THE RHA REVIEW
Volume 2, No. 3, Second Quarter 1996

Let me offer you a piece of free advice, risk management, if you will, from a risk management novice who learned the hard way.

If your company is like most, the printing of your promotional materials is handled by an outside contractor, typically either an independent print shop or an advertising or marketing company. If you give the company your negatives or plates or have it make plates or negatives so that it can reproduce your materials, be careful. Ensure that what you supply and/or pay to have produced is returned to you along with your printed materials every time you have those materials printed. Or have a signed agreement with the company responsible for your printing stating that it will return your materials to you when and if you decide to take your patronage elsewhere. I am currently learning the hard way that you may lose valuable materials if these precautions are not taken.

My problem began when the quality of the print shop that I had used for a couple of years began to decline, both in customer service and in the quality of workmanship, and the people we had dealt with had left the company. We were never informed that "our people" were gone. Instead they were "out of the office today" — for a week and a half. Despite the problems, we decided to give them a few months to get their house in order. However, when the decline had become too much for us to put up with, we decided to move our account to a different service provider. The management at the original print shop refused to release our materials because, according to its general manager, that’s the policy. Apparently the company feels that the materials we supplied — which were created by a previous provider and are very company-specific — and those which we paid them to manufacture on our behalf, belong to the print shop and not us.

Following repeated letters and phone calls which elicited no favorable response, I contacted my company’s attorneys, who are currently pursuing the matter. Although the missing materials are probably not worth the financial cost of litigation, the lack of business ethics inherent in the situation certainly makes one consider it. After all, my company paid for all of the materials, which were kept on site for us, as most printers do. Surely if we’ve paid for these materials they belong to us. If they are not returned to us, have they not been stolen?

The message from this risk management novice is this: cover all bases when seeking off-site services, especially when they involve releasing valuable, difficult-to-replace materials to an "outsider." If there is no way to store the negatives and plates in your office, then be sure to at least get a written agreement from your provider stating that it will release your materials to you within 10 days or so of receiving a written request for the return of those materials.