McNeal Graphics

Clarity is an important quality of an excellent print job. The kind of eye-popping projects that draw people from across a room are the result of the concerted effort of all involved. Just as the ink must be properly aligned on the substrate to ensure clarity in a given piece, the wants and needs of the manufacturer, distributor and client must also be properly aligned to ensure clarity in the focus and content of a commercial print job. What can distributors do to ensure they act as the best possible conduit for information and help their clients to produce the products exactly as desired? To help

Rank: 1 Company: WorkflowOne, Dayton, Ohio Sales $(000): 1,000,000 Principal Officer(s): Greg Mosher, Chairman, CEO Locations: 150 Rank: 2 Company: Proforma, Cleveland Sales $(000): 293,000 Principal Officer(s): Greg Muzzillo, Founder, Co-CEO; Vera Muzzillo, Co-CEO Locations: 650 Rank: 3 Company: American Solutions for Business, Glenwood, Minn. Sales $(000): 239,776 Principal Officer(s): Larry Zavadil, President Locations: 410 Rank: 4 Company: GBS, North Canton, Ohio Sales $(000): 90,143 Principal Officer(s): Eugene Calabria, President, CEO Locations: 12 Rank: 5 Company: Merrill Corp., Monroe, Wash. Sales $(000): 83,950 Principal Officer(s): Mark Rossi, President Locations: 6 Rank: 6 Company: The Shamrock Companies, Westlake, Ohio Sales

Plenty of work and wealth keeps the commercial print market strong. When it comes to paper-based products, commercial printing may be one of the most stable products in the forms industry. Ranking second only to forms in a recent survey conducted by BFL&S, commercial printing accounts for 22.3 percent of our Top 100 Distributors' sales. This is because the market for colorful, full-process print work continues to be infinite. At least, that is what several distributors, whose commercial printing sales account for a large percentage of their revenue, are saying. But will the market for commercial print remain strong? Andrew Duke, co-owner of

Distributors report that the rewards far outweigh the hassles when promoting commercial printing. It's about time for distributors to sell commercial printing—literally. The time and energy spent turning around a commercial printing job are much greater than that involved with traditional products, but then so are the rewards. Of those who ranked among BFL&S' Top 100 Distributors this year, 22 percent sell commercial printing. Here, three of them discuss their transitions into this market and how it differs from working with traditional products. Repeating Business When Janis McNeal left her employer in 1987 to establish her own distributorship, she agreed not to

Industry professionals talk about the reasons and the results behind their interactive Web sites. Make no mistake. The World Wide Web has become the impetus behind greater business communication. And, although the initial incorporation of the Internet into daily business practices can be long, tedious and quite expensive, many distributors are more than willing to foot the e-commerce bill in return for e-business potential. Interactive Web sites that allow customers to in-put and retrieve information on the status of their orders, as well as communicate with distributors, are proving to be efficient tools that should eventually level out upfront costs. To find out