Today's Guest

Paul Baron is the founder and CEO of The Wall Printer USA, a product that is changing how walls get beautified. Paul is responsible for all executive functions, driving the growth of the corporation and the success of businesses that purchase a Wall Printer. His decades of business experience span B2B, B2C, retail, manufacturing, distribution, international business, and franchising. Paul thrives in rapid growth, high-energy environments and values a diverse culture with good people who like to dream big, work hard, and have fun. He leads with a positive attitude, humor, and humility.

Resources Shared

• The Wall Printer
• Thryv
  

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:

Hey, Hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street, and this week we have the founder and CEO of The Wall Printer USA, Paul Baron. Welcome, Paul.

Paul Baron:

Nice to be here, Gordon, with you and your audience. I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you.

Gordon Henry:

Great to have you. So Paul is the founder and chief executive of The Wall Printer USA. The Wall Printer is a new way to print vertically from signage to original art. The Wall Printer can quickly produce durable, long-lasting murals on any surface, indoors or outdoors. It's the fastest and most cost-effective way to communicate visually. Wall Printer USA helps people start and operate successful small businesses. We'll get into that through distributorships throughout the Western hemisphere. What should listeners get out of this episode? Vertical printing is a old idea, but Paul has found a new way to do it. Maybe this is a business you would like to get involved with. They're selling distributorships across the US and the world and as I said, we'll get into that and the opportunity there may be for you. So Paul, welcome to the show. Maybe you could start by just telling us a little bit about your career, your journey as an entrepreneur, and how you discovered wall printing.

Paul Baron:

Yeah, I appreciate that, Gordon. Thank you for the introduction. I was approached by with this vertical printing machine by a German manufacturer. In this particular case, the product was a $70,000 machine. I had never seen or heard about a vertical printing machine. I didn't know whether that was expensive, cheap, or whatever. I just knew that it was an innovation I had never seen or heard about before, and as a result I wanted to learn more, but I couldn't make the deal with the company. The company wanted me once again to be a hired salesperson and I just don't do that anymore. I wanted a piece of the company if I really liked it. So conversation broke down with him. I'm in my home office and I call to my wife in another room and I yell and I say, "Hey Maureen, come take a look at this."

Well, as soon as she hears that sentence and rather than come look at what I'm talking about, she usually cuts up my credit cards and changes the passwords on my bank account because she goes, "Here we go. Paul's going to invest in something nuts again." But this time after coaxing, she took a look and like me, she said, "Wow, never saw anything like that before." And she said, "If you think you could do something with it, go for it." When something comes across my desk that I just had never heard about or seen, it gets my curiosity. So I found out that there were in fact only five, literally a handful of customers in the world that manufactured these types of machines.

Gordon Henry:

Wall printers?

Paul Baron:

Vertical printing machines. The Wall Printer is my registered trademark. I now own three patents on the technologies that are in our machines.

Gordon Henry:

Let's just move to talking about wall printing, what it is and how is it different than billboards or signs painted on buildings or any of the kind of signage we've seen in the past? What's new and different about it?

Paul Baron:

Great question. And so Gordon, a vertical printing machine, which is the generic name and my wall printers, what they do is they're a inkjet printer. Your desktop printer on steroids and only prints, vertical surfaces. This is not a replacement for vinyl stickers that can do vehicle wraps and curved walls or can stick on some surfaces indoors, but it is an inkjet printer that can print any width, any height, any surface, indoors or outdoors, any digital art. It will print it and it'll print it on brick metal tile, plastic wood, wallboard, any surface at all.

Gordon Henry:

And you said, if I heard you right, any size, so if this is a New York City building with 300 foot high walls, you could do that?

Paul Baron:

So imagine a window washer. Let's say you phrase the question, can you wash the windows on that building? Well, yes. You have to erect scaffolding. Yeah, you have to bring the person washing the windows or our wall printer up to each level. But the technology you get and the training you get allow you to do what's called image stitching. So if you did have a large mural [inaudible 00:04:47] in the printer itself, which is designed to fit inside of an eight-foot standard US room, but of course it does also come with an extension rail that'll give it an extra three feet.

