Great Lakes Label
910 Metzgar CT NW, Comstock Park, MI, USA 49321
www.greatlakeslabel.com

Tony Cook has taken the circuitous route to success. His journey has included a car wash pitstop, an exploratory trip to Europe, and finding his first press near a dumpster.

Cook’s journey began in 1992 when he finished at Ferris State University from their insurance program. After making the decision to forego the life on an insurance salesman, he opted to use his business education to explore other avenues. A colleague from Cook’s college debate team presented him with the opportunity to sell labels. Despite lacking any foundational knowledge of the label industry, Cook took the interview – and ultimately got the job.

“When I joined this small company, they had one salesperson who had been there for 28 years,” recalls Cook. “He had announced his retirement, so that’s why they started looking for another salesperson. By the time they hired me, which was about a month away from his retirement, he decided he was going to stay another year.”

This delayed retirement provided Cook with an opportunity to learn the label business. The label printer moved Cook throughout a variety of roles to build up his industry knowledge. He worked in the art department, purchasing, estimating and even production planning. Cook concluded the year by sneaking in to be taught to run a press during production’s second shift.

“I didn’t know anything about printing or labels when I entered the business,” explains Cook. “I didn’t even know what they meant by pressure sensitive labels. You pretend like you do in interviews, but you really don’t know what you’re talking about. The internet really didn’t exist back then, so I had to go to the library to learn. They said, ‘Maybe it’s a good thing. Our salesperson is going to retire in six months, so in the meantime let’s get you some experience.’ Then when he finally retired, I had a lot of product knowledge from my hands-on training.”

Cook was not long for that job, though. When he left in June of 1994, he established Great Lakes Label. Cook, the company’s CEO, endured humble beginnings, too. The business originated in a one-bedroom apartment with a card table in the closet. He had a typewriter, fax machine and a credit card with $500 available – just enough to buy business cards, letterhead, and incorporate the business.

“It seemed like a great plan, of course I had no idea what I was doing,” remembers Cook. “I thought a lot of my accounts would give me some business, but not a one did. So, for six months, I had no business. And I had just gotten engaged and married over a nine-month period, and that was about two months into the engagement when I left the one job and started Great Lakes Label. 

“There were a lot of hard times,” says Cook. “Not only do you not know everything you need to know about the particular business you’re going into – you don’t know business. I was 27 and I had studied business, but you don’t really know what it means to meet payroll and cashflow and all these other considerations.” 

Cook used his hands-on education to start out as a label broker. Many of his prospective clients, however, wanted to deal directly with the manufacturer and didn’t see the benefit of working with a broker.

Another opportunity soon presented itself, though. “I had a friend who worked at a label company, whose owner told him to get rid of these two old tape presses, and they were MA50s, the original presses made by Mark Andy from the beginning of the flexographic industry,” notes Cook. “He gave one away, and he said to me, ‘I’m going to put it out by the dumpster tonight, and if it’s gone in the morning then I’ll know you got it, and if it’s not, then it’s going into the dumpster.’”

Cook borrowed a pickup truck and brought the press to a friend’s hand car wash – which was also another source of employment for him at the time. “I worked at the car wash because I hadn’t gotten any business, and I needed to make some money,” Cook says. “I contacted all the customers that relied on this tape press, and a few customers came with it. It wasn’t a lot of business, but at least when customers asked if I manufactured, I could say I did. How many presses did I have? Just one, and it was the size of a table, but it was enough where I had to buy from suppliers, and it was the start of a manufacturing business.”

That sampling of business led Cook to buy a Webtron press in 1998. He would add five to six staff members, as well as two more Webtron presses over the next four years.

But before Cook could experience any true growth, he had to take another sizable risk. He had discussed a project with a power and lighting company in 1999, but at the time they were doing so much business that the company required all prospective suppliers to obtain a supplier ID number. Cook, without a number, faced a two-year moratorium on conducting business with this company. But its European outlet offered a different set of requirements, so Cook turned his attention to the United Kingdom.

“They were still offering supplier numbers in Europe, and I had been communicating with this fellow, where we made samples, quoted, came up with a machine design, and then everything just stopped,” explains Cook. “I needed that business, and I had a lot invested in getting that project off the ground. I had about $3,000 left on my one credit card, so I told my wife that we’re going to go to Europe, and I’m going to see if I can find my contact since he had stopped communicating. Either we’re going to treat it as a nice trip, and when we get home, I’m going to go get another job and shut my company down, or I’ll come back with a way to do some business and keep it going.”

Cook was able to locate his contact at the company’s European facility, but not before sneaking through the entrance gate to inquire about his whereabouts. The company’s lack of funding put a halt to their business plans, but Cook was not heading home without first fighting for Great Lakes Label.

“I asked if the plant manager was there and if we could go see him,” recounts Cook. “He said, ‘I don’t know if we can do that,’ and I said, ‘I did just fly across the pond,’ and he responded, ‘Yes, yes you did.’ Well, I explained my situation to the plant manager, and we bartered and made a deal right there, and they wrote me a PO that night. By the time I was done, I was working with 20 different facilities for this company around the US, Canada, Mexico and over in London, and it really saved Great Lakes Label and helped launch the business.

“For me, I was never going to quit,” says Cook. “That was never an option for me. I may have had to tell my wife that to get her to go overseas, but I was going to make it work.”

