Mr. Magazine

Publishing During A Pandemic (13)

 “I think the magazines that have great content can really use it to their advantage now and everybody should really be, as an industry, pushing forward when we come out of this because marketers out there, consumers of content, are all going to be going through some sort of reset in behavior, whether they overtly know it or not. So you’ve got to be in front of everybody with why this is an important medium.” Joel Quadracci

 “I think it’s less about preparing for the actual “what happens,” and  more about having a communication style and network within the culture of your company. It allows for people to drop everything and shift gears rapidly. Quad’s a very strong culture. It’s a very non-hierarchical culture. I wear the same uniform that the people on the floor wear and I had already started doing video blogs a bit ago on and off, but now I’ve ramped it up because the technology has changed so much.” Joel Quadracci

Quad is an American printing company based in Sussex, Wisconsin. It was founded on July 13, 1971, by Harry and Elizabeth Quadracci. The company has 39 printing facilities in the United States, as well as facilities throughout Europe, Canada, and Latin America.

Joel Quadracci is Chairman, President and CEO of the company today and has been running the company during this tragic pandemic with bold, yet sure steps. Joel says that you cannot be afraid to be bold and fast and not scared to pull really tough levers early in a situation. As long as you’re honest and communication through all channels is open and key to the process, making resolute and often hard decisions comes a bit easier, especially when those decisions are based on the good of the company.

I spoke with Joel recently and we talked about a few of the decisions he’s had to make during this pandemic, especially when it comes to the importance of keeping his staff and employees safe and the company secure.

“There’s a lot of actions we’re taking and we’ve been very flexible in terms of not being scared to go there, maybe in some cases, a little bit too far, because you are going to the point it hurts. The future is unknown right now in this situation, so you just have to assume that the worst is happening and you don’t know how long it’s going to be with us, therefore err on the side of dealing with the crisis as it is and make really bold moves.”

A future that may be unknown indeed, but Quad is dealing with it boldly and surely.

So, please enjoy the 13th Mr. Magazine™ interview in the series of Publishing During A Pandemic with Joel Quadracci, Chairman, President and CEO, Quad.

But first the sound-bites:

On operating during a pandemic: I’ve had to tell a lot of people that for the next 12 weeks they were on furlough, because when an economy just quickly shuts down, people stop marketing. And the biggest hit so far has been on the retail side with retailers not doing retail inserts

On ensuring safety at the workplace: One of the latest things we’re doing to protect our employees is, now that the CDC wants our employees to wear masks, you can’t find them. Meanwhile in the last couple weeks, some of my people came up with their own prototype of a mask that we can do on a web press.

On the impact of the pandemic on printing: It’s sort of a mixed bag. I mean certainly it’s down, whether you are talking ad pages, or what we’re seeing is a lack of visibility because everyone’s trying to understand when the pandemic is going to end.

On any shortage in ink or paper: No, we haven’t had any problem there. As you know, we manufacture our own ink…

On whether you can ever prepare to such a crisis: I think it’s less about preparing for the actual “what happens,” and  more about having a communication style and network within the culture of your company.

On his message to staffers and customers: First of all, communication is key, not just to my internal staff, but what I’d really wish I could have more of from our customers right now is true communication.

On any additional words of wisdom: Just that, in disruptive times, at least in any kind of disruption I’ve ever seen, it has always been an opportunity for the world to rethink how they do things. In our case, how they use media. I’d say that people need to understand that as we come out of this, everyone’s going to be looking at how they should do things differently.

On what keeps him up at night: I think it’s sort of the obvious, the coronavirus, and the safety of my employees.

And now for the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Joel Quadracci, Chairman, President, and CEO of Quad printing company.

Samir Husni: Considering what is going on, how are you doing and how is Quad operating during this pandemic?

Joel Quadracci: Relative to what’s going on in the world, I’m doing pretty well personally. The company is very focused and doing a lot of things during a tough situation, but hanging in there.

