Workflow One
Headquarters: Dayton
Ownership: A subsidiary of Workflow Management Inc.
Local employees: 424. (National: More than 2,200.)
Products: Business documents, print services, promotional goods, including placards, hats, marketing merchandise.
Plants: 9.
Distribution centers: 24.
Sales offices: 49.
Source: Workflow One
DAYTON — Workflow One might be considered a quiet company, but not because of any particular lack of visibility or action.
The company has a riverfront home downtown. Print Professional magazine ranked the company No. 1 in its “top 100 distributors” list last year for the fourth consecutive time. And it just completed a large distribution expansion in Columbus, overseen at the Dayton headquarters.
Workflow One calls itself one of North America’s largest providers of business documents and print-related services.
The Dayton Daily News recently sat down with Dean Truitt, Workflow One president and chief executive, to talk about the company, its work and its future.
Q: Does it seem to you that the company has been relatively quiet?
A: "Well, we are a private company. We try to get the word out. I think we are probably less known in Dayton than others, although we have deep roots here. I think we have 400 people here now and we've had more than that over time. But this was at one time a divisional office. Our headquarters was in Stamford, Conn. for many years. Last year, we closed the Stamford office and moved the corporate headquarters here to Dayton. And when we made that move, we may have come in under the radar."
Q: Why move the headquarters to Dayton?
A: "That was the holding company (based in Stamford). Workflow One was one of the (subsidiary) companies, and it was the largest. In 2008, we embarked on a turnaround strategy, a transformation, to improve customer focus and profitability, that sort of thing. One of the things we did was sell off some of ... our core assets so we could really focus on Workflow One."
Q: What did the turnaround accomplish? How have you weathered the recession?
A: "Over the years, Workflow One had acquired about 30 companies. They ended up building up the debt levels and there were a lot of integration opportunities that just didn't get completely implemented. We had duplicate plants. We had 80 different sales offices.
“Our industry was hit pretty hard in the recession, in terms of the printing industry. Our revenues were down consistently with basically everyone else, and that was about 20 percent in 2009.
“But the thing that was kind of interesting about that, since we were doing the transformational program, in consolidating locations and improving efficiencies, our earnings went up by about 27 percent. Revenue went down, but earnings were up.”
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