executive perspectives: Living the American Dream

Justin Zavadil was born into the print industry. His father, Larry Zavadil, is the founder and CEO of Glenwood, Minnesota-based American Solutions for Business (ASB). Under Larry's leadership, the company grew from a small distributorship into an industry-leading distributor of printing, promotions, office supplies, corporate apparel, e-commerce solutions and enterprise-wide document management.

Throughout Justin's middle school and high school career, he performed many odd jobs at ASB. He worked everywhere from the mailroom to the warehouse, and performed maintenance on-site. He could've chosen a different path after graduating from the University of Minnesota, but ASB was his calling. It was home.

Justin spent four years selling for the company in the Minneapolis market. He has been working at headquarters for the past 4-1⁄2 years and currently serves as vice president of sales and vendor relations.

Here, Justin talks a little business.

Print+Promo (P+P): How do you set goals for yourself?
Justin Zavadil (JZ): I set annual and quarterly goals for my personal performance that should directly impact the performance of the company if I am doing it right. I try to set weekly and monthly benchmarks and tasks that are necessary to the success of my long-term goals. Since I head up our sales resource group, my goals consist of things like recruitment, top line sales and vendor program participation.

P+P: How does your company remain nimble and ahead of the curve?
JZ: Technology! We have invested a large amount of time, money and resources into the technology that will improve our business and position us for large-scale growth in the near future. We invested in a major ERP (enterprise resource planning) implementation that was extremely difficult, to say the least. That system is in and operating as it should be. We now have what we refer to as "the holy grail," a system that gives us the ability to have the order in at the time it was created. With 500 sales associates who place their own orders, we were at their mercy as to when they would send in orders and many times we would receive vendor invoices prior to receiving our sales associates' purchase orders. This system allows our associates to enter their orders from a smartphone, tablet or laptop in the field.

We also have invested a lot in our customer facing e-commerce platform, including just-in-time wearable programs with all of the major wholesalers, print-on-demand platforms, programs that allow our customers to upload logos on merchandise on the fly and many other exciting things.

P+P: What do you expect to be some of the biggest challenges the industry will face?
JZ: One of our biggest challenges is going to be replacing our retiring sales associates' business with new business. We have grown over the past two years, but much of that has come from additions and company acquisitions. With an aging sales force, our biggest challenge is to address the erosion in our "same store sales." Over the years, we have always been a wonderful landing spot for sales associates who were educated by "the majors" but as we all know, those companies are few and far between these days. We need to be able to provide the education necessary to train new salespeople. We are working hard to find ways to help our associates looking to retire and at the same time helping to transition a new salesperson into the business.

P+P: What keeps you up at night?
JZ: I don't sleep a whole lot in the first place, but the thing about our business that keeps me up the most is the changing buyers in the marketplace. Our customers are getting younger and are latching on to new technology, different modes of communication and e-commerce. I spend a lot of time thinking about how our marketing, e-commerce and strategic operations departments can make the customer experience easier for our end-users. As more millennials enter the workplace, we are positioning ourselves to be a company that provides the positive overall brand experience these young professionals are looking to conduct business with.

P+P: What would people be surprised to learn about you?
JZ: My wife and I don't have any children yet, but we do have two beautiful horses (a paint and an off-the-track thoroughbred), a cat, and our baby, a 6-year-old blue Great Dane named Franklin. I like to run, bike, ice fish, bird hunt, snowboard and play basketball. I am an avid University of Minnesota Gopher fan, so that makes me a glutton for punishment. My brother and I own a bar/restaurant on the U of M campus, which he operates. You can find my wife and I pouring beer there before and after Gopher athletic events.