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History / Information
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Main Lobby of Gateway
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Gateway Press, Inc. ("Gateway") is a Louisville, KY-based commercial printing company. The Company was founded in 1950 by C.W. Georgehead, Sr. While working as a printing salesman in Louisville, Mr. Georgehead had saw the need for additional printing capacity in the region. Initial capital was provided by Mr. Georgehead, three other employee / shareholders; and William Keeling (Georgehead's brother-in-law). Over the years, Gateway has grown from a four man operation working in a 4,000 square foot building into an employer of 225 in a 170,000 square foot facility running 24 hours, five days a week. The company is privately owned by descendants of C.W. Georgehead, Sr., William Keeling and eleven active or former employees.
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Gateway has a history of steady and consistent growth. The company has never had an unprofitable year or laid off a single employee for lack of work. With sales of over $40 million, Gateway is one of the largest printers in Kentucky. Nationally, Gateway ranks among the 175 largest printers of all types.
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Mission Statement
Our mission is "We will provide our customers with an outstanding service at a competitive price. We will treat employees and customers with the utmost fairness and respect."
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Business Philosophy
Gateway's business philosophy can be best summarized as follows: |
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- Maintain conservative growth by retaining substantial earnings to invest in new technology and equipment.
- Give employees a vested interest in the business by paying an annual bonus of 25% of total pretax profits. Keep them informed relative to sales, profits, debt, capital spending and future plans.
- Develop and cultivate long term relationships with customers, suppliers and employees.
- Empower the entire staff. Encourage decision making at the lowest possible level.
- Help employees by providing educational incentives for them and their dependents (paid college tuition).
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Nature of Business
Gateway competes in the commercial printing arena. Commercial work is a general category of printing that covers magazines, catalogs, folders, brochures, posters, maps, cards, tax forms, soft cover books, etc. While other printers specialize in areas like publications (magazines), financial (checks) or forms (standardized business forms), Gateway's strength is the ability to print many types of work for its customers. This one stop shopping approach has served us well as our customers don't need other printers for different types of work.
Equipment
Gateway has extensive prepress equipment, both traditional and electronic, including two electronic platesetters. The pressroom is a combination sheetfed and web operation, featuring eight unit heat set web presses. Our binder capabilities include: perfect binding, saddle stitching with inline ink jetting, cutting, folding, drilling, tabbing and more. Mailing equipment with computerized mail management programs are utilized along with extensive fulfillment operations.
Staff
Gateway has 225 full-time employees plus an additional 10 to 20 temporary employees as needed. Temporaries are used during peak production periods and to test out new workers before making an offer for full-time employment. The average tenure of all Gateway employees is over 18 years. We have seven employees with at least 40 years at Gateway.
We believe that retaining our people is a key to maintaining our quality and service. The following two polices are the primary reasons for our high employee retention: 1) Promote from within whenever possible 2) No layoffs for lack of work. We have stuck to these polices over the years as nearly all our senior managers have risen through the ranks and we have yet to lay anyone off for reasons other than disciplinary.
Another way we keep our people is through a profit sharing program. Gateway pays its employees union scale (although we are a nonunion shop) plus an annual bonus equal to 25% of pre-tax profits. For the average employee, this bonus averages three to six weeks salary. As a further incentive, Gateway pays full in-state college tuition for dependents of full-time employees.
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