Dymark Supply Nears Small Business Milestone

A wise man once said, “The less a man makes declarative statements, the less apt he is to look foolish in retrospect.”

In our June 16 issue, we ran a cover story on Rapid Prototypes of Bentonville. It was generally well received, other than a line about RP being the “only” company in the area performing services in “one-off” prototypes and shortrun printing jobs.

Turns out that isn’t the case, and the upside of a mistaken statement like that is that it usually will result in the record being set straight.

Thanks to an e-mail from owner Rick Ward, we learned about Dymark Supply, located just down 2nd Street from another Rogers fixture, Daisy Manufacturing. Dymark, owned by Ward and his wife of 35 years, Cynthia Ward, has been in business since 1987.

The Wards ran Dymark alone up until about three years ago when they began to expand the business and they now have eight fulltime employees, including their oldest daughter Cristina Ward.

“We can print on anything if it’s flat,” he said. “Cardboard, glass, aluminum, steel, foamboard. We’re really geared toward the low to intermediate quantities.”

Rick Ward said he and Cynthia were content to keep the company’s growth relatively flat for many years. Dymark made around $300,000 to $350,000 per year, but revenue has taken off since they expanded its capacity to seven printers, including five wide format printers, a UV printer and the first ColorSpan printer purchased in the U.S. (ColorSpan was taken over by Hewlett Packard on Nov. 1, 2007.)

Ward said the first three were shipped to the United Kingdom and he bought the fourth. The ColorSpan can print on anything up to 2.75 inches thick, including steel doors and brick.

For the first time, Rick Ward said, Dymark will pass the $1 million revenue milestone in 2008, a major achievement for any small business.

Revenue has grown by 30 percent to 40 percent in the last three years, and he said Dymark is actually on pace for around $1.3 million in 2008.

The Wards have worked for Daisy, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Kraft Foods and a host of others, but their biggest and oldest customer is Frito Lay. Rick Ward said he’s dealt with around 800 different people with Frito Lay – a company he’s worked with for 16 years after parlaying relationships built while he was selling label guns – but only finally visited its corporate headquarters in Dallas last year.

Dymark does the signage for around 90 percent of Frito Lay’s “zones” around the country and Rick Ward noted that Dymark signs are in all 50 states.

Rick Ward was nice enough to point out that one reason we may not have heard of them was because he’s spent less than $5,000 in 20 years on advertising, and that’s been on things like sponsoring a youth baseball team.

“Up until about three years ago, we didn’t have any competitors locally because we didn’t deal with anyone locally,” he said. “For the longest time we really didn’t even have a front door. Cynthia and I would come in, lock the door and go to work. When we wanted to go to lunch, we’d close up and take the phones off the hook. We did everything.”

Citing a statistic that figures a married couple only spends a little more than two hours a day together, Rick Ward figures he and Cynthia have been married for more than 400 years after putting so many long days together.