The Ownership Team of A/E
The owners of A/E Graphics, from left to right: Joe Shaw, Tim Davis, Dan Schmidt, John Sieber, and Tom Taubenheim.
By Ed Avis
Tom Taubenheim was a college student in Milwaukee in 1990 when he wandered into A/E Graphics in suburban Brookfield looking for a job. He didn’t have any blueprinting experience, but he needed a job and wasn’t having much luck elsewhere.
“I saw in a local paper that this place was hiring delivery drivers,” Taubenheim remembers. “I came in and talked to Fred (Gennerman, one of the owners), and he said, ‘Do you want to start today?’” Taubenheim said yes and he is still there, though just about everything has changed, from the type of equipment to the make-up of the customer base. And Taubenheim isn’t delivering prints anymore – he’s the president.
Diazo and DJ
When Taubenheim started at A/E Graphics, the company was thick in the diazo printing era. Part of his job was cutting down large sheets of blueprint paper and repackaging them in black bags for resale. The company also sold bottles of ammonia. But seven hours a day he was on the streets of Milwaukee, picking up and delivering jobs.
“I made a lot of friends in the architectural offices,” he says. “Sometimes I was the first person they’d see in the office in the morning and last person in the evening.”
But he had other interests as well. About the same time that he started at A/E Graphics he landed a job as a weekend announcer at a radio station in Milwaukee, a position he held for the next 10 years. It was a small station, and at any given time listeners could hear him spinning records, running various programs, and even doing some commercials.
That jack-of-all-trades experience was duplicated at his day job. “In radio if someone doesn’t show up you have no choice – you’re stuck until they find someone else,” he says. “That’s very similar to what we did in the blueprint shop – when something happens you work through it.”
Into the Office
Even though Taubenheim spent most of the day outside of the shop, he did develop an interest in the business side of things. He got to know the woman who handled the shop’s billing – all done by hand in those days – and when health issues prompted her to retire in 1992, Gennerman and the shop’s other owner, Mel Kirsch, asked Taubenheim if he’d like to apply for her job.
“After a few days they offered me the job,” Taubenheim remembers. “I was in a quandary. I had my delivery routes and I liked the people I saw every day, and I didn’t want to be stuck in the office all day. But I felt it was the right thing to do.”
So he took the job, and through that position he learned the ins and outs of the reprographics business. Among his accomplishments during his decade in that job was switching the company to a computerized billing system.
Bid Set Management
A few years later another key development arose that profoundly changed A/E’s business. “In 1995 Fred heard of a company in Arizona that did a bid management type of thing. He liked the idea so we ran with it,” Taubenheim says.
So on the next big project A/E offered to handle the bid management work for the contractor. Instead of delivering a big set of prints to the GC for them to distribute to subcontractors, the subs instead came to A/E’s office. Taubenheim and his colleagues printed the sets as needed, kept track of who took them, notified subs when changes were made, and generally managed the whole complicated process. It didn’t really generate much more revenue than doing it the old way, but the GCs loved having that task off their desk.
“It brought us new accounts,” Taubenheim says. “Our competitors locally were not doing this, so we picked up a lot of general contractor accounts, most of whom are still with us today.”
From FM to New Location
In some cases, A/E developed FMs inside the locations of large clients. One such location, in downtown Milwaukee, evolved into a separate branch of the company in 1999.
“They had a lot of needs, so we talked to the client, an architect, about having one of our people on staff. Eventually other companies around there started asking for services. The space had a side door, so within a year it became its own location. We shared the revenue with the architect.”
The only hitch was that some competing architecture firms didn’t want to bring work there, so in 2006 A/E opened its own office in downtown Milwaukee. Within a year the office at the client’s location was closed and the work all moved to the separate A/E office, which remains open.
Plain Paper and Color Arrive
The next big change came courtesy of Oce. Gennerman flew to Amsterdam to see the new 9800, and by the late 1990s A/E had five of the giant plain paper printers going at one time.
“The 9800 virtually overnight revolutionized everything,” Taubenheim says. “In less than a year we stopped blueprinting, and then within another year the photo department was phased out.”
The company charged 60 cents a square foot for the first set off the 9800, and less on additional sets. “We made money from that,” he says. “Those were the good days.”
Within a year of the 9800’s arrival the company also got into color printing. They bought a wide-format Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer and a Seal mounting and laminating machine.
“That really took off within a couple of years,” Taubenheim says. “We were mostly serving our existing AEC clients with job-site signage, directional signage, helmet stickers, etc.”
About a decade later A/E separated the color work into its own division, Epic Color. Epic Color moved into its own location a couple of miles away from A/E’s Brookfield headquarters, and it had a devoted sales rep. These moves allowed the company to remove any lingering feelings among customers that the firm only worked with AEC businesses. They soon picked up marketing companies, retailers, and other such firms that were not part of A/E’s traditional customer base.
Epic Color today features two Roland ecosolvent printer/cutters, a small-format color printer, a Seal mounting/laminating machine, and other equipment. It recently moved back to the A/E headquarters building, but with its own entrance and signage.
Becoming an Owner
In 2001, Gennerman and Kirsch decided it was time for a new generation of leaders to take over, and they created a buy-out program. Taubenheim and five other employees took advantage of the program and became the owners over the next several years. One has since left, but the rest are still owner/employees. Taubenheim is the president and handles the sales management and other leadership tasks; John Sieber oversees the downtown Milwaukee branch; Dan Schmidt manages the Epic Color division; Tim Davis is the technology director; and Joe Shaw is the general manager of the Brookfield shop.
Modernization
Today A/E Graphics is a much different firm from when Taubenheim was driving the delivery truck. Most files come in over an online planroom – A/E uses Reproconnect -- and posting charges and download charges have replaced some of the printing revenue that has faded in this digital era. Dealing with digital files of all types means the staff need to be well trained on such issues. “Someone in the industry said we are file traffic controllers,” Taubenheim says.
Many of the clients are same architecture firms and GCs that A/E served during the hey day of printing. But the work is different in many cases – they buy color work from Epic Color, buy or lease equipment (A/E is an Oce and Canon dealer), and have A/E digitally handle bid sets.
And some printing still happens, Taubenheim says. However, one thing has changed regarding printing: A/E doesn’t charge by the square foot anymore. About three years ago they started charging by the line item instead.
“That’s been a very successful model,” Taubenheim says. “In the back end of our system the software figures out the cost using the square feet, binding, and other factors and blends everything in, so we don’t do any of the math. That’s helped us get a grasp on what we’re doing.”
The Future?
Taubenheim predicts continued growth in his color work, perhaps in new niches such as packaging and prototyping. Color CAD is another area he feels will grow, and that should lead to significant equipment sales for him.
But even after 25 years in the business, nothing is truly predictable, he says. “I don’t know about the future. That’s just our industry – nobody knows!”