Page 12 - Marketing Times v1

12 Traverse City Marketing Times • Fall 2014
them had been with me since day one.” Goff could have sold to a larger printing company, but he was concerned that choice would mean the end of VP. Chances were, a buyer would merge the business with another plant located elsewhere and lay off employees in the Traverse City location.
“They could probably do it more ef ciently than I could do it, but all these people who I’d been friends with all my life, I’d worked with. I’d been to their weddings, their parents’ funerals, their kids’ baptisms; these kinds of things would be gone. And you think, why? Why would you want to do that?” The payoff would have been huge and immediate, but Goff wasn’t interested.
Instead, he looked internally for a successor and found a strong candidate in VP’s chief nancial of cer, Scott Lizenby. Then they recruited a sales manager to run the business development and marketing and found Dave Moore, a marketing and sales executive from Quebecor Printing, who Goff had met while
serving on a board at Western Michigan.
After nding the new partners, Goff created
a structured plan through which Lizenby and Moore could buy him out as they met certain performance milestones. “You have to be somebody who started a business to really understand, but it’s like the business is your baby,” Goff explained. More than anything, he wanted to make sure that after he was gone, VP would be left in the hands of people who cared about the company and the community.
“Bob is that guy – you know the one,
who gets up in the morning and does more before eight a.m. than anyone else you know,” Moore stated. “He delivered a constant pace of positive energy. That is a motivating force
in a company, and I can assure you that
our clients felt that energy in the results and prompt follow-up to every conversation.”
Moore added, “And, my rst impression of Village Press was the impeccable housekeeping and cleanliness. Having worked on acquisition
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