Company Profile: Commercial Printing Powered by AlphaGraphics

AlphaGraphics of Downtown Raleigh’s recent acquisition of 120-year-old Commercial Printing Company (CPC) not only bridges three centuries but creates synergies that will bring North Carolina’s printing industry to the next level for decades to come.

“The opportunity just arose from our two families,” explained Chris Andrews, VP of Sales for AlphaGraphics of New Bern. “We’ve known of the Moores and Commercial Printing Company for a very long time. It’s the oldest printer in North Carolina, and it just seemed like a natural fit. We have a new franchise with a lot of digital design and cutting-edge experience pitching one [set of] things, but we needed to follow it up with traditional expertise with the legacy printing.”

It was Andrews and his people who initially approached CPC. “A mutual acquaintance put our ownership group together with [principal owner] Ralph Moore, and that’s how it went down.” Moore remains onboard to ease the transition and handle several of his long-time accounts. Andrews’ co-franchisee, Michael Linden, serves as operations VP.

CPC was the larger of the two firms, with more than 400 customers in the Raleigh community to AlphaGraphics’ 100 to 150. The deal took nearly four months to broker. The combined companies, Commercial Printing Powered by AlphaGraphics, represent more than 200 years of experience and a deeply rooted commitment to the printing industry and to the state of North Carolina.

The company and its 25 employees now operate from a single 11,000-sq.-ft. facility. Salt Lake City, UT-based franchisor AlphaGraphics has more than 260 locations in the United States, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom.

Need To Partner

The merger filled several needs. “We were growing very quickly as an AlphaGraphics franchise in downtown Raleigh, which is a very quickly expanding business market,” noted Andrews. “We needed to partner with a printer with great traditional and legacy in offset, and had a little digital and a great staff. The most important thing we needed was personnel.”

The synergy was apparent to all, Andrews said. “We saw what has traditionally worked with CPC and what AlphaGraphics as a franchise network is geared towards, and the two really complement each other in terms of optimizing what we can offer a customer.” While CPC’s strengths include offset print, forms, finishing, folding, inventory fulfillment and mailing, AlphaGraphics is more focused on digital design, variable-data digital printing, dimensional mailing, and large format. “Now,” he added, “we can go to the customer and say, ‘You’ve been doing this with Company A, we can do so much more because we’ve acquired Company B.’ And vice versa.”

Linden commented, “AlphaGraphics’ expertise in marketing communications will enable Commercial Printing Company to deliver a more diverse product offering as both companies expand their marketshare under this new association.”

“They are very good at associations, universities, and state government,” Andrews said. “What we were really focusing in were small to medium-sized businesses; less the more institutional stuff they were doing and more of the business marketplace.”

The companies’ equipment packages also were complementary, noted Andrews. The newly merged firm features three offset presses, including a Heidelberg fou-color perfecctor with tower coater, and a Konica Minolta bizhub C8000 digital press. "We are in the contract phase of adding a new high-speed, black-and-white and full-color digital box," he reported in late November. “We’re also going to bring in our large-format equipment.”

Andrews has been looking forward to going multichannel with more of his clients. “We’d like to be able to offer multichannel marketing that goes from the things that CPC is good at and keep that brand consistency all across. We want to be all-encompassing and really consultative for all of our clients. We have some ideas we really want to go after, but first we have to be seen as experts in our field to our customers, otherwise we’re just coming in and pitching things that they might not think we know about.”

Roaring in Raleigh

The local economy should cooperate with the hoped-for expansion.

The business climate in Raleigh “really is roaring,” according to Andrews. “If you look at any of the statistics that come out in any of the business publications, Raleigh is by far the most consistent. We are near the top in fastest-growth city, highest paying jobs, and for small business job growth. I have lived here all my life, and I have never quite had the sense that it’s growing as much as I do now. There’s just a buzz around the city that really I’ve never even seen before.”

The primary mission for 2015 will be growth within the firm’s current customer base. “We absolutely will be looking for new business,” Andrews promised, “but the thing right now is telling our existing customers what the increased capabilities are. We will do both concurrently, but the main focus is more from present customers. We won’t be looking in too many new areas. I feel like we’ve got these different industries under our belts, and we just need to look more heavily at them.”

Additional acquisitions are a definite possibility. “We are always looking for a good fit for us,” Andrews said. “What that might be next would be a large-format printer, and with that you need installers and the equipment. Really, to invest in great large-format equipment you need the business to justify it, and so that would be what we would look at next.” And that could be as soon as the first quarter of this new year.