Kathryn McDaniel had to face the facts: If she didn’t revolutionize her business, it was going to die. Here’s what she did next.
Every industry changes as technology develops and consumer expectations shift. It leaves entrepreneurs with a choice: adapt to meet customer expectations or risk failure.
That’s where Kathryn McDaniel found herself about eight years ago. Her family’s traditional commercial print shop, ColorMark, had been hit by the economic downturn.
Marketing departments had less money for flashy brochures and direct mail campaigns, so they ordered less. Many thought it would pass.
McDaniel knew better. She paused to do something that many entrepreneurs believe they’re too busy to do. She took a hard look at the business model. She put pen to paper and realized that if she didn’t make changes—revolutionary changes—ColorMark would be out of business soon.
“I had to look for something that was new and unique to keep us on the forefront,” she said.
It led her to launch tech-savvy MEDiAHEAD, a digital printing firm with a data-driven marketing approach that has flourished in just a few years, thanks largely to McDaniel’s forward thinking.
Within the first year of business, the company hit 1,000 percent growth—no easy feat.
A lot of businesses talk about the concept of innovating, but McDaniel has taken that concept to a completely different level, said Cindy Reynolds, the owner of Somerset Ridge Vineyard & Winery and a MEDiAHEAD client.
“For her, it’s been a constant state of innovation,” Reynolds said. “Not only innovation in her business going from ColorMark to MEDiAHEAD and to what that’s all about—different type of clients, different types of technology, different type of thinking, different type of training of your employees. I mean it’s about complete innovation and reinvention.”
Only What You Need, Right When You Want It
MEDiAHEAD still offers traditional litho printing, but McDaniel has tipped the idea of commercial printing on its head to tap into a data-driven field that goes well beyond basic printing. The firm offers the tools to launch targeted marketing services, mailing services and fulfillment.
One of the biggest innovations is that MEDiAHEAD creates specially tailored IT portals for all its clients. This allows customers to order marketing products—stationery, business cards, fliers and brochures, promotional items—on demand and in small batches rather than bulk.
The portal is available online to anyone at a company, so the rank and file can order their own business cards or access approved marketing material rather than add another layer of busy work to someone’s plate.
“It’s very easy to navigate for your average person,” McDaniel said.
Larger competitors offer similar services, but they haven’t been able to provide the easy navigation and personalized service that is essential to MEDiAHEAD’s brand. When businesses like The Buckle need to order birthday postcards, they can use the portal to make a fast shipment.
McDaniel has also radically altered shipping and delivery speed.
“We ship everything in 48 hours, which is certainly not the case in the printing business,” she said. “And then you have brand consistency wherever you are in the country or the world. So the marketing department out in Seattle is using the same colors and the same disclaimer that the administrative assistant in South Carolina is using.”
A Customer For Life
ColorMark was making good money printing mountains of paper for companies. But much of it, McDaniel knows, was never used.
When she launched MEDiAHEAD, McDaniel started going to customers and explaining that they didn’t need to order brochures by the tens of thousands. They could get much stronger responses if they used personalized, targeted mailings.
This was a big risk—she was essentially telling her customers to buy less.
But McDaniel knew it was only a matter of time before a competitor told them the same thing. Or before a C-suite administrator asked why the marketing department was wasting money on unused materials during an economic crisis.
“People had warehouses full of print that was obsolete in three months or the next day,” she said.
She knows because she’s walked into businesses and viewed closets filled with expensive color brochures and pamphlets. She watched her clients shower customers with direct mail without ever stopping to track the success.
So McDaniel started asking clients more questions. She began to track the response of marketing campaigns. She started to apply predictive analytics to ensure her clients targeted the right people.
She cringed when she discovered that the YMCA dropped 900,000 postcards in the mail around the New Year to drum up new sales.
“There was a much better way to do this,” she said.
McDaniel researched the success rate and used predictive analytics to determine likely customers. She told the Y to send about 220,000 postcards instead.
“Everybody was freaked out about that,” she said. “You can imagine.”
But they tracked it and determined that the campaign had five times the response of the previous one, she said.
“Then you have a customer for life,” she said.
McDaniel said the changes save her average client about 25 to 30 percent.
Printing With Purpose
MEDiAHEAD still handles “a ton” of printing, both litho and digital. But MEDiAHEAD works with companies to help them determine what products they need. Companies have to think about how they’re using marketing material. It also forces them to consider when it’s appropriate to print and when it’s appropriate to send a PDF by email.
“You don’t have to print it,” she tells customers. “And we don’t have to produce everything that’s on the (portal) system. If a client has a vendor that they like for signage or T-shirts or even printing, we can tie into that vendor with these systems that we’re building.”
MEDiAHEAD helped to transform how one client orders its marketing brochures and material. The firm had been printing bundles of beautiful color brochures that were stuffed in closets and under desks.
Yet in some cases, field staff at satellite offices across the country didn’t even know the brochures existed and were reinventing the wheel. Messages had become so jumbled that one satellite office was ordering marketing with the old logo.
“When you spend this much money on a brand, you really want to preserve that,” McDaniel said. “Brand consistency is very, very important to a lot of big companies.”
These days, when McDaniel discovers that a client has mountains of paperwork stuffed in closets, she offers to store it in her MEDiAHEAD warehouse, which is filled with marketing supplies for nearly every trade and industry. Clients use the IT portal to order what they need when they need it.
‘She’s A Survivor’
If it all sounds easy, then think again. Transitioning from litho print to a data-driven marketing approach was monumental.
“I always likened it to turning a cruise ship, but really what we did was jump off a cliff,” McDaniel said.
She can laugh about it these days. But it was emotionally and physically taxing.
McDaniel and her ex-husband had worked together at ColorMark for more than 10 years after divorcing, but eventually decided to split professionally, too. He wanted to continue with a traditional litho print shop under the ColorMark name, while she wanted to pursue a more data-driven approach in MEDiAHEAD, which opened in 2012. They divvied up employees and equipment.
MEDiAHEAD has flourished, but ColorMark went out of business, McDaniel said. She had to help close out the old company, including the layoffs.
She describes the process as a nightmare. But it strengthened her resolve to keep MEDiAHEAD alive.
“She’s a survivor,” Reynolds said. “And people don’t know how much it takes to truly run a business and make payroll and innovate and be the best at what you do. They have no idea going in, or else you could probably never do it. Once you’re in, the survivors find themselves, and it’s an amazing thing to watch.”
The experience created a strong bond between McDaniel and her MEDiAHEAD employees.
And that bond is something that clients readily see.
“You can tell when you walk in the building that these people are a team and they respect her. She obviously cares very deeply about them,” said Amy Wilkinson, a national program manager at HNTB.
HNTB has been a customer of ColorMark and then MEDiAHEAD for 25 years. The relationship continues, Wilkinson said, not just because McDaniel is a good person, but because she is constantly generating new solutions. Wilkinson remembers that McDaniel was pushing technology long before any national firm.
“(McDaniel) quoted us on one job where she saved us thousands of dollars,” Wilkinson said. “She found a different way to do it. She didn’t have to do that. She could have done it the old way and made a buck or two, but she doesn’t.
“She really takes time to look at the customer and what truly is best for them, and I think that’s why she has such a good following.”
