A year like no other

How Holland Litho continued to excel despite the pandemic

This year has been a year like no other year. We went from having substantially less work than normal in the summer, to going gangbusters in the fall again with a 20% reduction in staff for Covid-related reasons. Over the summer, we saw the United States Postal Service at times take up to a month to deliver mail because they were having the same issue with employees. We have been able, for the most part, to stick to within a couple days of deadlines by working a lot of overtime, with some employees putting in over 60 hours a week. We have had owners, sales people, customer service people, estimators, accounting and human resources all pitch in and help with production. Many even worked the Friday after Thanksgiving, which is normally a holiday.

We couldn’t get as many projects out as fast as we would have liked, and there were some hiccups — and we appreciate everyone’s understanding with this. Just know that it was not for lack of effort!

Even when faced with these unprecedented challenges, we have adhered to our procedures. We have decades of experience hearing feedback from customers and attracting employees from competing companies. We have an excellent system of custom print manufacturing in place, and we meet weekly for a commitment for constant improvement.

We did not embrace short cuts. We stick to our procedures because they save problems in the future. We also typically meet twice a day to review the jobs on our production schedule, which tends to be about 60 pages long, making sure everything is juggled to keep jobs on track. Throughout all of this, we adhered to the systems we have, and our team stepped up to fill the personnel gaps we had to ensure we could continue to produce your print projects on time and with excellence.

We’re thankful to all of our customers and we’re thankful to our employees for stepping up to the plate and doing what it takes to get the job done and done well.

Have a Merry Christmas and may the new year bring us all renewed hope and a life that once again resembles normal!

Holland Litho President Rick Baarman (left) and Sales Representative Paul Soltysiak (right) chip in to get the work done.