Launched During the Great Recession, SpeedPro Marin Realized There Was “No Place to Go But Up”

Starting a new business—much less a print business—at the height (or depth, as the case may be) of the Great Recession may not have been the most advisable idea in the world, but when the entrepreneurial spirit strikes, sometimes you have to go with it. So it was in 2010 that Steve Moran-Cassese decided to start a print business. “Everyone was like, ‘You’re going to start a business now?’ And I said, ‘Well, this is the best time. It can only get better from here.” And thus was born SpeedPro Marin in San Rafael, Calif.

Moran-Cassese had spent 17 years in the agency world, working on corporate event management and hospitality, leading to a stint working on the Olympics. Weary of the agency world, and an entrepreneur at heart, he looked around for business opportunities. “I came across SpeedPro and I really liked the model a lot,” he said. And not having a background in print production, he added, “I wanted something with training wheels.”

So how much of a challenge was it to start a print business at the nadir of the economic downturn? “I've asked myself that before and it's a difficult one to answer,” he said. “Because I was new I just didn’t know if it would have been better if we were in a booming economy. We were starting from zero, so anything upward sounded like a great idea.” SpeedPro Marin had an eight-month ramp-up, with Moran-Cassese pounding the pavement introducing local businesses to his shop. He outsourced work to nearby SpeedPros, and gradually accumulated business. “I was able to fill the pipe a little bit during that time,” he said. “It was a little slow, but every year from that point on we were growing 20% or more year over year. We were just rolling and growing and had a great reputation.”

Today, SpeedPro Marin has five full-time employees and a client base that includes some of the biggest players in the Bay Area (or anywhere for that matter): Google, HP, Autodesk, Comcast SportsNet, Facebook, SF State University, and BMW, as well as smaller and lesser-known businesses and agencies. The shop (or “studio,” to use Speed Pro Imaging parlance) has two roll-to-roll printers, one of them a 104-inch HP Latex unit. “[The Latex] is still our workhorse, and we can do a lot of eight-foot banners and step-and-repeats and it allows us to print on large canvas for a lot of clients.” He also has an eco-solvent printer and a couple of years ago acquired an HP flatbed. “That really changes the game for large-format printers when you can start direct printing.” The flatbed led to a CNC contour-cut machine. “Once you can start printing direct-to-substrate, whether it be wood, aluminum, foamboard, anything, then you can go out to this machine and contour-cut anything.” The current equipment portfolio allows SpeedPro Marin to produce just about anything they need. “The fact that we have flatbed, roll-to-roll, and a CNC cutter, that's kind of the complete package to be able to do most everything.”

One area he has been looking at, although with some degree of hesitation, is dye-sublimation. “A couple of our partners have dye-sub machines, but there's a lot of finishing involved in that,” said Moran-Cassese. “Honestly, I don’t want to spread out too wide where we’re a jack of all trades, master of none.” Currently, he outsources whatever dye-sub work comes in and is happy with that arrangement. But, he added, “if something unique came in and it made sense to be in the dye-sub business, I would invest.”

Moran-Cassese, like other display graphics and sign producers, has found that environmental graphics is currently a major growth area. (And if you’ve been to the Bay Area recently, you know that there’s no shortage of new construction.)

“I think what’s really propelled the environmental graphics movement is number one, technology and machines, the advent of latex, instant curing, and the flatbed with white ink,” he said. “And then a lot of the media that’s come out, especially optically clear media. That’s huge, because of the amount of things you can do with wall coverings, with conference rooms, and large glass atria. You can do really, really intricate designs, and really cool creative stuff. In the past, if you couldn’t use white ink and clear vinyl, all those little things would have to be cut out and placed, and it just was not practical. But now you can run all of these things on sheets of vinyl, butt them together, and you can make some fabulous looking environments.”

The logical next step was to begin contacting architectural and interior design firms, which has opened up new kinds of opportunities. Some of these firms had been doing environmental graphics for a long time, but some were themselves new to it. “Many of them said, ‘You know, we’ve been hearing more and more about environmental graphics and we’re pretty interested, so send us over some information.’” Educating these agencies about what’s possible using printed materials has been a great way to expand the client base. “We’re not the only ones doing it, but it’s been a real focus of ours,” said Moran-Cassese. “We have done a lot of wall murals for a lot of different clients, and that’s probably the first thing people jump at: big wall murals.”

Moran-Cassese also finds event graphics a source of growth, and for those projects, he has been working with agency partners. For example, two out of the last three years SpeedPro Marin has done the graphics and signage for Facebook’s global sales and marketing conference. “Those are the types of jobs you need to really continue to grow,” he said. “You cannot necessarily do that by doing two or three 24 by 36-inch prints on board. You have to have the big projects.”

Ironically, Moran-Cassese has found that the source of his biggest business challenge today is the opposite of the big challenge when he opened: a healthy and booming economy. Specifically, the tight labor market. In January, San Francisco’s unemployment rate dropped to a near-record 2.2%. “Staffing has become an increasing problem when you have turnover and need to find somebody that’s good,” he said. “Salaries are increasing, too, so it’s a bit of a bind as a small business because there’s a whole host of things that come with hiring somebody and running a bricks-and-mortar business. So that’s been a point of pain for me, probably over the last year and a half. Finding quality people that you can afford that fit in your financial model has been tough, especially in the inner Bay Area.”

Moran-Cassese is bullish on the future of wide-format and display graphics. “Large format is still flourishing,” he said. As much as the digital age has changed a lot of people’s needs or requirements for print, I think that really hurt offset more than it hurt large format. At the end of the day, when people want to put on an event, transform a ballroom, or whatever it may be, graphics are what does it. There’s just something about large-format graphics that I think will never die. The industry is continuing to innovate with faster machines, machines that print metallic, the clear vinyl, and different types of metallic vinyl. There’s so much out there that you can create so many different things. That innovation, along with the fact that large events need to create a dynamic environment and want it to be creative and cutting edge, it's a healthy place to be.

“It's really about continuing to push your name and your reputation out there in the marketplace.”