We have done a lot of aggressive things and we have done a lot of them very early. I guess being in the printing industry you’re used to having to react to tough things. I think we’ve learned that you always want to get ahead of things and be aggressive. We obviously have never seen a situation like this, but we’ve dealt with situations where we had to react very quickly.

We actually started in February, pushing two thousand people, within a three day notice, to work from home. And part of that was because we wanted to start heeding the safety warnings as soon as possible. And we wanted to test our idea for structure, to see if it crashes with all these people working virtually. And it ended up working quite well. I think on average we have around 3,800 people working from home and we are using a lot of technology to do it. And it’s working very well.

I’ve had to tell a lot of people that for the next 12 weeks they were on furlough, because when an economy just quickly shuts down, people stop marketing. And the biggest hit so far has been on the retail side with retailers not doing retail inserts. Just look at all the department stores that had to close overnight. We knew that was coming, so we started getting ahead of it. We’ve actually furloughed a few plants as well, just shutting them down for a couple of weeks here and there, depending on the schedule, just to get the cost down.

There’s a lot of actions we’re taking and we’ve been very flexible in terms of not being scared to go there, maybe in some cases, a little bit too far, because you are going to the point it hurts. The future is unknown right now in this situation, so you just have to assume that the worst is happening and you don’t know how long it’s going to be with us, therefore err on the side of dealing with the crisis as it is and make really bold moves.

Samir Husni: Since you can’t print from home, what steps are you taking to social distance and ensure everyone at the workplace is safe?

Joel Quadracci: That would be a lot of the back office, customer service, accounting, finance, IT people, those types of positions. And the reason you do that is because those are the people who work closely, physically close, to each other, with cube setups and office environments. On the floor of a printing plant, we are sort of naturally socially distanced. Specifically in our platform where we’ve done a lot of automation over the years. In finishing, where you typically see a lot of concentration on our large perfect binder doing a magazine, we have automation there and we’re not using that many people. The people are very spread out on the floor and we’ve really enhanced all the safety measures that the CDC has to do.

One of the latest things we’re doing to protect our employees is, now that the CDC wants our employees to wear masks, you can’t find them. Meanwhile in the last couple weeks, some of my people came up with their own prototype of a mask that we can do on a web press. Basically you run it through a printing machine with inline finishing to create a mask. Recently, we started up the presses. Now we are in the midst of wrapping up the printing of hundreds of thousands of them. We will be able to distribute them to all of our plants hopefully by early next week. I’ll be getting masks to every plant so that every employee on the floor has multiple masks they can use, because as you know these masks have a lifespan. So, that’s a big deal because of everyone in this economy dealing with the mask situation. We found some material that has never really been used for masks, but it’s a great filter and we can get it in rolls. We combine that with regular paper and we’ve created a mask that works.

And so, each part of the business has it’s different challenges with how you manage the COVID-19 virus. On the floor it’s going to be how do we get people masks and make sure we’ve got enough hand sanitizer, and make sure people are following the social distancing.

Samir Husni: What is the impact so far on the publishing frequency, printing, mailing, etc.? Any change on the print schedule from your clients? Skipping issues, reducing print run, etc.

Joel Quadracci: I’ve seen other interviews with some of the publishers in the group. It’s sort of a mixed bag. I mean certainly it’s down, whether you are talking ad pages, or what we’re seeing is a lack of visibility because everyone’s trying to understand when the pandemic is going to end. When you want to understand what’s going on in the economy, it’s constipated and the comeback is not going to be like a light switch, it’s going to be slow. I can’t start printing until an advertiser wants to give a publisher pages and so it’s going to be an interesting unwinding of this, but meanwhile what we’ve seen is people cutting back on the number of issues, some temporary, some will be permanent. I get the feeling that there are also some decisions being made that were decisions that were ultimately going to get made anyway, but this was a good excuse to move on them now.

We saw some spikes in certain parts of the newsstand side, especially in grocery stores. My wife comes home with magazines every time she goes to the grocery store because everyone is just dying for content while they are sitting around their house, which I think is a good thing, but on the other hand no one is really going to airports right now and so we’ve seen that spike kind of erode a little bit. We do a lot of high volume magazines between Hearst, Meredith, Condé Nast, National Geographic, and I think everyone is just trying to be creative, trying to manage it as they can and yet I think no one really has great visibility and that makes it hard to manage.