So if you don't have a ceiling or you have a tall ceiling or you're printing out doors, it will print without any other scaffolding or any other manipulation around it of logistics or anything. It'll print just out of the box anywhere from five and a half to nine feet image tall and then any width at all because it propels itself along tracks or on wheels if it's a perfectly flat surface. Tracks, if not and everything's included. But to answer your question, the technology is called image stitching. One image goes on top of another image and then there's no limit. You need a forklift of course, to bring yourself and the printer up to the next level, but pass those expenses through to your customer when they want a job like that.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, so that's my next question. So who are your customers? Are they advertisers who want giant images of their drink or beverage or?

Paul Baron:

So Gordon, they're actually our customer's customer. Our customers, to answer your question, they fall into two general buckets. Entrepreneurs, the startups, the people who see this as something innovative, they want to lock up a territory. We're not a franchise. We don't reach into their pockets and take royalties and revenues from them. What we do though is we do give exclusive geographic territory to people. So because this is innovative and people see this out there, they go, "Hey, that's pretty cool. I'd like to be in that business too." The other half, Gordon are those that have an existing business. They're painters, interior decorators, general contractors, artists, muralists. They're people who want to do this, use this machine to quickly, reliably put artwork on walls and maybe leverage their existing customers.

Gordon Henry:

Let's say I'm the first bucket, I'm an entrepreneur. I hear Paul winning on Main Street and I say, wow, that's a great business. I want to lock up St. Louis or I want to lock up Seattle or some territory that you have. Okay, walk me through the economics. What does it cost me to cost of entry to get the machine? How much can I charge for each of these murals? What's my revenue going to look like for a year? Just walk me through what it's like to run this as a business.

Paul Baron:

The machine costs $30,000. That's where you start. The machine is $30,000, that's if you just want a machine, so that guy with the painting business, the general contractor who doesn't care about territory because they've got already a business, they're marketing, they've got their customer base identified and they want to mine that and add more revenue, they buy a printer from us, $30,000. You get training, support, warranty, everything you need to start the business with a wall printing machine. Now you've got the entrepreneur, they want to lock up an exclusive territory. We reduce the price of the machine by $5,000. Your cost as a territory owner is $25,000 for that machine and you're obligated to buy one machine first, grow a business with our support being the only one because we promise now not to sell to anybody else in your territory. What's a territory? It goes by population and your budget and what kind of a business plan you have.

If you want the starter territory, the minimum investment is $10,000 for the territory. That's 300,000 people. You define it based on where your office is, where your location, a base of starting your operations is going to be, and we start adding zip codes or county lines or whatever gets you up to 300,000 people. And that includes, of course, all the businesses that are in that territory, schools, hospitals, everything else that are all your customer targets as well as the residential population, but that's your territory. Costs you $10,000, costs you 25 for the reduced price of the machine, so your all-in investment to get started is $35,000, plus the shipping cost of the machine, maybe $36,000. So that's your all-in cost. You are obligated after two years with our support, grow the business because we're not selling to anybody else in that territory, buy a second machine in two years, then by a third machine in the third year.

Our research, my research of these machines being out there for about 14 years worldwide has shown that an area of 300,000 people with a average economics of people who can afford this type of a service, and I'll get to that next of people who can pay for this, they could probably grow five machines out there with people, and that's what we really want. We want people to make a business that has equity for them, that builds value for themselves and their families. So how much can they make? Our printers never charge less than $20 per square foot. So take a five by eight mural, and I'm only using that as a small piece of art that has numbers that my 70-year-old brain can handle. So five by eight is 40 square feet. You charge the customer $800 for that. People are buying that every day of the week. $800 for five foot by eight foot mural. Absolutely beautiful.

Again, any wall. Indoors, outdoors. What does that cost you? Five by eight. 40 square feet. Ink costs about 50 cents a square foot. You've got $20 worth of ink. Our printers print at 15 to 20 square feet per hour. It took two hours to print that mural, so you put somebody on that printer at $20 an hour to pay them, that's $40 labor cost. Let's say it took you an hour to travel to that customer site because unlike signage, companies that print out hundreds of billboard signs or something like that, or small real estate signs or political signs, this machine goes to the site to print. It doesn't have to. Some of our customers print on paper, on plastic, on metal, and they actually never leave their office. They just print on fabrics or vinyl and make signs and send that to people. But ideally, it goes to the site and so that five by eight 40 square feet, you drove an hour to get there, you drive an hour back. Let's say you took an hour to set up the machine and get everything right.

