Brian Franz is an experienced sales and project management professional currently serving as Vice President and Sales Manager at Envision-3 since May 2013. Brian’s responsibilities include driving new business initiatives, managing a sales team, and implementing workflow efficiency procedures. Prior roles at Envision3 encompassed Sales Representative and Project Manager, where Brian focused on identifying marketing needs, enhancing customer satisfaction, and coordinating print projects. Prior experience as Advertising Director for The Threefold Advocate at John Brown University involved selling and designing ads, while an earlier role as Logistics Coordinator at Envision-3 involved shipping and receiving operations. Brian holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from John Brown University, completed in 2013.
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Chris Santomassimo: Welcome back to The Think Factory podcast, powered by OGC Solutions. I’m your host today, Chris Santomassimo. It’s nice to be out of the studio, or out of the office, and on the road. I’m excited to introduce Brian Franz, who’s our guest today. Brian is a Vice President at Envision-3 in Bloomingdale, Illinois, where we’re sitting together.
So, welcome to the podcast!
Brian Franz: Thanks, Chris. Yeah, it’s fun! I appreciate having a guest here onsite, being able to see our facility and how we got to connect. So it’s just really a great thing to show people what we do—hopefully we can do that over the audio waves today.
Chris Santomassimo: Absolutely! I hope we can convey the excitement I see on the floor. I mean, you’ve got a lot of activity. In a manufacturing environment, you never like to see an idle floor and yours is not idle by any means. So it’s great to see the activity, which is amazing.
I’d love to have you introduce the company to folks that might not be familiar with it. Talk about all the segments that you handle and some of the things you’re doing for customers.
Brian Franz: Yeah, absolutely. So I work for Envision-3, which happens to be a family company. So my dad’s the owner here. He’s been around for 25 years while I’ve been in the business for 12 of those years. I’ve done various roles throughout my time being here.
I have a background in marketing. I studied marketing in college, so I really like that side. And so for me, the sales side really came to life as a part of a passion of mine. I really enjoyed that side of getting to know people, the relationship building, and figuring out how to grow the company over these years. So I’ve led various roles and got my own customers. I’m still getting my own new customers as well.
As a whole, Envision-3 does pretty much four things well: it’s print, it’s direct mail, it’s packaging, and fulfillment. So those are kind of the four main groups there. And between our two locations, that’s what we do day in and day out.
We continue to get new equipment. We’ve acquired seven different companies over that 25 year tenure. And so we just try to figure out ways to meet our customers’ needs the best that we can. And I just have fun doing it. I really love being able to do that every day and no two days are the same.
I’d say, I tell a lot of people, it’s kind of like making cake. So it’s just a matter of what kind of cake we’re making today. You got a lot of the same ingredients, but there’s a lot of derivatives of that. And so part of my job is when I get to tell clients about what we do and educate, and give them solutions to meet their problems. […] So I think that’s Envision-3 in a nutshell.
Chris Santomassimo: Besides doing great work, what are some of the other things that you do that makes it easy for a customer and to take advantage of the solution?
Brian Franz: Yeah, so we really, I think peace of mind is huge.
So for what we do for our clients, it’s knowing that we’re gonna get something done when we say we’re gonna get it done, and knowing that we’re not afraid to tell them when something goes wrong. Luckily that doesn’t happen often, but if it does happen, we are able to adjust, adapt in our team because of how agile we are. We can send other labor to do something and finish it on time if I have issues because of other problems upstream of that issue.
So I think that’s really what makes it, and our customer service team is great. They handle so much that comes through here of the 3,000 jobs a year we get. They’re on the front lines handling customer requests and also very quickly too.
So a lot of things, it’s kind of funny in this day and age, the phones don’t really ring as much anymore, but the emails go crazy. So they’re typing away very fast all the time, and that’s just kind of how the business has evolved. And I know AI is gonna continue to play a part in that, which would be crazy, but our big thing is you actually get a human and someone will care and talk with you.
Chris Santomassimo: Yeah. Maybe that’s part of the formula for success, right?
Brian Franz: I think it is, and that’s why I’m not worried about AI. I think it’s gonna complement areas that it needs to complement, but it’s not going to replace areas that don’t need to be replaced.
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