Profiles: Hagen Mehnert ’84

Alumni PROFILES

HAGEN MEHNERT ’84: Eastman:where DIGITAL and print meet

Hagen Mehnert in his printshop

By Richard Wills, publications editor

At a time when the world is supposedly becoming a paperless society, Hagen Mehnert ’84 is bucking the trend and keeping a little printer’s ink on his hands. But his Eastman Systems is more than just a printing company. It’s a full-featured document management system that continues to grow by positioning itself at the point where the digital and print worlds intersect.

Eastman is a digital and offset printing and copying operation that can turn out products large and small, from artquality brochures, letterhead and business cards, to signs, banners and other large-format jobs. They also do a lot of scanning, cutting and laminating.

But 30 per cent of the company’s bread and butter lies in digitizing existing printed documents. Given the current state of technology, what the business world needs is a service that can go in either direction.

Businesses that have a backlog of paper documents use Eastman’s services to digitize their records so they can freely access them at any time. “Everything is digital after a certain date,” Hagen points out, but anyone doing business before that time has a lot of catching up to do. “Once we’ve put their documents online, they can access them from home, from their cottage, from anywhere.”

Another of Eastman’s specialties is in providing custom coursepacks for university teachers and students. Selected course materials from a variety of sources are acquired, compiled and digitized by Eastman, who provides the student or professor with a PDF package of all the required reading for a course, saving a lot of time and money for both students and professors. “We offer book chapters online the same way iTunes sells music,” he says. “Coursepacks are a billion-dollar industry in North America.” On the other hand, many businesses, such as the legal profession, are still required to distribute paper documents by mail. Eastman can copy, collate, package and bulk-mail these materials halfway around the world at a fraction of what it would cost, saving a law firm a significant amount on mailing costs alone. When Veritas visited Hagen’s plant, workers were completing a mailout of 10,000 six-page documents to Europe, a job that had to be completed in 48 hours. In such cases, Hagen and his two partners call in extra help, with as many as 17 workers pitching in to complete a rush job. Hagen got started in the coursepack business in 1992, while still pursuing a political science degree at McGill. And his business is still growing. Eastman just moved into a new, larger plant on William Street on March 1. The partners “took a leap of faith” and renovated a large space, building walls, pouring concrete floors and installing wiring. They have five digital copier/printers at the downtown site and an offset printing plant in the West Island.

In an age when information technology has been reinventing itself almost yearly, Hagen has found that the secret to a successful printing business lies in diversification and adaptation.

“The focus is shifting,” Hagen says, “and we’re trying to tap into all of the options.” ■

Geoff MOORE

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opportunities that are extremely competitive purely from a financial perspective. Then you also get the benefits of addressing specific social and/or environmental issues.

“Don’t forget,” Geoff stresses, “this is still all about investment and business and making a profit. So you set a financial target, which is your first bottom line, but then you also have specific objectives with regard to social issues, which makes it double-bottom-line. If you also want to add environmental impact, it becomes triple-bottom-line.

“No matter how wealthy or how poor we may be, we are all, ultimately triple-bottom-line people, affected not only by the economy, but by social issues and the environment.

“Why not target things you care about while you are making money?” ■