So that's five hours total labor, all-in time, travel expenses, that's a hundred dollars labor, $20 ink. $120. I'm going to double that because you should practice the print first back in your office before going to a customer site, so it looks like what your customer wanted. You don't have to print the whole big mural, print a foot of it, make sure the machine and everything's working right, and so you've got $250 costs. I always like being over the top on expenses and what have you made? That $800, $20 a square foot, so that's a $550 net profit for that one small mural. Do two walls in a place or do two of those a week, that's a thousand dollars a week. That's what a small mom and pop could do. We hope people are printing every day and printing multiple walls and buying multiple printers. That's how you really make money with this and get into the six and seven figures. But anybody can take one machine and make a good high five, low six figure income for themselves,

Gordon Henry:

And then somewhere in there you got to figure out paying back the cost of the machine, assuming they borrowed the money to buy the machine, they've got to pay back essentially amortization on that loan.

Paul Baron:

Yeah, two prints like that, that have a net profit of $500 each. That's a thousand dollars net profit. You do two of those prints a month, you've paid for a machine just like you pay for a car. Many of our customers do take out equipment financing. The cost is anywhere from 700 to a thousand dollars depending on the time, how many years, what the interest rate they get, what their credit is, all that kind of stuff. Same thing as buying a car.

Gordon Henry:

So you've explained the economics really well and why it would work for somebody. Now they do have to go out and sell the job. They've got to find the customer.

Paul Baron:

Again, we're not a franchise, so we are not doing that marketing for them. This is their business. In fact, it's their business to the extent that one of the things they get is a customized wall printer with their brand, their logo, their email address and website and phone number, a QR code. We actually customize their printer with their brands because when these printers are out there on the streets, they act like advertisements in the field. But yes, they have to go ahead and use Facebook, social media, word of mouth, direct mail, billboards, anything any business would do.

Gordon Henry:

Right. Cost of customer acquisition. Yep. Okay, excellent. How many distributors have you signed up in the US here?

Paul Baron:

About 130 up to this point. Most of our customers, about 90% of our customers do fall into the... They take an exclusive territory and then about 10 to 15% by just the printer.

Gordon Henry:

And are you also handling distributor sales for other countries or just the US?

Paul Baron:

I am all of the Western hemisphere, so our customers, we have about 80% of our customers in the US, about 10% are in Canada, 10% throughout South America, Mexico, the Caribbean. We service and support everybody out of our Wilmington, North Carolina. These machines with internet access, we can log in and we can service them, identify any issues that they might have. Our training is done by Zoom. It takes about three hours for somebody to know how to use this machine, and then they have to practice to learn really to be confident and comfortable using it.

Gordon Henry:

You mentioned something interesting there. So if a machine has a problem, a mechanical problem or software problem, you can go in via internet and find that problem and fix it?

Paul Baron:

Yes.

Gordon Henry:

And that is a service you provide, so if I buy the machine from you, I'm not responsible for the upkeep?

Paul Baron:

No. You're responsible for the upkeep to the extent that we do give a one-year warranty, if there's a manufacturer defect in any of the hardware, and there are computer components, there are cables, there are pulley, there's tracks, there's all sorts of things. If something is defective, it'll be replaced under warranty free of charge. If you go ahead and abuse it or drop it out of your truck or something or off the top of the scaffold, we'll still replace it, but we'll charge you for it. But we do provide that warranty on the hardware. Now the software and the training is unlimited free for the life of the machine. We go ahead and not only can we service the machines remotely, but if there are any updates to it or any upgrades, we've only had one since I've been in business for three years to kind of improve a little bit on the speed of the machine.

We found a way to do that through software engineering and to reduce maintenance to some extent. But the upkeep and maintenance that you just mentioned, that's your responsibility. We train you on what's what it takes, and it takes about 15 minutes a day to make sure that the inks are working through the printer properly so that when you've got a job, it's ready to print. And if you're not using the printer, this is a printing machine. It has inks. It's no different than your $70 paint sprayer. If you're going ahead and putting paint in something and you're going to spray paint a wall, after you finish, you better clean it out. Otherwise, you might as well just throw it out.

Gordon Henry:

Paul, we're going to just take a quick break your word from our sponsor and we'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. More with Paul Baron in just a minute.

Thryv:

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Gordon Henry:

And we're back with Paul Baron, The Wall Printer and the fascinating discussion about wall printing. Who knew this was a business, but evidently it's growing and very successful for those who are able to find customers to do their wall printing? I'd like to talk to you now, Paul, you mentioned you speak to audiences everywhere. I'd like to talk to you a little bit more about small business today. What do you think are the key qualities for somebody to thrive running their own business today?

