Tim Yurick in front of his business, Northeast Blueprint
By Ed Avis
When Jim Yurick noticed that the owners of Northeast Blueprint in Cleveland were missing some obvious business opportunities, he was intrigued. The year was 1986, and Yurick had built a career as an accountant. Doing the books for Northeast Blueprint was a side hustle for him; his day job was with Sohio, an oil company that was in the last stages of being acquired by industry giant BP.
The BP situation had changed Yurick’s view of working for the company. The Alaska pipeline was a big deal at that point, and billions of dollars were flowing through the office. The environment at work evolved into something that did not appeal to him.
A promotional piece from Northeast Blueprint in the 1960s. Notice the delivery vehicle parked in front.
Across town at Northeast Blueprint, business was booming. But the owners were nearing retirement age and were not particularly concerned with growth.
“My father said they would be getting calls from large Fortune 500 companies on the east side of Cleveland asking for blueprinting, and the original owners would say, ‘Well, we have a vacation that week, but we'll do it when we get back,’” says Tim Yurick, Jim’s son and the current owner of the company. “Those were still the days when they could say, ‘Nobody's in the office, we'll talk to you in a few weeks.’”
The younger Yurick was a senior in high school then and remembers when his father came home, talked to his wife, and then told the family that he wanted to buy the little blueprinter. The opportunity to grow the business just seemed too good to pass up.
“As I got older, I started to appreciate more how big of a chance he took,” Tim Yurick says. “I give him a lot of credit. He probably could have stuck it out at BP for another 15 or 20 years and retired happy. But he was a tougher guy.”
Moving Past Diazo
Tim Yurick joined his father in the business a couple of years later, after a short stint working in construction. He saw what his father was doing with the business and decided it could be a good fit for him, too.
He started in sales and production, helping run the company’s two Dietzgen production diazo printers. They had two smaller diazo printers as well.
The company was all diazo at the time. In the mid-1990s they bought a Xerox 2510. It was not an easy decision, since diazo was still highly profitable, but the trend seemed to be moving towards plain paper. They upgraded to a 2080 a few years later, and eventually shifted to Shacoh plain paper printers.
“We just evolved with the industry,” Yurick says. “We were never the first guys to jump into a new technology, but we’d give it a little time and kind of feel it out. Then when we had the availability and pockets to jump in, we’d do it.”
Growth and Transitions
Around that time, the company outgrew its original space, which they were leasing from a construction company.
“We had an opportunity to buy an 8,000 square foot building, which was a next major step,” Yurick says. “We had one large job with a local, very well-known company that allowed us to put a down payment on a building.”
Yurick evolved into the president’s job by 2010, though his father remained involved until he died in 2018.
“He worked at the company until the day he passed,” Yurick remembers. “He just loved to be here. He loved talking to people.”
Today, Yurick’s wife Maria helps him run the business. She handles the books and provides another perspective when decisions need to be made.
“I always try to run things past her,” he says. “It’s good to have her perspective; it protects and saves me in a lot of ways.”
Graphics, Scanning Opportunities
Northeast Blueprint expanded into color graphics work about a decade ago. They serve the AEC community with an Epson inkjet printer and a fleet of HP PageWides. Color is a growth area for the company, Yurick says, and he’d like to hire a full-timer to handle that work exclusively.
Scanning is also growing for them. There are thousands of mature companies in the Cleveland area, and many need scanning projects handled. Among Northeast’s scanning clients is NASA, which has an office in Cleveland.
“We were making blueprints for NASA back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and we still maintain that relationship,” Yurick says. “We’ve been doing archiving and things like that for them for as long as I can remember.”
Yurick says some large document management companies seek scanning/archiving work, too, but they typically don’t understand the intricacies of scanning sepias, mylars and other legacy documents, so they leave the scanning part of those projects to Northeast.
“I can go in there and talk circles around anybody as far as scanning, because we were there when the prints were made. We understand how it was created, so we're going to get the best product, digitizing it. And I sold a lot of scan jobs on that basis,” Yurick says. “Now I have the IT companies calling me to wholesale the scanning.”
The Future
Yurick, whose company joined IRgA in June, continues to explore new areas. For example, he’s currently investigating 3D scanning for his AEC clients. But just like he did with other services, he is approaching that technology cautiously.
“We’re not a company that will go out there and sell something and hope it works,” he explains. “I let my customer know that I’m not an expert yet, that this is something we’re learning. But they know that the people at Northeast Blueprint care. We’ll invest in our time and equipment to give them a product and say, what do you like? What works?”