Business Spotlight: The Copy Kingdom

On East Trafficway, one man’s grease pit is another man’s printing enterprise.

Husband and wife small-business owners Rod Shetler and Jana Nations Shetler spent a few months making over the former Doe’s Eat Place into office space for their two businesses.

Rod operates Corporate & Legal Reproductions LLC, and Jana runs Nations Insurance Agency. They moved both operations into the 1232 E. Trafficway St. property they bought this summer for $215,000 from KA Investments LLC.

While it’s a completely different setup – no more finger-licking ribs and macaroni and cheese – restaurant remnants remain.

“We’ve got random beer signs everywhere,” Rod says in a rear storage room, pointing to Budweiser and Banquet signs that eventually will go to friends. “This one’s spoken for.”

Rod hired general contractor George Zarras of Affordable Home Improvements Inc. to convert the 6,500-square-foot building. Four months and roughly $75,000 later, the Shetlers made the move in November from a leased office on South Brentwood Boulevard.

Crews kept intact a corrugated metal sliding wall and the Doe’s wooden bar for character elements that attracted Shetler to the center city building down the street from Hammons Field.

“It’s called his man cave,” Jana says of the bar area yet to be used for entertaining clients and friends.

The core of the business takes place in the rear of the building, where four copy machines and three scanners are at the ready for confidential document management.

Corporate & Legal Reproductions is built on two legs: daily production orders and archiving projects. One day Rod and several part-time staff members could be making photocopies from a USB flash drive and another they’re digitizing thousands of printed pages.

“Anybody who finds themselves buried in a lot of files, paperwork they have to keep, but it’s starting to take over their lives,” Rod says of his typical clients. “It just happens to be a lot of law firms and accounting firms.”

Mel DePriest, office manager at Hyde, Love & Overby LLP, says hardly a day goes by where the firm isn’t reaching out for document management services.

“If there is a day we don’t have something done, probably the next day, we have extra work,” she says.

With specialization in medical malpractice cases, orders from the law firm include single jobs, such as a large-format trial exhibit, to the digitization of 6,000 pages.

“We’ve had archiving issues and I had a whole half of a room with binders and I had them archived,” DePriest says.

Three-quarters of the work is for law firms, which oftentimes must welcome Rod and company into their attorney-client privileges.

“It’s an incredible amount of trust that a law firm gives us to invite us into that circle,” he says. “Many times, we will sign documents with a firm having to do with confidentiality.”

Other document work is for accounting firms, and Rod says Bass Pro Shops is among the 50 regular clients and nearly 100 active clients.

Teachers by trade, the Shetlers found Corporate & Legal Reproductions on a search two and a half years ago to make a career change and buy a business. They contracted with Kingsley Group, and business broker Tim Gregory presented them with a list 20 deep of available businesses.

Seeing only descriptions of the companies’ products and services, not even their locations, the Shetlers were a little overwhelmed by their options.

“I just asked him, ‘What do you think?’ He pointed to this one,” Rod says of the first look on paper.

The couple signed a nondisclosure agreement and began to learn more. “The more we heard, the more we liked,” he says, noting they agreed on a $215,000 purchase price with John and Melissa Beckwith.

Jana says the straight-forward business model – started by Michael and Charlette Steelman in the late 1990s – was attractive during this career shift.

“This business was something that fit into our wheelhouse of things we could do,” she says. “You can’t buy a welding business if you don’t know how to weld. We didn’t want to run a restaurant. We both know how to run a copier.”

“And work on deadlines,” adds Rod, who also spent several years working in sports journalism for the Springfield News-Leader and Joplin Globe.

They recall a 14-hour deadline to catalog two boxes of receipts stapled to checks and invoices.

“We had to copy every page and reassemble it to its original format,” Jana says. “We don’t say no to deadlines.”

In 2013, the first full year under their management, Corporate & Legal Reproductions grossed $275,000 in revenue. With this year honing in on the $200,000 mark, the Shetlers attribute the higher first year to a backlog of archiving to be scanned.

“We have not had a serious archiving client this year,” Jana Shetler says, noting daily production orders are carrying the load, up 60 percent this year. We are one good archiving client away from this year being better than last year. We’re missing the archiving client right now, and that’s not an easy sale. That can be a $100,000 bid, easily.”

Hyde, Love & Overby’s DePriest says that order might be coming.

“Right now, we’ve got a case going to trial in a few weeks, and when it’s finished I can guarantee they’ll have a bunch of archiving to do for us,” she says. “It’ll be boxes.”