Dave Hultin, Author at Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

Sooner or later every print shop hires somebody to sell, and then finds out the job can’t be handed over. The problem is rarely the new hire. It’s that there’s nothing to hand him. Everything about how the shop sells lives in the owner’s head. The veteran rep has her own version, and hers works, and it lives in her head too, in a form nobody else can use. So the new person learns by riding along between deliveries and picking up whatever came up that week. He comes back from a call without what estimating needs. He promises a date without checking the schedule, and it turns up on Saturday. And the same five or six questions come back to the owner’s desk over and over, answered out loud and then gone. That’s its own kind of funny, in a trade where a shop will turn around a 40-page procedure manual for a customer on a Tuesday and has never once printed its own. Eight months in, nobody can say whether he was a bad hire or was never taught the job. That’s a hard thing to be sure about when the test was never written down. Why the

Sooner or later, every print shop loses an account and finds out when the predictable work stops showing up. Nobody called to complain. There was no bad job, no missed deadline, no argument over a proof. The orders for the manuals came in every quarter, the trade show pieces had been printed every March for eleven years, and then one spring the buyer went out to get fresh bids for the printing and somebody came in cheaper. What stings afterward isn’t the loss. It’s the look around the shop. Nobody had been out to see them that quarter. Nobody had talked to them about anything except the order that was already running. The account had been on autopilot for a year. In a print shop, a customer who never calls is either perfectly happy or about to leave, and from the inside those two look identical. Ask an owner which twenty accounts the shop can’t afford to lose and the names come without looking anything up. Ask where that list is written down and the answer is usually a pause. The top twenty get the same proofs, the same invoices, and the same holiday card as the other few hundred.

Sooner or later, every print shop sorts its customers. It doesn’t happen formally, and usually not on paper. It happens in the schedule, in who gets called back first, in which job the shop will work a weekend for. Almost everywhere, the sorting runs on one number, which is how much the customer bills. That number is easy to get. Every system reports it. It’s on the year-end summary and it’s in the owner’s head. It’s also the one number that can’t answer the question the owner is actually asking, which is whether the account is worth what the shop gives up for it. Why Sorting Customers by Sales Hides the Answer The advice every owner has heard is to take care of the top twenty percent. What that advice never says is to subtract. Nobody’s version of it asks what the biggest account costs to keep. The account most likely to be quietly unprofitable is the one sitting at the top of the revenue list, because size is exactly what buys the accommodations nobody charges for. Somebody works the weekend, the rush shipping gets absorbed rather than billed, and three other jobs move to make room. None of that

Your email list isn’t working as hard as it should, and you can probably name the reason without checking. The newsletter only happens when work slows down. Somebody writes it from scratch at 9 p.m. the night before it sends, between a quote that was due yesterday and tomorrow’s press check, and then the shop gets busy again and the list goes back to waiting. Every commercial printer has contributed at least one issue to the night-before newsletter genre. The list itself is usually full of people who already buy printing, which makes the silence expensive: marketing stops exactly when the shop is busiest, and the future pipeline stops getting built right when it should be. Why More Newsletter Ideas Won’t Fix Your Email List The first instinct is to treat this as a content problem and ask AI for newsletter ideas. That works, as far as it goes. Any AI tool will hand you 20 usable topics in under a minute, and ideas were never really the bottleneck. What stalls a print shop newsletter is everything around the ideas. Nobody decided how often it goes out. Nobody owns the send. No issue has a job to do, so every

Sooner or later, every print shop owner has the same social media story. The shop’s page sits there with three months of nothing on it. The owner knows it. He has tried to fix it before. He hired a freelancer who posted generic content. He asked a CSR to “do social” on top of orders, proofs, and customer calls. Both attempts were dead within a quarter. He opens LinkedIn out of habit, sees a competitor’s post about a community sponsorship, and closes the tab before the bad feeling fully arrives. If that story sounds familiar, here is the good news: getting started is not your problem. You have already proven you can post for a few weeks. What you have not proven is that your shop can keep posting while jobs are on press, estimates are due, and deliveries are going out the door, with content that does not look like generic social media. Why AI Captions Won’t Fix a Dead Feed The temptation here is to treat this as an AI problem and reach for the kind of generic AI advice you see everywhere. Ask AI to write you social media captions. Ask AI to generate a few content

