Tony Dargo and Mark Langdon of Eastern Engineering Supply
By Ed Avis
It’s a big deal when a company reaches 50 years old. But in the case of Eastern Engineering Supply, which is celebrating the half century mark this year, reaching that milestone is hardly the real story. No, the real story of Eastern Engineering Supply is that the business practices that helped them reach 50 are arguably stronger today than at any other time in their history.
Let’s look at these business practices one at a time.
Relationships
First, the company leaders have always relied heavily on friends and partnerships. For example, when Bob and Mary Langdon launched the firm in Muncie, Indiana, in 1972, they were guided by an experienced blueprinter, Jerry Klinker, owner of Blueprint Specialties in Lafayette, Indiana.
“Jerry helped them get started and they were partners, with the agreement that my dad would buy him out after so many years,” says Mark Langdon, Eastern Engineering’s president and son of the founders. “We’re still close friends with the Klinker family.”
Another relationship that has been key to the company’s success has been the friendship between Mark Langdon and Tony Dargo, who is the company’s director of sales and technology.
“We grew up three houses from each other,” Langdon says. “Our families have been connected since they moved into the neighborhood in 1982.”
Dargo explains that he and Langdon both played on the Eastern Engineering Supply youth baseball team – which was coached by Bob Langdon – and hung out together at the shop. Dargo was an occupational therapist after graduating from college, but during a fishing trip in 2002, Langdon persuaded him to change careers and join Eastern Engineering. He started as a sales rep the following year and became director of sales in 2014.
“Once Tony took over that position, the company started growing quickly,” Langdon says.
There is one other key relationship – or rather, set of relationships – that must be mentioned. Langdon had joined Eastern Engineering full time in 1994, and had worked in several departments by the time his dad passed away in 1999. He was reasonably knowledgeable about the business, but he definitely needed more help as he moved into a leadership role.
“On his deathbed, my dad asked his good friends JL Lynn, Mike Carter and Dave Key to look after me,” Langdon says. The three men, who were leaders of Lynn Imaging in Kentucky and Key Blue in Ohio, guided the younger Langdon through those early years. “Dave passed away in 2009 but I’m still good friends with JL and Mike. I talk to them every single week.”
All of those relationships, and others, have powered Eastern Engineering’s success. Another key element is their constant embrace of technology.
Technology
Eastern Engineering Supply was a diazo printer, like every repro firm, from its inception until 1993. At that point they ditched the diazo printers and went all-in on Shacoh plain paper equipment. The company made that switch years before most repro firms did.
“My dad wanted to put pressure on the competition,” Langdon says. “He felt the competition couldn’t afford to go digital. It took a few years, but eventually that put us in a better position.”
Another big technology step forward came in 2001, when the company adopted eDistribution, a digital planroom developed by Lynn Imaging. Today the two companies co-own the system. Eight years later the companies partnered on another key development – eComm, a construction information management system.
“Today we compete against Procore and other software like that with eComm,” Dargo says. “We have our own developers and direct code based on our customer requests. It’s all with the goal of keeping it easy and simple so all parties can have a seat at the table.”
Langdon says the company is considering making the software available to other repro firms.
The next big step forward on the technology front was really more of a business move: In 2014, Langdon decided the company had to start charging for digital services. He realized that his staff was spending time and labor providing digital services without compensation. In one case he observed, staff spent six hours preparing a spec book but the invoice came out to a paltry $120. Totally not worth it.
“So I came up with some ideas for charging fees for digital services, and called a team meeting about it,” he recalls. “I said, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ and I damn near had a mutiny on my hands! People said, ‘How can we charge for something we haven’t charged for before?’ So Tony talked to me about the concept and we fine tuned the idea. The following Friday we started charging for digital services, and as soon as we did that, we gave all the employees a raise. I told them, ‘Look, we need you to bill for digital services and you’ll get rewarded for that.’ It worked.”
Langdon told his staff that he would take any phone calls from customers complaining about the new charges. The day the invoices were mailed he took just two calls, one from a customer who completely understood, and one from a customer who simply asked that the charges be switched away from digital and tacked onto the printing itself (that customer just didn’t like to be charged for digital services but didn’t care if the ultimate bill was the same). Three months later he got one more call complaining, but that was the last one.
One more big technology change: The HP Pagewide, which can be found in each Eastern Engineering location. Langdon reports that the Pagewide has allowed the firm to price color CAD prints the same as monochrome prints. And Eastern is the largest Pagewide dealer in the country. Both facts have helped the company grow.
