9

HATTIE: Number 9. A Willingness to Evolve

Steve Hoffman started in business printing quality photos for the real estate industry. He's still printing quality photos but you can see for yourself he has evolved!

STEVE HOFFMAN (Founder and Owner, Modern Postcard): (Voiceover) Fortunately we started with technology first. When we went to Modern Postcard, the only way that we could do it was to have everything internal be digitized. Everything was digital from the very beginning with Modern Postcard.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Steve Hoffman is founder and owner of Modern Postcard. He has 250 employees who produce over 100 million postcards a year for some 150,000 customers.

STEVE: Yes, 1993...

HATTIE: You said, `We're going out there. We're not staying with old stuff. We're going forward.'

STEVE: If you're going to get 32 images on a plate, how do you get that? The key things with color is it has to be in a register, and the color has to be good. And the only way you can do that is through digital technology. We solved the problems back in 1993, '94 in terms of doing that. And so internally, we had a completely digital work flow. Now it's a question of, `How do we take people's information and stuff from the outside inside,' because we already knew where the landmines were.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) At their website, Modern Postcard's customers are invited into the digital workflow. Choose build online. Stock artwork is provided, or you can send in your own photos and artwork. No constraints, optimization all the way. Write your copy. Submit the card and pay with your credit card. And, you can email your mailing list so that you never lift another finger until you receive your own copy in the mail.

STEVE: Well, first of all, we made a pact not to ever do postcards.

HATTIE: Who's we?

STEVE: Jim Toya-Brown, my vice president, my wife...

HATTIE: She worked for the company then?

STEVE: She was actually one of our real estate photographers. And we were driving up to go skiing, and I said, `You know'--we were just talking about business, and I said, `You know, I think that we could probably do postcards just by taking a sheet of paper and cutting it into four sheets of paper basically.' And they said, `No, absolutely not. I don't want to have anything to do something that inexpensive.' And they basically promised me to drop the whole subject of postcards.

HATTIE: They felt it was demeaning?

STEVE: Well, we were heading more towards larger brochures and more quality and going the other direction. I kept trying to bring it down to what people could afford. If we apply the technology of the day towards that, we could actually produce something that the market would respond to.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Jim Toya-Brown came to work with Steve in 1986. He's senior vice president, part owner, friend and confidant.

JIM TOYA-BROWN: I mean, I've always been driven to work hard, you know. And whether it's mine or someone else's company, I mean, I've always put 110 percent. I mean, that sounds kind of cliche, but, you know, I've just always put that effort into it. And let me tell you something. It was not a pretty sight in the first couple years. I mean...

STEVE: The company basically started in a one-bedroom apartment.

HATTIE: And this is your one-bedroom apartment?

STEVE: Yes.

HATTIE: In January, 1976?

STEVE: 1976. And all I was, I was a photographer. And my claim to fame was that I was doing something that would normally cost $60 to take a very nice architectural photograph of a real estate building, and I would do it for $10 as opposed to $60.

HATTIE: Wow.

STEVE: In doing that, it was easy for me to capture as much market share as possible. And as I captured more market share, I found out that you can build in the efficiencies within your system.

HATTIE: Are you telling me that in this one-bedroom apartment, you were actually thinking market share?

STEVE: I was actually thinking market share.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) From 1976 until 1993, Steve worked to perfect processes, to serve the core customer, real estate agents. When a recession hit and real estate suffered, Steve and Jim agreed, they needed to find a new customer to serve.

STEVE: Actually, I was probably not the strongest believer in the postcards, 'cause It was a lot of work. And we were used to getting in work from professionals, professional photographers, then we would get the quality. When you take in work from amateurs...

HATTIE: Like me.

STEVE: ...they send in one-hour photo prints and want you to reproduce it. And sometimes, you get transparencies that are way overexposed, underexposed, off-color. And our philosophy back then was garbage in, garbage out, and there wasn't the technology to solve the problem economically. Color separation was very expensive, very time consuming. And fortunately Photoshop was the newest application on the block, but it ran on the Macintosh, which totally choked on an 8 megabyte file. But Silicon Graphics had one. Just the timing of everything--like within months of when Photoshop came out on Silicon Graphics, we had it on our machine, and lo and behold, we could take a photograph and change the color and edit it to our press needs, and we were off and running at that point. But that took about four to five months, and it was about a solid year before we said, `Postcards is the right way to go.'

HATTIE: And you had how many employees then?

STEVE: Sixteen.

HATTIE: Sixteen.

STEVE: Yeah.

HATTIE: So, really, the postcard product is what catapulted the company?

STEVE: Yes, absolutely.

(Voiceover) One of the key things that I heard, I think it was, in a book a long time ago was that everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die to get there. That's one of the key things that I've always felt was that from day one with my business was I didn't care about, you know, the number of hours. I didn't care about the effort. I was there to build an organization, to grow it and serve my customers and my employees. I love it. I love it.

HATTIE: These nine qualities needed for success over the long haul are hard but not impossible.

Good luck. We'll see you next time.