Samir Husni: Are you seeing any shortage in paper, ink, etc.?

Joel Quadracci: No, we haven’t had any problem there. As you know, we manufacture our own ink and we control upstream supply chain for ourselves, where we source directly to pigment providers. We even manufacture some of the other components. We’ve been able to maintain good control there. I’d say that distribution has been interesting because we get stuck in sort of a global economics of trade right now in distribution where, for instance, if we are going to the west coast from the Midwest oftentimes we are using train cars and containers and things like that and everything is a little bit disrupted because you have containers stuck in the wrong places and you’ve got disruption in distribution in general so that’s been an interesting thing to follow. It’s certainly not a shortage, so no, I can’t think of anything where we’ve had a shortage of much other than visibility.

Samir Husni: As printers you are always prepared for a crisis, but did you ever, in your nightmares or dreams, ever think of such a situation and can you ever be prepared for such a thing?

Joel Quadracci: You’d never believe it. I decided to watch that series Pandemic that came out ironically just before all this happened. I’ve watched the bird flu and I’ve watched the situation in China. You logically understand how people would be concerned that some pandemic could happen, but then you emotionally never believe it. You think, that’s never going to happen in my lifetime. I get the reasons why they worry, but then you see this happen and the pace at which it happened. You never thought you’d see something like this. We were getting ready for a recession, I think everyone was kind of anticipating something was coming, but when you see full brakes on everything within a week, no, I never would have thought we’d see something like that.

 Samir Husni: And can you ever prepare for such a thing?

Joel Quadracci: Yes, you can. I think it’s less about preparing for the actual “what happens,” and  more about having a communication style and network within the culture of your company. It allows for people to drop everything and shift gears rapidly. Quad’s a very strong culture. It’s a very non-hierarchical culture. I wear the same uniform that the people on the floor wear and I had already started doing video blogs a bit ago on and off, but now I’ve ramped it up because the technology has changed so much.

Every week or multiple times a week, I’m now doing some sort of interview with someone, but then just telling it like it is. I don’t go out there and do a video blog that’s scripted where I’ve got things I have to say that have been vetted by everybody. I actually just wing it and do it in one shot because it’s real and I know our business and I know what we’re doing, so I just tell it like it is. When we say I need to furlough a lot of people, like tomorrow, we are honest with them. We opted to tell them it’s a longer time that we were originally thinking versus a shorter time because we want them to be able to plan in their own personal lives and we just try and be very honest and also be very fast about it.

You can never prepare for what kind of disaster is coming. Everyone does disaster planning, but when it comes, the disaster usually comes in some other form than your scenarios. But if your corporation is used to pulling levers fast, and you are able to communicate very quickly, not just about what lever you’ve pulled, but the why you did it and be credible about it, you will have the following. There’s a lot of people I’ve seen pulling levers.

One of my executives has a husband who works at an industrial company in Milwaukee and he got furloughed and his notice was on his way out the door. They handed him a letter that said “you’re being furloughed indefinitely” and it was not even signed by an individual, it was signed by the HR department. That was the explanation. With us, we told everybody that we’d be doing it, it’s coming. When we did it, we told people what was happening, we kept in touch with them. Layers of communication allows you to do a lot. When you are in my position, you’re the one who’s saying we are going to charge the hill or we’re going to jump behind these barriers to defend ourselves. That’s only good if you turn around and see that the troops are following you and following what you say and if they actually believe in it. Because if it gets really insane, like it is now, you need the buy-in for it to happen.

To me, the way organizations need to be prepared for any type of disaster is how you should run your business day-by-day. I think a lot of learning experience will come out of this for a lot of companies about how they could have really been much better, and we realize now that we weren’t as good as we should have been. It’s spurring a lot of thought on our side even though we think that we are really good at it. But what is our learning now and how can we use this to be innovative in the workplace and be innovative in how we communicate on a going forward basis.

