Business People Vermont June 2012 : Page 9
I t’s hard to tell in casual conversa-tion which of Larry Brown’s two main activities is more important to him. One feeds his soul, and one feeds his pocketbook. On the soul side of the equa-tion is Brown’s affinity for his avocation, which encompasses a longtime involvement in fire and ambulance work. A devout Christian, he has served not only as a fire department chaplain for over 30 years, but also as captain in the Barre City Fire Department and deputy chief of the East Montpelier Fire Department. He has launched a couple of fire and ambulance services, and has encouraged both of his sons in their pur-suit of national certification as firefighter paramedics. On the pocketbook side is his long-time interest in graphics and printing, which led to the 1988 founding, with his wife, Diane, their sons, Jim and Bob, and daughter, Carole, of L. Brown and Sons Printing. “We started the company at our home in East Montpelier,” says Brown. “I had an old barn building there. I went in and shoveled cow manure out, poured a cement floor, redid the walls myself, put a little dock area in for loading trucks, and converted it into a small print shop 28 by 64 feet.” All that was needed, he says, was a substantial loan to finance equipment. “My wife was very nervous about this. She said, ‘If the banker says yes, we’ll know it was right. If it’s no, we’ll do some-thing else.’ It took 10 minutes to get the loan.” Now 14 years later, the barn has been left behind for a 22,000-square-foot facil-ity in Barre plus leased space in the for-mer Ethan Allen Furniture Co. building in Randolph. Employees number around 25, plus an occasional group of 40 to 50 temporary workers in Randolph, hired for six to 12 weeks at a time through Westaff to accommodate big projects. Learning of Brown’s history, it seems natural that he leaned toward the print-ing business. He grew up in Clinton, Mass., in the shadow of Colonial Press, one of the largest commercial printers on the East Coast. “Everybody in that area always looked to get a job in the Colonial Press graphics division,” he says. Brown studied graphics at vocational school for four years and, following grad-uation in 1965, took a job with Colonial. He pursued additional courses in graph-ics, estimating, and commercial printing at satellites of Northeastern University. “The Colonial Press was an extremely large company at the time,” says Brown, “with several hundred, if not thousands, working there. I worked in a number of divisions there — bindery, press, fulfill-ment — so I had a good experience level.” One good experience was meeting Diana Falldorf. She had taken a job there to fill time before she could enter a den-tal hygiene program in Worcester. They married in 1967, both age 19. In 1970, he left Colonial for a job at Atlantic Union College Press, later called Atlantic Graphics, in Lancaster, Mass., where, in the next five years, he rose from pressman to assistant general manager. By 1980, with three young chil-dren, the Browns decided to leave Massachusetts for Vermont, familiar to them from their friendship with Ron and Steve Desroches (right), digital press supervisor, confers with Wright Caswell of Xerox Corp. about Brown’s newly acquired iGen4 digital press. Marty Kowalkowski, who had bought Leahy Press in Montpelier in 1969. Brown and Ron Kowalkowski had met when Brown was with Atlantic Union College Press. “I decided to leave the printing indus-try and was hired to work as a sales rep for a company that was serving the blind and visually impaired in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont,” says Brown. The family packed their belongings in a U-Haul and headed north. Unfortunately, when they arrived, Brown was told that the job had been given to someone else. “Unbeknownst to the regional sales rep who hired me,” he says, “another rep in the New Hampshire area had hired a salesperson to cover the same territory the day before I was hired and hadn’t got the information back to headquarters.” Brown called the Kowalkowskis, who, for some time, had been urging him to come work for them. “I worked with Ron and Marty from 1980 until 1988,” he says. “I had a vast background in four-color printing. At that time they were a smaller company, and I was able to help them with putting in larger four-color equipment, moving to their present loca-tion, and helping organize it.” “Larry worked quite a few years for me as pressroom foreman,” says Ron, “and as time went on, he decided to step out on his own. I always like to keep friends ... and good competition!” he adds with a laugh. “We started out as a company with zero accounts,” says Brown. “After we got the loan, we put in presses and cameras, a folder and cutter, and the necessary things to run a small company.” Diane was to handle the finances and office management, Carole would help in the bindery and take over meal planning and prep, and Brown and the boys would sell and run the presses. The first day the company was open — “a Monday,” says Brown — he wrote an order. “The first doctor’s office I stopped at, I explained I was starting a printing business, could do a fast turnaround at a good price, and the secretary said, ‘We need 1,000 envelopes.’” The boys were 13 and 15 at the time, says Brown. “I used to take Jim, the 13-year-old, with me on sales calls, and Bob, at 15, was much more mechani-cally inclined, so I trained him to run equipment — all aspects of the trade. It was part of their home-school program, which we did through high school.” Jim eventually went to Oregon, where he became “the youngest advanced life support instructor in paramedics at BUSINESS PEOPLE–VERMONT • JUNE 2012 JEFF CLARKE 9
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