PrintGlobe was founded in October 2000 by company President Dan Steinborn . With a mission to become the leading online source for printing services, PrintGlobe launched the www.printglobe.com portal in February 2002 and has since built a strong customer base in all 50 states. PrintGlobe currently has more than 30,000 customers, including Apple Computers, The Gap, K Mart, The White House, Microsoft, HP, Lockheed Martin, Kraft, NASA, Disney and more. PrintGlobe also serves a host of major univ
How It Began
Dan Steinborn was always destined to own his own business. At the age of 8 he and his identical twin brother started selling alfalfa sprouts on the downtown mall in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Later, while in college at the University of Texas as a journalism student, Dan and his twin also formed a non-profit organization that focused on providing recycling services to apartment dwellers in Austin, and also published a full color magazine. While neither of these two early endeavors were major successes, Dan credits these early experiences for giving him the basic entrepreneurial toolkit and confidence to undertake what would be the most important business move of his life, starting a company called Corporate Communications of Austin (CCA), in 1995. The goal of CCA was to offer both graphic design and branding solutions for businesses, as well as offer a range of print brokering products and services.
Just as sure as CCA was busy helping its clients embrace this new and promising medium called ‘the internet’, the company itself started brainstorming what its opportunity might be on the World Wide Web. The end result of that brainstorm was PrintGlobe.com, the Internet Printing Superstore.
The opportunity seemed obvious and vast. In 1999 there were only a small handful of printers or graphic designers that had good websites, and almost nobody in the printing market could actually sell a print job completely online. PrintGlobe was determined to change that and lead the internet printing revolution.
Challenge
The business of selling printing requires solid systems in place to manage the mountain of customer and project-specific data, data on new leads, and mange the workflow that is necessary to produce a high volume of print jobs accurately and on-time.
It became clear to PrintGlobe after 5 years of operating CCA that the most critical part of its foundation for maintaining sanity and profitability for its growing printing business had to be a solid IT infrastructure for the company.
Upon the transition to PrintGlobe in 2001, CCA had no network at the office. The company didn’t own any servers, nor did it operate a centralized database for managing leads or orders. The company was about to grow from 5 employees to more than 10 one year later, to more than 30 employees today. The future of the company depended on addressing these core IT deficiencies
Solution
With the funding of PrintGlobe.com in August 2000, Dan began to build out the essential IT solutions that would allow the company to build eight straight years of double digit growth.
The company network started with only one Dell server initially and one PC that was retrofitted to act as a network server. The server acted as the main file server for the company and its employees. The server also hosted the first client database, which was developed in MS Access. The retrofitted PC hosted Active Directory, which is the software that manages the user accounts and network privileges for The first big IT lesson was an expensive one. PrintGlobe learned the hard way in 2003 that a company should also have a backup domain controller server in case your primary server fails. Being that the computer that Active Directory was put on was both old and not a Dell, it failed and brought down the network one afternoon. More than a thousand dollars and two days later, the new network (Active Directory) was rebuilt and put on a used, but STILL RUNNING, Dell PowerEdge 1300.
The company later invested in a second server to act as the backup Active Directory.
Summary
PrintGlobe has matured into a profitable and efficient company, and Dan Steinborn credits the IT investments for making it possible.
“Our revenue per employee is greater than $250,000, which is a healthy metric for any business, especially a printing company. There is absolutely no way we could have achieved this revenue per employee without the efficiency delivered by our network of Dell servers and custom developed information systems.”