Five Questions With: Doug Nixon, Co-Owner of Speedpro Imaging

Doug Nixon co-owns Speedpro Imaging – Essex with Jerry Gainey, a studio that prints high-quality advertising banners seen all throughout the area. Speedpro has been in Nutley since last fall.

1) What made you want to enter the field of printing?

I spent a number of years working in the insurance industry, 27 to be exact. I went through a couple of downsizings. Jerry [Gainey], my business partner, also worked in the corporate world. We both woke up one day and said, you no what, we’re 55 years old; the corporate world has no guarantees any more. Do we want to spend our next 10 to 15 years of work sitting on the edge wondering if our jobs would be there or not, or do we want to take a gamble and try something different?

2) What is the most interesting aspect of what Speedpro Imaging does?

The world of advertising today, besides moving from print to digital, is becoming a bold, ‘in your face’ world of advertising. For us at Speedpro, the most interesting thing is that we get to look at all kinds of graphics all day long and analyze how people advertise their businesses. We also look at what might be effective ways to advertise. We get to interact with all kinds of folks.

3) How diversified is your clientele?

From a geographic standpoint, our territory is Essex County. There are seven Speedpros in New Jersey. While we’re located in Essex County, and we have a large client base in Essex County, we can market wherever we want to market. We have customers locally, and we have customers as far away as Bethlehem, Pa. We also have a number of customers in New York City.

4) What made Nutley a good fit for Speedpro?

When we started looking for space, we had specific requirements in terms of what we needed. We needed a spot that had a garage door and a bay; we needed flex space. We took a look at a lot of different spaces, but we kept coming back to this spot because like the town feel here in Nutley. We like being able to go out and walk up to the diner or the post office. We didn’t want to be in a corporate park. We wanted to be somewhere where we could integrate ourselves in the community and get known.

5) What is the average day like here at Speedpro?

It can go from mild to wild depending on what’s going on. Every day jobs are coming in. We have a production meeting (for the four person staff) in the morning. We talk about what’s on the table and what has to go out. From there, [half of the staff] moves into their world of marketing and printing. My world and Jerry’s world is a lot of going out and meeting people. We’re different from the competition because we’re on the road every day, meeting people and marketing ourselves. The way to develop contacts isn’t through the computer like some of our competitors think; it’s getting out there and developing face-to-face contacts.