It’s time, ladies and gentlemen, to unveil the Printing Impressions Top 300. Unfortunately, Printing Impressions doesn’t include some valuable parameters, such as productivity per employee. By adding a column for productivity per employee, the table becomes more interesting. Although I am not allowed to re-share the PDF, you can easily do it yourself.

Since the 2024 edition was published, AI has improved, and therefore, you should follow these steps. Get the Top 300 list from Printing Impression (piworld.com). Now sign into you ChatGPT account, and upload the PDF and add this or similar prompt to ChatGPT: “Please make a table of all the data, and add a column "productivity per employee" where you take the revenue and divide with number of employees - please do all 300 companies - and remove all extra text not related to the specific companies. Insert a column between Revenue and Last year's revenue, and calculate the percentage difference over the year. Enhance the table with missing data like the number of employees, and finally make it downloadable as an Excel document.”

Minutes later. You will receive a file that allows you to utilize the data to gain significantly more insight than just revenue size.

Take the Top 300 as is. You will get a list of the 300 largest printing companies in North America based on revenue, and of course, you can see that RR Donnelley increased their revenue, 13% from $4.647 million to $5.251 million. Still, if you looked into the 2023 edition, you will see that it’s probably some error, as the revenue for that year was exactly 13% lower.

The Top 300 reveals a total revenue decrease of almost 3 billion dollars. Running the above prompt will enable you to raise similar questions and dig deeper. It would have been great if Printing Impressions had dug a bit deeper to try to understand why some of the changes are so radical, but we will :-)

I have, for years, scraped the list, as productivity per employee is way more interesting than revenue. First and foremost, you can compare performance with your company, and you will also soon realize that RR Donnelley may be the largest printing company in the US. Still, they spend MUCH more money managing their business than the smartest. When you sort the list based on productivity per employee (or revenue per employee), you soon realize that the data can’t be used blindly. Companies like 4 Over International, Minuteman Press, and AlphaGraphics are all chains where the chain's revenue is consolidated to the HQ, which, of course, has fewer employees.

If you remove the chain-like or misleading companies from the list, you will end up with an average productivity of almost $260,000, a drop from 2023's $262,000. One hundred twenty-three companies pass the average, which is fantastic. RRD, Cimpress, Quad, and Taylor are below average, meaning that the cost of operation is higher than average. This should be ‘lower’ hanging fruit for increased profit, but still, it seems that it isn’t the case.

We will write some follow-up stories on the Top 300, talking to some of the winners and losers - stay tuned :-)

---

Making a list of data is one thing, and I am not underestimating the work it takes. However, what I find interesting is evaluating the data. What do they say about our industry's dynamics, and why are some companies thriving, while others are suffering? Can we learn?