A fluid sibling partnership

The Flottman Company, a 91-year-old commercial printing firm near Cincinnati, found a unique way to balance the ambitions and desires of three siblings with the leadership needs of a company in an embattled industry. The firm did it with a Solomon-esque management succession plan that calls for rotating the president's job among the three third-generation owners of the company. The plan has worked well for 20 years, but the next scheduled transition may not take place.

The Flottman Company has its roots in the commercial printing industry, but it doesn't describe itself as a printing company anymore. Rather, it's a “marketing solutions provider,” according to the company president, Sue Flottman Steller. “We do ink on paper like commercial printing —brochures and things like that—and pharmaceutical printing,” Sue explains. “But we also take technology and intertwine it with social media, the digital world and direct marketing.” Pharmaceutical printing is the company's bread and butter, accounting for more than half its annual revenues, followed by traditional printing jobs in numerous formats. But digital marketing services like cross-media campaigns that use print, web and mobile technologies such as QR codes are growing rapidly, according to CEO Tom Flottman, Sue's eldest brother.

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