Careful Growth
The partnerships and the technology have led to growth opportunities for Eastern Engineering, but the firm has been deliberate about that growth.
The first expansion was the opening of a new office in Fishers, a suburb of Indianapolis, in 1999. Langdon says that office made sense because Marbaugh Engineering Supply, which dominated the Indianapolis reprographics market at the time, had been sold to an outside firm and the owners, Joe Marbaugh and Brad Clough, left the company.
“That new office grew faster than we expected,” Langdon says. “We started out in a 2,200-square-foot office, then one year later we expanded to 5,500 square feet, and two years after that we moved to a 12,000-square-foot office.”
The company next expanded with a new location in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 2005. That office also succeeded, Langdon says, due to a higher level of technology than most of the competition in that city.
The Muncie, Fishers and Fort Wayne locations were in place when Dargo became director of sales in 2014, but Langdon considers Dargo’s promotion a turning point – the company really “hit its stride” then, he says. “Our service manager, Sue Bauer, who plays such an important role here, had 10 years of experience by then, and Tony had 10 years experience. And we had two dozen other employees who had been with us longer than 10 years. You just can’t replace experience. So we just started hitting our stride and maturing. We took off.”
Dargo concurs: “By that time we had that core of employees who cared about our customers and knew how to create connections and solve problems. We just doubled down on that.”
The next big move came three years later, in 2017, when the owner of Toledo Blue Print, Bob Anderson, told Langdon he wanted to sell his firm. Langdon bought Toledo Blue, which gave the company its first location in another state. That acquisition also gave Langdon the chance to put his mark on an existing firm.
“If you go into most blueprint shops they have a certain look and feel,” Dargo explains. “But when you go into Mark’s buildings, it’s different. They’re landscaped, the parking lots are painted, the interior is fresh, you can eat off the floor. That transition started to happen in Toledo. We got a new building, renovated it, and built our culture around it. That investment immediately paid off.”
If you know the geography of the Midwest, you’ll realize that the Toledo office put Eastern Engineering on the doorstep of Michigan. That was part of the plan – the next new location was opened in Livonia, just outside Detroit, in 2019. The company moved a manager from the headquarters office to Livonia to start that branch, and hired a skilled service technician and some salespeope who know the market well.
The most recent expansion was the other direction – the company bought Dean’s Blueprint in Champaign, Illinois in 2021.
“That acquisition has been tremendous,” Langdon says. “It was already going good, but we put in some new equipment and made the place look more professional with new tile, new carpet, new paint, new delivery vans. It’s amazing what doing that does for employee morale.”
The changes to the Champaign location, as well as the others, are managed by Amy Legg, Eastern Engineering’s marketing coordinator. She makes sure the branding is the same throughout the company, that all the locations have the same look and feel. The goal, Langdon says, is to have the same customer experience in Toledo as in Muncie as in Champaign.
Employee Care
The success element that ties everything else together is treating employees the right way, Langdon and Dargo say. In addition to good pay and benefits, a key part of treating employees well is letting them make decisions and trusting the outcomes. “When we hire new employees, they all say they’d rather work for us than anyone else,” Dargo says.
An example of how the company treats employees relates to philanthropy. Rather than seeking out high-profile charities to donate money to, in hopes of getting good publicity, Eastern Engineering’s leaders tend to donate to charities that employees support. That shows employees that the leaders care about their interests, and it greatly magnifies the financial support the employees themselves offer to those charities.
Another example relates to the 50th birthday. No big, splashy public celebration is planned. Instead, employees are getting $50 gift cards each quarter and a “monetary surprise” is being planned for later this year.
The Future
Mark Langdon, Dawn Langdon, and Tony Dargo
What’s next for Eastern Engineering? Mary Langdon, Mark’s mother, retired from her role as CEO in late December 2021. Dawn Langdon has assumed the role of CEO after working for Eastern Engineering for more than 27 years. She has extensive business and leadership experience from her key responsibilities managing human resources and accounting departments. Mark and Dawn are a successful husband and wife team who plan to continue to expand the family business. They’re currently considering several acquisitions right now.
“We’ve got to continue to grow,” Mark says. “We want to expand our territories. I think our competition knows that, and we’ve ruffled some feathers with our expansion, but we owe it to our employees to continue to grow.”
Eastern Engineering has the systems in place to make their expansion plans a reality. Stay tuned for the next half century.