Copycat Printing and Signs of Grand Island is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

Located at 365 North Broadwell Ave., the company specializes in printing, design, copying, signs and mailing. Dan and Chris Fogland are the owners.

The beginnings of Copycat Printing goes back to 1980 when Milo Stites opened up the first Copycat store in Grand Island on South Locust Ave. Copycat was a franchised based out of Omaha that started in the 1960s.

Copycat Printing & Signs owners Dan and Chris Fogland pose at their store. It is located at 365 N Broadwell Ave in Grand Island, NE. (Jon Helgason/For the Independent)

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But, six month after opening the business, it was destroyed by the series of tornadoes that struck Grand Island on June 3, 1980. Stites reopened the business two years later, but then sold the franchise back to Copycat. In 1985, the Foglands purchased the franchise in Grand Island from the company.

When the Foglands purchased the Copycat franchise from Standard Blue in Omaha, neither of them had any experience in the printing business. Dan Fogland said they moved to Grand Island in 1980 where he served as the City of Grand Island's chief building inspector after the tornadoes that hit the community. Prior to moving to Grand Island, he worked for the City of North Platte.

Dan Fogland said it was what he calls his "entrepreneurial gene" that lead him from leaving his job with the city to operating his own business.

"I always wanted to be in business," he said.

As a boy he had a paper route, and his father owned and operated a body shop in North Platte.

"Being in government for 12 years and becoming an entrepreneur are at opposite extremes," Fogland said. "When we had this opportunity to get into this business, we decided it was something we could do."

And after 25 years, Fogland said, "Everything turned out okay."

Chris Fogland said taking that leap into owning and operating your own business was "scary."

"The early years are an extreme amount of hard work and you are basically risking everything you have," Dan Fogland said.

He said other than having a photography background in high school, Fogland said he knew next to nothing about the printing business.

But what got them through was using a key rule to running any successful business: "You have to do what you say you are going to do and what ever it takes, you got to make it happen," Fogland said.

That type of customer service philosophy has earned the business loyal clientele over that last 25 years. Also, both of the Foglands give credit to the professionalism and attention to detail of their employees in making the business successful.

Another factor that helped them out in those early days was Stites, who came out of retirement to help the Foglands out with the business. Also, Teresa Ullman, who worked for Stites when he had the business has also worked with for the Foglands since day one bringing her expertise and experience to the business operation.

"There was some help out there for us, in the technical aspect, such as how to get a piece of paper through the press and that kind of stuff," Dan Fogland said.

Another big challenge of running a printing over the last 25 years was the ever changing technological landscape of the business.

"There has been an enormous amount of change," Fogland said. "One of the things we have done right, over the years, is trying to look forward five years or so and try to embrace that change," he said.

For example, when they opened the business in 1985, there was a lot of work that they did then that now people can do on their personal computers and printers at home.

"What we had to do is look at new avenues, new businesses, where the industry was going and who was going to need our services then try to embrace that technology," Fogland said.

Instead of ignoring the person who was using their personal computer and printer to do a printing job, Fogland said the reached out to those customers to enhance the work they were doing at home.

"Not a lot of printers did that," he said. "They saw that as 'they don't know what they are doing' or 'don't bring me that home computer file that we have to mess around with and straighten out for you.' That was not the attitude we took."

And 25 years later, the Foglands said they both enjoy coming to work each day.

"The fact that we have been able to provide for our family has been very satisfying," he said. "When we first started out, we just wanted to make sure we had enough to buy groceries and pay the bank."

For more information, contact Copycat at 308-384-8520 or visit their website at www.copycatprinting.com.

By Robert Pore
robert.pore@theindependent.com
Published: Sunday, June 20, 2010 12:17 AM CDT