Ben is a corporate trainee with Quad Graphics, one of the largest commercial printing firms in the country, dealing with “consumer magazines, special interest publications, catalogs, retail inserts/circulars, direct mail, books, directories, and commercial and specialty products.”
Transcript
>> MY name is Ben Rayburn [assumed spelling], and I currently work as a corporate trainee with Quad/Graphics in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Quad/Graphics is probably the-- not probably; it is the second largest printer in North America. I work with them as a corporate trainee like I said. It's a program where lasting anywhere from 18 months to 3 years. You start out working with the production floor briefly to get a better understanding of the actual printing process, and then from there you rotate doing different admin rotations and kind of learning more about the company while at the same time finding where you actually want to work in the company. Well, currently I'm doing estimating in one of our commercial specialty plants, which is basically sales; it gives us a piece that they want produced for their clients, and we tell them how much it will cost. So let's say it takes seven different offline processes plus the actual printing, we tell them what it will take to do, where we'll produce it, and how much it will actually cost to produce it. Typically depending on what it is I probably have about you know 15 to 20 of those a day, and it can be hectic. It's a very-- I never do the same thing twice is what it seems like what I'm doing right now. So just back and forth calling people talking to people, understanding what we're producing. Understanding how I can get it done, because I am still relatively new so I'm always learning. We have multiple different processes. We have Gravure Web offset, heat offset, sheet fed. It all depends on what you want produced. If you want you know three million magazines you may go on a Gravure press, which is very large; the size of a building to be honest, and that's a very involved process, and ending up from there it goes into finishing, which is where they actually fold, collate, and bind the pieces, and then they will ship it out. And it all depends on the process; I don't want to get too in depth because I'm a print nerd. I could sit here and talk all day about how the process is done, but there's many different ways. We're into multiple segments of the market and not just one, in magazines. We are mainly a B to B company, so we work with mostly other businesses. You know anything from retail, you know catalogs, inserts, special-interest publications; it's hard to really give one client-- you know if you were to walk up to a magazine rack and you were to look, I would say we probably printed over half of those. And a lot of catalogs, a lot of direct-mail pieces you get in the mail, so stuff you may call junk mail you know we love it, because it's business for us, and it's actually been proven to be one of the best ways to get your product out there.
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