Up and .coming: Livingston business, Printing for Less finds success on the Internet

LIVINGSTON — On March 4, 1999, America was in thrall to the Internet.

The NASDAQ seemed unstoppable. Investors were pouring money into any company with ".com" on the end of its name. High-tech CEOs were hailed as national heroes.

Jacob Goldstein Chronicle staff writer

And Express Color Printing, the Livingston print shop that employed fewer than a dozen people, launched a modest Web site called printingforless.com http://www.printingforless.com

At a time when Internet companies were promising to change the very nature of society, the idea behind Printing for Less was astonishingly simple — use the Internet to sell business cards and brochures to small and mid-size companies.

Four years later, the Internet bust has driven into bankruptcy many of the companies that promised to change the world; most of those that have survived have dramatically cut back on both work force and ambition.

Meanwhile, Printing for Less — PFL to its employees — has steadily grown to a staff of more than 60 people, and its revenues have increased from less than $1 million in 1999 to more than $7 million last year.

The company has printed full-color catalogs, brochures and business cards to thousands of customers in all 50 states, according to Jeff Batton, PFL’s director of marketing.

Andrew Field, the company’s founder and CEO, boasts that PFL is able "to bring New York and California dollars into Montana … and we don’t have to take up a lot of space or pollute the air."

From the outside, PFL still looks like a low-key print shop — a nondescript building covered in cheap brown siding on Geyser Street, just off Main Street in Livingston.

Inside, there is the sense of a place constantly under construction.

At the top of a flight of unfinished stairs, the computer guys work in a room the size of a large closet. A few feet away, some 20 people are shoehorned into a slope-roofed room that might make a nice apartment for a college student.

The seating arrangement in the room looks more improvised than organized — two open clusters of workers, separated by a thin partition.

The room is a sea of computer monitors — three for each person. Some of the employees are talking on hands-free phones, others are tapping on keyboards.

Downstairs, much of the floor space is dedicated to the shop where the actual printing takes place. A smallish room with a single, tiny window serves as Field’s office. Just behind the building, a trailer — "north campus" to those in the know — provides overflow office space.

Field is smart, pushy and a bit manic, as might be expected of the founder of a successful Internet business. But, unlike many entrepreneurs, he asserts that the story of his company is about more than him.

He attributes PFL’s success to the staff, which he calls "a bunch of nice, highly competent, highly technically oriented people."

"People in Park County have a right to jobs that pay more than $7 an hour," Field says. Most PFL employees make at least $40,000 a year, according to Batton.

PFL hovers near profitability, but has raised about $1.5 million in venture capital to allow for faster growth. In the last round of financing, which closed in December, the company was valued at $20 million, Batton says.

Field and his wife Victoria still own a majority of PFL, and 20 percent of the company’s equity has been set aside for employees.

The small and mid-size business segment of the national commercial printing market is worth about $12 billion a year, and Batton sketched out a long-term goal of growing PFL into a $100 million-a-year business.

He says taking the company public is "our pie-in-the-sky goal," and calls acquisition by a larger company a "fallback position."

Jan Light, a 25-year veteran of the commercial printing industry who has worked at PFL since 1999, says he doesn’t think much about an IPO or acquisition — moves that could turn his equity in the company into a sizable wad of cash.

"I’ve put that into a corner of my mind, locked it up and thrown away the key," he says.

For Light, PFL has been a radical departure from other print shops.

"(At) most of them it’s just sort of business as usual: You do what you did last year," he says. "There’s no sense of that here.

"It’s a real inferno of a place sometimes," Light adds, describing the intensity of the working conditions.

But he seems glad for the experience, and expresses no regrets about taking a job at the company nearly four years ago.

"There’s no reason not to take a brass ring when it’s handed to you," he says.

http://bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2003/02/23/news/econbzbigs.txt