A Family Affair In Clinton | Family Business Honoree | Category: 100 - 249 employees
Photo/Edd Cote
Dunn & Co./Legacy Publishing, 75 Green St., Clinton 01510
The Dunn clan, from left to right: Carlos and Cathleen Llanso, Mary and David Dunn, Pamela and Timothy Cross, Mary Pat and Peter Heelan.
When Barack Obama was elected president, it was more than a historic moment for David Dunn. It meant lots of new business rebinding history books and inserting new pages at Dunn & Co. in Clinton. And that’s always a family affair.
When new books are rebound, there’s always waste to recycle. That means plenty of new inventory for the company’s affiliate, Legacy Publishing Group, where Dunn’s wife Mary, his three grown daughters and their husbands all punch time cards. His nine grandchildren also help out, modeling in Legacy’s catalogs.
“My three daughters, from the day we started, were involved in the family business,” said Dunn, a 66-year-old Lancaster resident who began his company in 1976. “They were just children then.”
Pluses And Minuses
Dunn’s three daughters were all 12 and under when he left his executive position at the former Colonial Press in Clinton, which at the time was a 1,500-employee book manufacturer, to go out on his own and rehab books for manufacturers.
All three daughters went to college to be teachers, determined to leave the family business to their father. But they and their husbands all felt the call back hard to resist.
“Not everyone wants to work together, but there are some wonderful advantages to being a family business,” said son-in-law Timothy Cross, a former Providence attorney who now works as Legacy’s vice president of sales.
Cross counts a casual office environment, a five-minute commute and getting to see the family more among the advantages. It would be hard to give up that flexibility by going back to the law, he said, and the work wouldn’t hold the same meaning.
“This is near and dear to our heart,” he said. “This is our family business.”
Cross is married to Dunn’s daughter Pamela, Legacy’s vice president of design.
Oldest daughter Mary Pat Heelan is vice president of marketing while Dunn’s other daughter Cathleen Llanso holds the title vice president of product development while her husband, Carlos Llanso is CEO of Legacy.
Dunn started his own business for the same reason many small business owners do: dissatisfaction with the boss.
“I was a square peg in a round hole,” he said.
“The company had been sold. And I knew I didn’t fit in and management knew I didn’t fit in.”
Dunn’s plan of refitting books to save manufacturers printing costs did well in the first few years. Dunn & Co. quickly grew to 35 employees.
Then, the economy slumped in 1978 and book manufacturers simply stopped production, giving him his first tough experience with layoffs. “To go from 35 to 3 was really difficult,” he says.
Difficult, but Dunn acted. Rather than wait for hardcover books to linger on discount shelves, Dunn proposed book manufacturers hire him to repackage the books for the paperback market.
It worked, and he’s been steadily entering new markets and tackling seemingly insurmountable problems ever since.
Along with commercial printing, the new markets include Legacy Publishing Group, which shares 90 employees with Dunn & Co.
Legacy began about 15 years ago when Dunn first tried to tame his $80,000 a month trash bill. He began pasting tourist scenes on discarded book covers and selling them in his wife’s gift shop in Kennebunk, Maine. Today, the book covers are recycled into greeting cards, notepads and other gifts made partly in Clinton and partly in China due to labor costs.
The final product is sold at gift shops across the country, at the company’s web site, www.shoplegacy.com, and at Mary Dunn’s gift shop at the company’s headquarters.
Though proud, Dunn admits to worry. He arrives at work daily at 3 or 4 a.m. to work amid the quiet and says sometimes it’s then that the thought of maintaining his early 1900s, 250,000-square-foot mill building wears him out.
“It’s like it says, ‘Feed me,’” he laughs.
The economic slowdown is also a big worry, recently forcing 30 layoffs at the company. Ten employees have been hired back.
“Family businesses are great as long as you can continue to reinvent yourself,” Dunn said. “If something goes wrong, though, all our jobs go away."
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