In-plant Manager Retires — Then Starts New In-plant 

On David Earp’s final day at Lake Land College Print and Mail Services in March, he clocked out at 1 pm, got in his car, drove 15 minutes north to Harvest Print & Media, and was clocked into his new job by 3 pm. In his latest venture, Earp was tasked with building an in-plant “from the mud” for the Melvin Management Co. —  which is the parent company of both Harvest Print & Media and Rural King, a farm and ranch store chain with 158 retail locations across the Midwest.

“I was approached by Drew Weckbach, director of strategic initiatives from the Melvin Management Co., who owns Rural King, wanting to know if I was interested in helping them start a print shop,” Earp says. “Then they asked me to step in as a consultant and do some analysis of the type of work they were doing, the type of equipment that we would need, see if it really made sense. And in the end, it did.”

From left: Drew Weckbach, Madison Mapes, and Dave Earp show off the new Konica Minolta AccurioWide 320HS, with a print width of up to 126′. The in-plant is the first U.S. facility to install the 320HS.

Today, Harvest Print & Media in Mattoon, IL, provides high-quality signage, displays, and custom print solutions for Rural King and a growing base of external customers.

After 30 years at Lake Land College, where he built the in-plant into a wide-format powerhouse, Earp says his experience creating this new eight-employee print shop has been nothing short of positive.

The in-plant is keeping its Colex automated cutter very busy. With it are (from left) Jimmie Perry, Dave Earp, Steve Kitchen, and Natalie Pilcher.

“We've had very few challenges. Really, nothing that we haven't been able to blast right through. It was fun building it from the mud,” Earp says.

And it truly was from the mud; Earp recalls that his current facility needed some much-needed TLC at the beginning.

“This place was a trash hole. I mean, literally filthy, dirty carpet, holes in the walls. The lights didn't work. There were receptacles hanging off the ceiling, the electricity had to be completely redone. The air conditioning went out on us, and we had to put a brand-new air-conditioning system in. And so, we built it from the ground up,” Earp says.

Getting the Right Equipment

And, of course, you can’t have an in-plant without equipment. Earp says he considered volume and speed when it came to selecting the right technology for this new print operation.

“When you talk about different products in the print industry, you've got your cut-sheet, brochures, business cards, flyers, booklets — all those types of things. And those are the things that we kind of gear towards,” Earp says. “But then you start looking at the expanded services of wide-format, which in my opinion is the absolute juggernaut of printing these days. That is where profit is made.

Steve Kitchen stands with the new Duplo DC-618 slitter/cutter/creaser.

“What's important to remember is when I printed something at Lake Land, it was typically for Lake Land or a customer, and it was one or two, and they may need a few extra,” he notes. “But when you print for Rural King, we have 158 stores.”

Because he was looking for speed when it came to wide-format, Earp paid a visit to Konica Minolta in New Jersey. It was during this visit that Konica Minolta was getting ready to launch its AccurioWide 320HS, with a print width of up to 126′′, UV LED curing, and a six‐color plus white ink configuration — and lo and behold, the in-plant became the first U.S. facility to install the 320HS.

“We didn't know if we were going to be able to fit that in, but we did some high-level negotiating, got that within our capital expense line, and [have been] super impressed with the machine,” Earp says. “The thing flies. It's ran like a charm, and you can just tell that it's built really well.”

'A True Partnership'

Earp says it was really important for Harvest Print & Media to find a manufacturer that also felt like a partner.

Kyle Jansen and Dave Earp show off the new Roland TrueVis VG4-640.

“The biggest thing that we were looking for, and what I really feel like we found, was a true partnership — a true company that was willing to support us, to help us grow, to get through any hiccups that we had at that point,” he says. “We really found that in Konica Minolta. It's reassuring to me that I can pick up the phone and the No. 3 [Konica Minolta] person in America will answer the phone.”

Drew Weckbach with the new Shark SC-31TS paper cutter.

And as a part of this partnership, Harvest Print & Media will serve as a Konica Minolta customer engagement center for the regional Midwest — so Konica Minolta can bring prospective customers into Earp’s shop, see the equipment, and even run their own files to see how everything works.

Earp added a lot of other equipment as well: a Colex automated cutter, a Roland TrueVis VG4-640, a Duplo DC-618 slitter/cutter/creaser, a Konica Minolta AccurioPress C6100, and a Shark paper cutter.

Thanks to this fleet of equipment, he and his team have completely taken over POP displays and storge signage kits, like the signs that go above every department, the bathrooms, the greeting card displays, the cash registers, and “Thank you for shopping at Rural King Signs.” The best part? That signage was previously outsourced. Now it is all done in-house.

“Anytime you bring something in-house, you're saving the costs on that, Earp points out. “But I think it was also important for brand control. I think it was important to be able to print things in-house and save on shipping. Essentially, what we have done here is we're bringing in stuff that was done in Nashville and Chicago ... and centralizing the print process here.”

Looking Forward to the Future

Even though Harvest Print & Media appears to really have found its groove, the in-plant has only officially been going at it for four months, according to Drew Weckbach, director of strategic initiatives for Melvin Management.

“We consider April 1 kind of the first date that we had all of our functionalities and capabilities. So, if you think about that, we're only really four months into this, and we're pretty consistently growing 20% per month” Weckbach says. “So, we are doing this dance, Dave and I, on where our capacity is for labor, where our capacity is for demand, and where our capacity is for [print] production. We're trying to scale all three of those simultaneously with hyper growth. So, that is probably our biggest challenge. Dave and I are both adept at this problem, but it is a really huge undertaking that Dave and I are making look really easy.”

Down the line, Earp is most excited about expanding services, getting into the community, and making strategic corporate partnerships.

“We're really starting to hum right now,” Earp says. “So I feel confident that we can bring customers in. I feel confident that we can start to look for some corporate folks that we can say, ‘Hey, we know you're doing a bunch of signs. We know you're making a bunch of stickers. Let's partner up and let's do those things.’”

Built “from the mud” and already humming, Harvest Print & Media is proving that Earp’s final clock-out at Lake Land wasn’t the end of his career. It was simply the start of his next — and perhaps most ambitious — print run.