Page 14 - BusinessWest December 21, 2020
P. 14

     The Latest Word
At Hadley Printing, the Presses Have Started Rolling Again
By George O’Brien
Chris Derosiers was searching for a way to describe what things were like last spring, at the height of what’s now being
called the first COVID-19 surge.
And he found an analogy that probably works
for just about every small-business owner in this region.
“Every time we picked up the phone or answered an e-mail in the second half of March, it was ‘cancel this,’ or ‘please put this on hold.’ Literally, everything was just getting stopped in its tracks.”
“It’s like being on the highway ... you’re going to 65, 70 miles an hour and cruising along nicely, but with three-quarters of your trip still in front of you,” he said, effectively summing up how things were going during Q1 at Hadley Printing, the family-owned venture he serves as president.
“And then ... it’s like hit- ting a wall of traffic, and you don’t know how long that wall of traffic is. And six or seven months later, we’re just finally getting to the other side of that traf- fic jam.”
By that, he meant
the company has been
experiencing gradual
improvement over the
past several months, and
is approaching something
approximating normal:
business that is off per-
haps 10% from last year.
Recently, and for the first
time since the pandemic
started, the workflow was
such that team members
were actually able to earn
some overtime, a much-celebrated milestone because of what they believe it indicates.
What isn’t known is whether the company will hit another wall of traffic, or when, said Chris’s brother, Greg, the company’s vice president, add- ing quickly that this puts Hadley Printing in the same position as just about every company dur-
     Chris (left) and Greg Derosiers say Hadley Printing is back to something approximating normal, and employees have actually logged some overtime.
   ing the pandemic — an unsettling place, to be sure.
“What we don’t know is whether this ‘back to normal’ will stay that way, or whether there will
Hadley Printing
Continued on page 16
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