”
So it was with some justification that Wisconsin Gov. Anthony Earl, in his Feb. 3 State of the State address in Madison, singled out Quadracci and Quad/Graphics as one of Wisconsin`s biggest success stories.
”Three years ago, Quad/Graphics had one plant in Wisconsin employing 700 people. Today there are three plants employing 1,700 people with an additional 700 jobs projected over the next year,” said Earl. ”Harry Quadracci has succeeded through innovation, vision, ambition and a little help from the state.”
Quadracci was a lawyer. He went to Columbia University Law School and for a while was general manager for W.A. Krueger Co., a commercial printer his father helped found. Labor strife there convinced Quadracci, now 49, to go into the graphics arts industry on his own.
He took a second mortgage on his house, borrowed $800,000 from 15 investors and raised another $500,000 in venture capital to found the company, which now goes through 24 miles of paper a day. Its state-of-the-art Harris web offset presses never stop.
There`s more to Quad/Graphics, however, than bare bones sales figures and statistics abount paper and ink consumed. The company also is a good place to work, say experts who chronicle life in the workplace.
In 1984, the Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. ranked Quad/Graphics beside Delta Air Lines, Eastman Kodak Co., Mary Kay Cosmetics Inc. and Citicorp among the 100 best places in America to work. Addison-Wesley credits Quadracci, saying: ”He expounds his thinking to other partners in `Think Small`
seminars. Chief among his notions is an aversion to organizational charts, job descriptions, time clocks and committing policies and procedures to paper. Communications with employees should be `personal, vocal and spontaneous.` ” There are no unions at Quad/Graphics, with plants in Pewaukee and nearby Sussex and Lomira, and Saratoga Springs, N.Y.. Nor are there fancy job titles. Employees are managers or staff, and each wears identical dark blue shirts and slacks while working in the plant. They work 12-hour shifts, three days one week and four the next. There are two shifts a day.
Each new employee goes through 10-weeks of school to learn job skills and get acquainted with company policies and expectations.
A staff member can expect to earn ”in excess of $20,000 a year” after two years and receive another $7,000 annually in benefits, Quadracci said. Last year`s payroll was more than $36 million.
The company maintains Camp Quad, a 40-acre retreat for employees, and a day-care center and has physical fitness programs, counselors and employee profit sharing among its benefits.
The name of the game at Quad/Graphics is productivity. On any work day, few idlers are seen as millions of copies of Newsweek, Bicycle Rider, Harper`s and MAD roll through the presses at 2,000 feet per minute. No Quad/Graphics press is older than five years. Quad/Tech, 1 of 11 company divisions, designs, builds and maintains much of the internal mechanism needed in the highly automated plants.
Quad`s presses print a standard 8 1/2-by-10 7/8-inch format, the size of Time magazine. ”That`s how we zeroed in on the magazine industry since day 1,” said Quadracci. ”We developed a standard size in a job shop industry where every job used to be a different size. To a certain extent, I think we influenced the standardization of size in magazines. Standard sizes have cut production costs.”
That standard size may change again, however, as new presses at Quad/
Graphics turn out a 10 1/2-inch-long page. That will save publishers 8 percent annually in postage and paper costs, though it won`t be noticeable to the reader or reduce editorial content, Quadracci said.
”For the publisher on a monthly cycle, it will be like getting one issue a year printed free.”
For 15 consecutive years, Quad/Graphics has increased sales volume at least 50 percent every year. It`s growing so fast that one division is a construction company to build plants. With the acquisition of John Blair & Co., which produces millions of newspaper coupon inserts each month, Quadracci expects company sales to exceed $300 million this year.
New, high-volume web offset presses soon will enable Quad/Graphics to go after some big national catalogue contracts. About a quarter of the company`s business is in catalogues; the rest in magazines.
With 6 million copies printed a month, Playboy is Quad/Graphics` biggest account. The magazine had been printed by W.F. Hall Printing Co. in Chicago, which at the end of 1985 became part of Krueger-Ringier Inc.
