Small, Fast and Built Around Data · Adam...
For years, Adam talked about the packaging industry.
Now he gets to live it every day.
At LOUPE Americas in Chicago, Morten B. Reitoft meets Adam from Label King, the Salt Lake City label company he joined Robert Parker in building just over a year ago.
Moving from sales, podcasts, LinkedIn, and industry events into actually running a production company has brought an entirely different perspective.
And Label King is deliberately lean.
Adam is currently the only person in the front office, yet the company has added more than 40 new customers during its first year together. He credits much of that efficiency not to having the newest printing equipment, but to using CERM and other software to process information quickly and avoid adding administrative people simply to move data around.
That allows the company to focus its resources elsewhere: building culture, hiring good production people, serving customers, and responding quickly.
And responsiveness is a surprisingly powerful competitive advantage.
Customers don't always expect an immediate solution. Sometimes they simply want somebody to answer the phone, reply to the text message, or acknowledge the email — even when that message arrives at 10 o'clock at night.
Label King combines that service mentality with flexo, digital inkjet, and increasingly sophisticated variable-data capabilities. A Domino print bar installed on a Mark Andy press is already producing millions of variable QR-code labels every month, supported by partnerships with technology and authentication platforms.
For Adam, however, the objective isn't necessarily to build the biggest label company possible.
He doesn't talk about needing ten presses or hundreds of employees within a predetermined number of years.
Instead, his philosophy is to trust the process.
Show up every day.
Treat employees well.
Treat customers like royalty.
Stay creative, humble, disciplined, and willing to adapt — and allow the opportunities that follow to determine where the company goes next.
It's also a philosophy Adam tries to apply beyond work. Despite the demands of building Label King, he remains active with his podcast, LinkedIn, basketball, and — most importantly — his wife and five children.
In this INKISH film, Morten talks with Adam about becoming a label converter, CERM, automation, variable QR codes, customer service, entrepreneurship, work-life balance, and why building a successful company doesn't necessarily start with deciding how big you want it to become.
Sometimes it starts with simply getting the process right.