Every print shop owner I know has the same Tuesday morning experience eventually. The quote list is sitting there. Some of the estimates are recent and active. Some are clearly dead. And a stubborn handful are neither. The customer never said no. They just stopped responding three weeks ago, and now there is no graceful way to know whether to chase the work or let it go. You look at the list and feel the weight of it. Each one of those quotes represents real work, real revenue, and real time the team spent estimating. Some of them are recoverable. You just cannot tell which ones. The list does not come with labels. An AI Chat vs. an AI Workflow The temptation here is to treat this as an AI problem and reach for the kind of generic AI advice you see everywhere. Ask AI to write better follow-up emails. Use AI to remind you when quotes are aging. Have AI rewrite your estimate cover page so it sounds more compelling. That is unstructured AI use. It produces a stack of helpful-looking outputs that don’t actually fit your shop, your customers, or how your team works. The follow-up email AI

You know the moment. Your sales rep is in a follow-up email with a prospect who’s comparing three printers. The prospect asks, “Why should we switch to you?” Your rep types “great quality, great service,” stares at it for a minute, and hits send anyway because there’s nothing better to grab. It’s not that the proof doesn’t exist. You have customers who’ve been with you for years, who send referrals without being asked, who tell your CSRs “we love working with you guys.” The proof is everywhere. It’s just not in a form anyone on your team can reach for when it actually matters. When AI Makes It Worse Before It Makes It Better Most printers who try using AI for testimonials start the same way. They paste in something a customer said and ask AI to “make it sound better.” And AI delivers something that sounds polished, professional, and completely useless in a sales conversation. “We are extremely satisfied with the exceptional print quality and outstanding customer service provided by this establishment.” Nobody said that. Nobody would say that. And no prospect would believe it. That’s what unstructured AI use looks like: the output is technically fine, but it

You already know how to sell printing. Your customers stick around, referrals come in, and when someone needs what your shop does well, you close the work. That part has never been the problem. The problem is the other list: the 30 or 40 prospects who don’t know you yet. You’ve probably pulled that list together at some point: marketing directors, event coordinators, business owners who are spending money on print, just not at your shop yet. And that list is probably sitting in the same spot it was sitting in last month, because every time you sit down to start calling, you realize you don’t have a plan for what to say when someone picks up. It’s Not a Motivation Problem Here’s what that usually looks like. You tell yourself, “Monday is the day.” You’re going to work the list. Then Monday morning comes, and you’ve got quotes to finish, a job in production that needs attention, and an email from a customer who needs something by Thursday. The list slides to next week. And the week after that. It feels like a discipline problem, but it’s a systems problem. The thing you actually dread is starting from scratch

Some printers left the 2026 National Print and Sign Owners Association (NPSOA) Spring Leadership Summit with a notebook full of ideas. Others left with a clear plan for what they were going to implement first. By the time you read this, that difference is already starting to show. The printers with a plan are putting something into motion. For many, that next step now includes figuring out how to use AI to get real work done in their print business. The rest are back in the day-to-day, putting out fires and trying to figure out where to start. That moment—right after the conference, when everything feels clear and possible—is exactly what this slide addressed during the workshop, Copy, Paste, Win! AI Workflows for Printers. What happens next determines whether those ideas turn into results, or fade back into the background. That Same Divide Is Showing Up with AI That same divide is starting to show up in how printers are approaching AI. The difference isn’t effort. It’s structure. Without structure, ideas fade. With structure, they turn into results. Some are already using AI with structure — completing real work, moving faster, and building repeatable processes they can rely on. Others

Stepping Back to See the Whole Picture Over the last several months, we’ve followed Clay Morgan from the moment AI first caught his attention to the day it became part of his shop’s everyday rhythm. Along the way, he went from experimenting in quiet moments to equipping his team with repeatable workflows. He discovered that AI isn’t just a tool for speed; it’s a catalyst for clarity, connection, and leadership. Now, Clay pauses to reflect. And the view looks different from here. A Quiet Evening in the Shop The lights were still on, but the shop had gone still. Jess had left early to take her son to a school event. Rick had closed up the delivery van an hour ago. Even the presses, freshly cleaned and reset for Monday, sat in patient silence. Clay walked the floor slowly, letting himself notice what he might usually overlook. There was the production schedule pinned on the back wall, a layout that had started as a rough AI-generated draft before Rick made it his own. A stack of reorder notes sat neatly on Jess’s desk. Some of the emails had come from an AI workflow they’d created weeks ago, now running quietly