Today, Great Lakes Label has six presses and more than 60 employees. Cook operates out of a 26,000 square-foot facility, which the company moved to in 2005. Great Lakes Label is in the midst of a growth spurt, and Cook anticipates his most profitable year yet in 2020.

Growing with Mark Andy
Of course, Great Lakes Label expanded on its original Mark Andy MA50 tape press and its three Webtrons. Great Lakes Label graduated to a Mark Andy 4120 press, an 8-color machine that was built in 1983. Cook refurbished the press and utilized several retrofits to help it keep better registration. That unit enabled Cook to acquire several national accounts.

When it came time to invest in a more modern press, Cook’s team had their sights set on several European manufacturers. Cook and team had recently made the decision to dive head-first into Lean Manufacturing, and he needed a press that would check off enough boxes to make the investment worthwhile.

Mark Andy offered the best value proposition for Great Lakes Label when it came to efficiency and timely changeovers. “At the time, Mark Andy was the last press we looked at,” explains Cook. “We were in the middle of signing a purchasing agreement for another press, but I was told to take a look at the P-Series press. I went down there with a group from our company, and lo and behold, when you walk into the Mark Andy breezeway, under glass is an MA50 and that was the very first press that I had. I said, ‘Oh my goodness, that’s an MA 50.’ When all three of us walked in and saw that, they looked at me and said, ‘Do you believe it?’ We went into a demo at Mark Andy and saw everything they had to offer, and the P-Series combined a lot of the features that we were debating about with other press manufacturers. Everything on our t-chart – good and bad – Mark Andy combined in the good column, so for us it was a very easy decision. We were hoping we could find a press that had all these attributes, and here it was.” 

Mark Andy utilized an ROI calculator to estimate Great Lakes Label’s prospective earnings with the new P-5 Performance Series press. Cook then knocked down Mark Andy’s figures by 25%, as he couldn’t believe the manufacturer’s estimates.

“Combined with the Lean features of the Mark Andy press, we probably surpassed their original ROI by about 15%,” says Cook. “It was just outstanding. It didn’t take us long to buy another one, and we have three now.”

Great Lakes Label operates two Mark Andy P-5 Performance Series presses and a P-7 Performance Series press. Cook invested in the first press in 2014, and his most recent acquisition came in 2018. Great Lakes Label was able to turn its 45-minute changeover time on the 4120 to just north of six minutes with the new technology.

Cook has also dipped his toes in the water with digital printing, adding Primera and Epson tabletop units to Great Lakes Label’s arsenal. “When we have customers who want 100-200 labels, we may diecut them and then run them on the Epson ColorWorks 7500, or run the whole job on the Primera, since it has a plotter/cutter.”

Lean and mean
Cook’s investment in Mark Andy came from a Kaizen event, as Great Lakes Label had decided to streamline its operations. Cook attended a Lean Manufacturing school, which accentuated his belief in processes.

“I assembled the team here and said we’re going to do Lean,” says Cook. “My production manager had been in the business for 30 years, and he had a favorite way of running manufacturing and did not want to change that. He was a great person and we did a lot of great things together, but he did not like Lean, so we decided to part ways.”

Cook immediately went to work, creating a current state map and a future state map. The Great Lakes Label team then picked up every piece of equipment and turned them around in order to grind the floor down with a buffer. The company then implemented a host of 5S practices and began hosting Kaizen events.

“We reorganized the building, moving presses tighter and remapped everything,” states Cook. “We changed the product flow and went to our supply chain, because we needed them to work with us. We have hosted Kaizen events for our own book of business, and also for our suppliers to use for their customers.”

Cook noted that the P-Series platform is designed with Lean Manufacturing in mind, so he collaborated with Mark Andy on a training program, which highlighted, among other things, changeover times and speeding up the printing process.

“Lean takes a commitment from the top to the bottom to make it cultural,” adds Cook.

Turning 25
Cook and Great Lakes Label have come a long way in their 25 years, from operating out of a one-bedroom apartment to producing labels for a wide range of industries. In addition to producing labels, Great Lakes Label also offers a label applicator system called the Label Gator. The Label Gator platform has been quite beneficial in the horticulture industry, and the overall Label Gator family features a dozen products.

“It’s hard for me to explain to people what it took,” says Cook. “The amount of work I did at that time, nobody could outwork me. I worked 18 hours a day, and that was an average day for me. I worked seven days a week while raising three little kids at that time, and they would come to see me at work. I would sell and conduct business during the day, and then I was running the press on second shift for 8-10 hours at night. I would then go sleep for four hours or so and then come back and do it all again. I went two years without taking a vacation, where I even worked on Christmas Day for 10 hours.”

With all of Great Lakes Label’s success, Cook is most proud of his employees. “All the managers of the different departments are from the floor, people that had worked with me for years and have a real eye for scheduling, purchasing, R&D and team management. Most of the people in leadership roles were running a piece of equipment here and have now moved into a director role of that segment of business.

“People will rise up to the challenge when given the opportunity. It never ceases to amaze me the capacity that an individual has when given a challenge and an opportunity,” adds Cook. “And I’ve just seen it over and over again here in every single way. The thing that I’m probably the proudest of isn’t the labels we produce but the leaders we produce. We’re really excited about the momentum that we have and what’s taken place. We’re really excited about the people who are taking us there.”