Government niche markets define Elkins-Swyers

Elkins-Swyers Co. Inc. had nothing to do with the hanging chad fiasco in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. Yet it is directly affected by the changes to the voting process brought about by that uproar.
Elections mean business at 95-year-old Springfield print shop Elkins-Swyers because much of what makes Missouri elections possible is a product of work done there. Nearly half of the print shop’s business comes from election-related jobs; Elkins-Swyers works in about 40 percent of the state’s 114 counties, said Steve Nibert, company president and owner. Factoring in additional government print work such as marriage licenses, tax receipts, and assessment and deeds of trust records, the public sector makes up about 85 percent of its business.
It wasn’t always that way.
Elkins-Swyers began in 1910 as William Elkins’ and Monroe Swyers’ commercial printing company, producing letterheads and stationery for Springfield attorneys, doctors and other professionals. In those days, when most of Springfield’s businesses revolved around the public square, company employees made downtown deliveries steering a pushcart. Later, the company purchased a Model T Ford for deliveries.
It’s come a long way since then, furthered by technological advancements and evolving legislation.

Sign of times
Of necessity, Elkins-Swyers is changing to meet new election law requirements prompted by Florida’s 2000 presidential election fiasco. Nibert said the U.S. Election Assistance Commission is creating new rules and regulations throughout the country to arrive at uniform standards for each state.
“The Help America Vote Act put into place by Congress due to the election outcome in Florida in 2000 has changed the election field of work more than any single thing that we’ve dealt with,” Nibert said. “The biggest thing that they are coming up with now is what is called Second Chance Voting – if you as a voter have over-voted an office, there at the voting site, if you insert your ballot that ballot is shot back to you.”
Elkins-Swyers still does commercial printing and has several long-standing clients such as CoxHealth and Wing Candy Co. But the main focus is on “anything in county government,” Nibert said.
“We do an awful lot of work for the county abstract companies. We do a lot of their binders and books,” Nibert said.
The county government print work began in 1928 when Leslie Lee bought the company. In 1972, Bob Lee took ownership, followed by Nibert’s father, Norman Nibert, in 1987.
Steve Nibert grew up in the business and bought it from his father in 1998. Over the years, the government business segment grew more and more significant.
Today, Elkins-Swyers designs and prints ballots, election signs and sends teams to voting sites to help with the election, Nibert said. It also uses a computer program to count votes for counties.
Greene County Clerk Richard Struckhoff said that his office has been a client for more than 30 years.
“Mainly they work with us on elections,” Struckhoff said. “They assist us and store equipment for us. Ever since we started using the punch-card system in 1976, they have printed our ballots … and delivered election supplies to our polling places. They’ve been an election partner with Greene County for a long time.”
Nibert estimated that Elkins-Swyers produces half a million ballots in a given election, while busy election years create up to 2 million ballots. With such a strong emphasis on elections, company revenues vary by year, Nibert said.
“Last year we had four major elections – presidential preference, municipal, primary and general,” said Nibert, who declined to disclose revenue figures. “A lot of our revenues are very up-and-down because of major on-years and major off-years. On the even-numbered years, probably as much as 65 percent of our revenue is due to the elections; on an off-year, more like 30 percent,” Nibert said.

Technological evolution
While Elkins-Swyers offers the old-fashioned paper ballot, punch card, and the increasingly popular optical scan, the company is embracing new touch-screen voting methods.
Nibert said his son, Cory, who began as the company’s vice president of marketing in January 2004 after graduating from Drury University, is the driving force behind new touch-screen election technology.
“Computers have taken over the way voting is done,” Cory Nibert said.
Elkins-Swyers has partnered with Sequoia Voting Systems, producers of a touch-screen voting system, and has applied with the state to be certified for touch-screen voting.
Printing technology has changed as well. In the beginning, typesetting was done on a Linotype machine, which casts an entire line of type in one bar, and everything was letter-pressed. Today, most of what the company does is generated over a computer program and offset printed.
Elkins-Swyers’ work involves more than the simple printing of forms. Nibert said that they have to know the current laws and change the forms accordingly to keep the forms legitimate.
“We keep updated on laws. For instance, the traffic tickets for Missouri have changed several times since we began producing those. A printer can print them, but unless you know the changing laws that ticket may be challenged in court,” Nibert said.
The company employs 22, with the average tenure being about 17 years. Sue Hudgens, vice president of operations, has been with Elkins-Swyers for 30 years.
“I just think that we have to grow with the times from how they used to do things manually to being computerized,” Hudgens said.
Nibert said Elkins-Swyers has become a nearly century-old business by flying under the radar, so to speak.
“In our line of work, the best thing you can do is not be in the news. If you show up in headlines in an election, it’s because you’ve not done something right,” he said.