Case Study: Sir Speedy – St. Petersburg, FL

Growing a print services business with high-quality Ricoh production systems and support

About Sir Speedy, St. Petersburg, Florida

Recognizing growth potential in the St. Petersburg, Florida area, Jerry and Lillian Powers purchased a Sir Speedy 28 years ago, migrating from Michigan, where they had founded their first Sir Speedy years before. The Powers' son, Jason, joined the family business as vice president 20 years ago and now plays a key role in growing the business. Today, the franchise serves all types of clients — from financial to medical to smaller community shops.

"Making the transition to an all-digital shop isn't an easy one. But when we started working with Ricoh, we experienced amazing support, all the way from service to help with business development. The equipment is very reliable and the color quality is amazing."
Jason Powers
Vice President of Operations
Sir Speedy, St. Petersburg, FL.

Challenge

The nature of Sir Speedy's business had changed and new print solutions had emerged. Demand for long print runs was decreasing while demand for quick turns was rising. So they made the bold move to become an all-digital shop. They purchased production print units from another provider, but these systems couldn't accommodate specialty markets and substrates, produce sophisticated color work or handle wide-format printing. To truly realize their all-digital vision, Sir Speedy knew they needed to find reliable, cost-effective digital production solutions that could deliver the image quality and diverse applications that their customers wanted.

Solution

After seeing an impressive demonstration of Ricoh's latest production systems at a convention hosted by their parent company, Franchise Services, Inc. (FSI), Sir Speedy felt confident moving forward with us — knowing they would have the full support of Ricoh and FSI.

Initially, Sir Speedy purchased two advanced Ricoh production print solutions — a color digital press and a black-and-white production unit. After seeing great results with these systems, they added a wide-format printer from Ricoh that opened doors to new opportunities in additional specialty markets.

The innovative color production unit produced 90 pages-per-minute for higher throughput and faster transitions between high-duty runs. It also had a 5th color station for outstanding image quality and support for a wide range of substrates needed to produce point-of-purchase displays, business cards, menus, oversized prints and more.

The advanced black-and-white system with a cutter produced reports, booklets and newsletters with crisp text and images at 1200 x 4800 dpi resolution while providing advanced scanning capabilities and inline punch. It also simplified production tasks for high-volume applications and featured user-replaceable parts to help maximize uptime.

The powerful inkjet wide-format printer enabled faster speeds and more media options to print on virtually any substrate — even wood, stone and tile — up to 2 inches thick and up to 4 x 8 ft. tall. It's ideally suited to applications such as backlit displays, signage, posters, interior decor, glass and metal decorative panels. Longer life UV-LED lamps also reduced energy consumption.

Result

Pop up display banner in exhibition area.

With Ricoh as their partner, Sir Speedy successfully made the transition to become an all-digital shop. The demand for quality digital color printing is still high — driving the possibility to add a second Ricoh color unit; however, they see wide-format as their biggest growth potential. And, with replaceable parts on hand and Ricoh's Trained Customer Replaceable Units (TCRU) program, their service time has been reduced and they can pick the best time to perform their own preventive maintenance to ensure continued uptime.
"The support from the Ricoh team has been a great asset to me. I really love working with Ricoh," said Jason Powers, vice president of operations at Sir Speedy, St. Petersburg, FL.

Download PDF