Paul Baron:

Well, certainly, as I mentioned earlier and as I often do, you have to be providing a service or product that solves a real problem. That's the first thing. Once you have that and you can become a trusted advisor, that's how you grow a business. And I don't care if it's even what you're trying to do and make money on with that particular customer, with the particular product or service that you think you're selling that person, it's all about relationships.

If I'm going to tell somebody one thing and one thing only build your relationships, even if it's not, don't always try selling what you are selling, okay. Sell yourself, okay. If somebody trusts you, not only will they buy from you, but if they value you, they will also seek referrals from you and give you referrals. And that's the most important way and the best way to grow a business, is by getting good word of mouth. It's no different than the reviews that we hear today, but it's always been that way even before the years of the internet when just word of mouth meant something, somebody's recommendation meant something. That hasn't changed, and that's important in small business. You have to build good, solid relationships, honestly, fairly, and provide a great service that people will recommend to others.

Gordon Henry:

Yeah, great advice. How do you balance your work with your personal life? We hear so much today, people talking about work-life balance? For entrepreneurs, very often there is no work-life balance. They're just working, building up that business. Any tips for people running their own small business?

Paul Baron:

Well, number one, you have to have a life. There's the expression, love what you do. You'll never work a day in your life. Well, that's a crock. It's true you'll feel good when you're working, but you still have to have something more than that. I've got two dogs. I've got a wonderful wife. I play tennis, I swim. I need those outlets. I like the theater, I like the whatever. I like just hanging out with friends. You got to have something, and if you don't have something, find something because you're going to need that to actually keep you sane. And again, a business will consume you. If you're going to be successful, it not only will consume you, but it should consume you because if you're not passionate about it, you're probably not going anywhere with it. And I don't care if it's something really cool and interesting.

Many people might think of The Wall Printer or if it's something like building widgets or something really boring or I don't know, black topping on a 100 degree, summer daylight we have. These things are important. They're necessary. They are solutions. People will pay for that, but you have to take pride in it. You have to enjoy what you're doing, but know that it's not the only thing that makes you or makes your life meaningful and be realistic. Be realistic with yourself, with your family. Set expectations appropriately. If I give any advice to people, it's set appropriate expectations for yourself, for your customers, so that hopefully you will exceed them and not leave people disappointed. People have always asked me, "What makes a great leader?" This isn't my answer. It's somebody else's, but it's stuck with me for a long time, and it's what I believe in. The great leader of a company is somebody who hires the best qualified people for the jobs that are needed, but then is wise enough to back off and let them do it.

Gordon Henry:

Excellent advice. Thank you for that. We just have a minute left. What's next for Paul Baron and The Wall Printer? Do you see running this for many more years? Are you going to sell the business? What's the future for the you and this company?

Paul Baron:

Short answer to the question, Gordon, is I'm at 130 customers today. I want to get to anywhere between 250 to 500, and then I'll start entertaining some of the offers that are being thrown at me already.

Gordon Henry:

Well, that's very cogent. I hope you can achieve that goal. That's very exciting. Where can people find out more about The Wall Printer and potentially get involved? The website is please?

Paul Baron:

Thewallprinter.com. It'll take you 30 seconds on the website to get it to see what the machine does. And by all means, there's a contact form you can fill out and we'll be happy to provide information. If you want to connect with me, I'm always happy to learn about people's journeys and share and try to talk you through something or learn from you. And LinkedIn is the best source for that. If you just search for Paul Baron on LinkedIn, you'll find me.

Gordon Henry:

Okay, great. That's Paul, B-A-R. One R, right? B-A-R-O-N?

Paul Baron:

Correct. And thewallprinter.com.

Gordon Henry:

Okay. Awesome. Well, I want to thank you for coming on our show, Paul. Great to have you here and share your experience with our audience.

Paul Baron:

Thanks, Gordon. Enjoyed talking with you.

Gordon Henry:

And I wanted to thank our producer, Tim Alleman and coordinators Diette Barnett and Daniel Huddleston. And if you enjoyed this podcast, tell your colleagues, friends and family to subscribe and please leave us a five star review. We'd really appreciate it. It helps us in the rankings. Small business runs better on Thryv. Get a free demo at thryv.com/pod. P-O-D. Until next time, make it a great week.

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