Tami Reese: In It for the Love of Print

Tami Reese

Tami Reese discovered her love of printing when she was just a little girl living on a military base. A bookmobile would come once a week, and every single time she couldn’t get enough of it.

“I just loved the smell of that bookmobile, so when I was little, I’d even think, ‘Someday when I grow up, I’m going to be a printer, and I’m going to design things on a page,’” Reese reflects.

It’s safe to say that Reese’s childhood dreams have come true. Today she is the operations manager of the Design and Print Center at Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, where she has worked for 33 years.

Born in California and raised in Utah, Reese worked for Microsoft as a graphic designer in Seattle in the 1980s. In fact, she went through her new employee orientation with Melinda French, better known now as Melinda French Gates.

“We would have dinner with Bill Gates,” she says. “I mean, it was just an awesome job.”

But when Reese’s husband got a job opportunity in Utah in 1988, they decided to move back. A friend of Reese’s urged her to apply to Intermountain Healthcare. So she did.

And then she quit.

“I started, and I didn’t like it,” she explains. “I was butting heads with my boss, and I was at a point in my life where I had just had a baby, and I didn’t need to work, so I said, ‘You know what, I don’t need this.’ But after I quit, they called me and asked me to come back and offered me my boss’s position because they had fired him.”

Building a Print Center

When Reese first started at Intermountain Healthcare, she says it didn’t even have a print center.

“We had to outsource all of our printing. We eventually had a color copier in-house, so we were able to take care of people’s needs on a small scale, but we basically just did graphic design. I was hired as a supervisor, but I was only supervising over one person back then,” Reese says.

It stayed that way for years, but then in 2012, she was tasked with creating a business case to create a centralized print center for Intermountain. After examining contracts, configuring space requirements, and researching equipment, the in-plant opened its doors in October of 2012. Within the first month, Reese says the center had revenue of $275,000. For years the new in-plant took all orders via email until finally going live with WebCRD from Rochester Software Associates in 2018. Reese recalls it was not the easiest of launches.

“There were tears, and there was pushback because it wasn’t the way we were used to doing things,” she recalls — but it all worked out in the end. “Since 2018, the WebCRD has been a game changer; our revenue will be $500,000-$600,000 a month.”

There are even bigger changes to come for the in-plant. It plans to relocate from its current 7,000-sq.-ft. facility in Midvale, Utah, to a brand new space 25 minutes away that boasts 20,000 sq. ft. and allows for the installation of a new Ricoh Pro VC60000 roll-fed inkjet press. Reese says the in-plant has been in the process of moving since last summer.

“With the housing market in Utah being crazy, it also affects trying to find warehousing and everything else. Everybody’s remote now, so you can find office space really easily, but we had a hard time finding the warehouse. But when we did, we started paying rent on it in June of last year — $47,000 a month — and it’s been with the architects and the construction crews since,” she says.

Reese anticipates moving into the new space by the middle of September this year.

Strong Staff, Strong Bonds

Back when the in-plant first opened, it had just five employees. Now the Design and Print Center stands strong with 19 people on staff. And in the years since opening, Reese says there’s been little turnover with her team.

“I’m not a micromanager in any sense of the word. And I feel like we all have a mutual respect for each other; we’re friends. But we also know when it’s time to get to work,” Reese says. “And honestly, I learned a lot from working at Microsoft; they didn’t have set work hours there; they let people work when it was best for them, and that’s how I treat my staff.”

Reese believes firmly in creating a great work environment for her staff, and what makes her most proud about her employees is the fact that they are problem solvers.

“They don’t need to be babysat; they’re just awesome workers. And we’re just a big family, really. We all care about each other, truly. They’re all motivated. We all have the same goal in mind, and we work for it,” Reese says.

For in-plant managers trying to craft their workplace culture, Reese says the best work environments embrace change and are open to new ideas from staff.

Being A Woman in The Industry

As a woman in a male-dominated industry, Reese is no stranger to gender inequality in print. She says there’s always, unfortunately, going a be a lingering mindset that you won’t be taken as seriously as a man would be.

“To this day, I still have conversations where I’m the only woman in the group, and they only look at the man to speak,” Reese says. “And there were points in my career that I wasn’t able to get the title or the salary of other men that were doing less than me,” Reese says.

Thankfully, with her current boss — Scott Schofield, assistant VP of Supply Chain Services at Intermountain — that has all changed, she says, and now Reese finally has the title change and pay she deserves.

“When I look back on when I started now, I really can’t believe I built all of this,” she says. “It’s just such a successful operation. We have the ability; I have the ability.”