Deliver What You Promise

Adding a digital press to its manufacturing business has helped Traco Manufacturing augment its position in shrink film printing.

New technology, and what some might consider an old-school philosophy, can be a winning combination if you do it right. Just look at president and founder John Palica's Traco Manufacturing. It started out as a manufacturer of one small portable shrink wrap machine in 1985 and grew, eventually offering printed shrink sleeves as a service, along with its wide array of existing product lines. The trouble was Traco wasn't a printer and off-shored most of the print work to be printed either via flexographic or rotogravure presses. The arrangement worked for a time, but the printing industry these days is all about short runs and just-in-time printing—nearly impossible if a business is sending work overseas to be printed. What's a business to do?

Well, it could jump on the digital bandwagon, which is exactly what Traco did. Once it combined digital technology with its tried-and-true motto of "promise only what you can deliver, and deliver what you've promised," Traco was well on its way to success with short runs, building on the trust it had already established between the market and the company's sales staff.

Honesty is the best policy

When Palica and his management team look at prospective employees, they look for candidates who possess impeccable honesty and integrity. "So when you talk to a salesperson at Traco, he becomes the source for you for just about any product line that you want, even if we don't sell it. We can direct you and give you some good information on where to find the product. We don't try to broker things and become middlemen. I think our sales team [members have] become 'go-to people' for purchasing agents around the world because they can trust them," he says.

Building trust is no easy task, but with what Palica calls old-fashioned business practices, it comes naturally. “There’s no hype in our sales. We’re very factual,” he says. “We own up to any of the mistakes we’ve made. We’re not perfect. We’ve made mistakes in the past. We have to own up to that, and we do so. I think it’s very hard to find old-fashioned business tactics and practices like we have at Traco where we actually promise what we can deliver and deliver what we promise.” Although he admits that may sound a little clichéd, “if you really do that, which we really try to do, then customers will learn to appreciate it and they’ll tell others.”

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