Alec Faber is a University of Arizona alumni with a strong background in Business and Finance. He has transitioned into a key operations role at Diversified Labels, where he manages the day-to-day operations and strategic growth initiatives for the company. Since 2017, Alec has worked with Diversified Dealer Services and TheftMark, leading efforts to reduce theft through innovative product solutions in the automobile and retail sectors. His work spans inventory control, sales, and expansion planning, with a particular focus on providing affordable, high-quality label solutions to businesses across the U.S.
In addition to his current role, Alec has gained a breadth of experience in the financial services sector. He worked as a Financial Advisor at USAA, where he helped clients with financial planning and investment strategies, and as a Wealth Management Intern at TCI Wealth Advisors. Alec’s career is marked by his ability to blend financial expertise with operational leadership. His diverse experience has provided Alec with valuable skills in management, sales, and strategic planning.
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Christopher Santomassimo: Welcome back to the ThinkFactory podcast powered by OGC Solutions, and I’m your host today, Chris Santomasimo. I’m actually in the Phoenix, Arizona area, sitting down with Alec Faber. He’s the president and CEO of Diversified Labels Digital Printing in Chandler, Arizona, and he’s also the COO of Diversified Dealer Services—welcome to the podcast today, Alec!
Alec Faber: Thank you for having me, Chris, appreciate it.
Christopher Santomassimo: So we actually kind of met by accident in a sense, but when we got to talking about some of the things that Alec is doing, I think it’s a really cool story about the related businesses—how you ventured into the label business, what you’ve achieved already, and what you’re going to achieve in the future. So talk a little bit about Diversified as a family of companies, and what they do, and what you do.
Alec Faber: So I started in the business about eight years ago, in July actually. My father-in-law, Mason, he’s the owner that started Diversified Dealer over 25 years ago. Wanting to essentially create a multi-generational family business, he brought me on given my expertise in business and finance. Basically he gave me an opportunity to carry forward this company and this legacy.
Diversified Dealer started in the automobile industry over 25 years ago, creating products for cars, warranty insurance, etc. So we have a couple products on that side of the company such as auto body labels, micro dots, window etch, and catalytic converter marking labels. What we’ve seen over the years is that there were a lot of costs involved in producing all the different components of our products.
For example, for auto body labels in particular, you’ve got the raw materials, you’ve got to print it, you’ve got to finish it, and then we actually have a process where we do lasering and things with serial numbers and stuff like that. So there’s a couple components in the process, and we wanted to figure out how we could make that process cheaper for us. So throughout the years we had been paying a printer probably like a hundred grand a year at least to print, just print for us, and then we would take our product and convert it and finish the serialization.
We were thinking “What can we do to bring those costs down?” And so that’s when we started looking into printing. So that’s pretty much the next big step that we took in that side of the business was bringing in the print in-house. So that’s kind of the, as abbreviated as possible, story of how Diversified Dealer got into the printing business.
And so then, yeah, along the way we basically decided like we need to step up again because we’ve got some experience under our belt actually doing the printing. And we thought, hey, you know, like let’s step up even more so we can have our product be as high quality as it can be.
Christopher Santomassimo: It’s interesting. You know, we kind of talked on the phone a little bit about how, you know, you, we wanted to talk about like, what are the difficulties that I see and like, what are the barriers and things like that?
Alec Faber: It is interesting because I feel like there’s, I feel like there’s not a ton of resources out there for people getting into the industry. It almost feels like from what I’ve seen and the things that I’ve learned, most of the stuff I’ve learned have come directly from peers, people who do this, you know, who are willing to share, which is awesome.
You know, the vendors of all the different products that we do, the raw materials and the inks and just all of that—they have been my greatest like sources of knowledge, just talking to these experts in the field.
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