Samir Husni: Briefly, if you were to send a sound-bite to your staff and clients, what would be your message?

Joel Quadracci: First of all, communication is key, not just to my internal staff, but what I really wish we could have more of from our customers right now is true communication. They may not have the visibility I want, but it might be more than they are giving me now. And for us to be able to react and be of service to them is so important. Also in the future, trust your vendor and bring them into the circle as the crisis unwinds and how tell them how you are thinking about it. We can handle the bad news, but it’s hard to handle the bad news if it comes last minute when you’ve known about it for several weeks.

We are all trying to plan through this. I think at a certain point right now, in this industry, is respect your supply base because it’s been in trouble. I think that unfortunately we just saw that LSC filed for bankruptcy Sunday night, which was – I don’t know if it was somewhat expected, but I think it was really sped up, and there’s a whole lot of printers in trouble.

We are doing everything to make sure that we maintain a good balance sheet and get through this to the end, but it requires a true honest dialogue and communication between customer and vendor. I say that for the paper companies. I say that for the distributor. Everyone right now needs to know what you are thinking even if it’s not great news. The sooner you can let us all in on that, the better. I got a pilot’s license when I was in high school. I flew for quite a while, but I haven’t done it lately. The one thing you learn from anybody who flies in an airliner, no matter how long the runway is, you’ll typically see the pilot use every inch of it. They’ll pull to the end of the runway, even if it’s a 20,000 foot long runway and the plane only needs 3,000 feet. The reason they do that is because on takeoff, if something goes wrong the runway behind you that you didn’t use is not usable.

That’s the point of being bold and fast and not being scared to pull really tough levers early in a situation, even when you don’t know how long the situation is going to last or what the turnaround is going to be, because it’s about protecting your company for the future. If that means you cause a lot of uncomfortable pain early on for your employees personally, it’s probably the right thing to do for the business so that everyone has the strength to weather the storm.

Samir Husni: Anything you’d like to add before I ask you my typical last question?

Joel Quadracci: Just that, in disruptive times, at least in any kind of disruption I’ve ever seen, it has always been an opportunity for the world to rethink how they do things. In our case, how they use media. I’d say that people need to understand that as we come out of this, everyone’s going to be looking at how they should do things differently.

The world will go for a reset on a lot of different fronts, whether it’s how people use telecommunications now or having fewer people working. But in terms of the magazine industry, I think it’s an opportunity – or it might be a missed opportunity –to really recalibrate the world on the importance of ink on paper. I don’t know about you, but I watch four different news channels and look at ten different news sites just to try and triangulate on what’s actually true and what’s really happening. Having good content in the future might be a great opportunity.

I think the magazines that have great content can really use it to their advantage now and everybody should really be, as an industry, pushing forward when we come out of this because marketers out there, consumers of content, are all going to be going through some sort of reset in behavior, whether they overtly know it or not. So you’ve got to be in front of everybody with why this is an important medium.

One of the things that is going to come out of this is, everyone learned, those who have had to work out of their homes for a long time, they’ve learned to slow down again.  The pace at home, even though you are working hard, it’s still a different environment, so you feel like you can slow down and you start remembering things you want to do again and get hold of doing some things in between calls, whether it’s hobbies or whatever. I think that people will kind of slow down again and consume content, not just news content, but other content, sort of closer to the old world where we spent a little more time just relaxing and enjoying it.

Samir Husni:  My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Joel Quadracci: I think it’s sort of the obvious, the coronavirus, and the safety of my employees. We had our first death of someone who got coronavirus. He didn’t actually get it in our plant, he was off for a couple weeks. But that’s close to home. Beyond that, it’s a bit about the ecosystem we plan and the point that I was just making. Our successful futures relies on the successful management that all our customers do in managing through a crisis. I would hope that through this that trust between all the parts of the ecosystem only increase, because we need to be a healthy ecosystem to do it. One part can’t be healthy without the other.

Samir Husni:  Thank you.