Brooklyn's Progress
February/March 2008

BY JILL D’AMICO

It takes more than just luck to keep your small business running for a decade – just ask Eugene Lee, CEO of Rolling Press, a small, “green” printing press located in Park Slope. He learned a lot of the business by doing it, and wasn’t afraid to take risks along the way. In a Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce Small Business Seminar held on Nov. 27, 2007, Mr. Lee explained the lessons learned over the past 10 years. The format of the seminar was a live interview, conducted by Small Business Management Consulting principal Alan Siege.

Lesson No. 1: You can’t satisfy everyone
Mr. Lee had graduated and taken the reins of his father’s printing press when the adventure began. He immediately set out to attract new customers and work by taking on as many projects and clients as he could. He never said “no” and subsequently, had to deal with scheduling problems with his printers changing for drastically different jobs. As the orders poured in, however, he noticed he wasn’t making a profit.

“I was trying to satisfy everyone,” explained Mr. Lee, “A proven formula for failure.”

He deferred to QuickBooks to learn more about his client base and the problem quickly showed itself – about 20% of his clients were making up 80% of his revenues. He called upon the advice of management guru Peter Drucker, and figured he could easily serve those 20% better if he eased out the other 80% from his client roster.

“To truly diversify, you have to provide many services for few or few services for many,” said Mr. Lee.

Lesson No. 2: Invest in your business
Printing, as a business, has a high overhead and mistakes are costly. Mr. Lee admitted he trusted people a lot at first, billed late, and let accounts go 60, 90, even 120 days overdue. Once he started thinning out his business, things changed. He found that when he called up and asked for the money, he got paid. Easy as that!

Personally, Mr. Lee had also been maxing out his credit cards to bring cash flow in. He managed to curb a lot of personal expenses and reinvested in his own business. “The foundation created is strong enough to pay you back later,” he advised.

Lesson No. 3: Change can be good
Mr. Lee’s reinvestment led to an entirely new business model for Rolling Press.

There was one personal belief Mr. Lee refused to change – his commitment to environmentally friendly printing. Printing, he pointed out, is one of the most noxious processes and he felt like he was putting his and his employee’s lives at risk as well as damaging the earth.

Mr. Lee was first sold on green printing in the early 2000’s but found customers wary of the new technology. “People didn’t know enough about it and thought it would be inferior or cost more,” he said.

He said he actually lost some business at first and decided to downplay that his was an environmentally clean printing process. Eventually, the idea caught like wildfire, spurred by the recent “green” trends and even Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” Mr. Lee was back in business.

Lesson No. 4: Let others take the reins
One of the most challenging things for a small business owner is hiring – for Mr. Lee, he based “51% on personality,” even if it wasn’t a foolproof method.

Mr. Lee said delegating was another lesson learned the hard way, and he was swamped with work until he started small. He applied that 80/20 maxim to his e-mails – another employee would be more than capable to answer 80% of them. He stopped giving his personal e-mail to clients and let others pick up tasks he used to do himself. He admitted that he is still working on delegating to this day.

Lesson No. 5: Get out of the office
With some of his newfound freedom, Mr. Lee started to seek out new clients via social networking. He joined a sustainability social networking and designer “meet-up” group. He surrounded himself with the social and civic organizations that he wanted to work with, and find work he did.

“I found networking more useful than advertising in a magazine,” he said.
 
Lesson No. 6: Prepare for the inevitable stumble
Part of all the work Mr. Lee did on his business was to cushion the blow you never see coming. One afternoon, with one phone call, he lost 40% of his business. Luckily, he was prepared from having diversified his clientele, and the promise of more on the horizon.

“I transitioned from many services to few to few services for many – luckily I had enough diversity from that transition to weather the loss, and found a good number of clients to fill the void."

To find out more about Brooklyn Chamber seminars, or to inquire about presenting at one, please contact Special Events Director Maggie Beaute-Lucien at 718-875-1000 ext. 105, or at mlucien@brooklynchamber.com.