ATS Printing Partnership
Over six years ago, Do All had a small team working at a brand-new facility for ATS Printing, 4177 3 Mile Road, in Bay City’s west end. Due to limited needs and time constraints over two years of Covid pandemic restraints and lockdowns, the business relationship between the two companies scattered.
Fast forward to a Do All Job Development word-of-mouth Employer Contact in spring of 2022. A simple ‘hello’ and handshake reunion between the two organizations led to ATS now becoming the Do All employment leader, currently utilizing ten clients in various service positions. The mammoth space on 3 Mile houses printing, stitching, designing, packaging, ordering, calculating, and distributing for national organizations as well as local services, with shipping and receiving flying in and out of the plant daily.
“Marathons, YouTube Channels, corporations, drop-shipments, concert tours, Olympics, fishing television shows, worldwide events--we do it all,” said Bill Coppens, lead managing and marketing director at ATS. “We do a lot of stuff in the outdoor world, predominantly fishing, but we're branching out and do some more hunting and that kind of stuff, just because we're all outdoor people.”
Do-All contributes to the packaging, press line-flows, repetitive tasks, and multiple on-site as-needed services. The partnership works extremely well now, as ATS has recently expanded again into becoming an inclusive fulfillment business for many national companies.
“What we found is more and more of our customers were shipping to some other fulfillment center and then they were shipping to all their end users,” noted Coppens. “We figured we could save them some money by keeping that in house. We do it every day with some of the websites that we run anyway, so it's been another revenue stream for us.”
Originally opening in 1989 and located in Merrill, MI, operations became so big, ATS found itself getting co-op help from local high schools, Bay Arenac ISD, and other organizations as they shifted to Bay City for more space. Currently utilizing about 70 workers a day at 3 Mile alone, ATS now has offsite centers doing specific duties across the entire area. When Do All came back into focus this year for the company, permanent positioning became available in specific nuance and dedicated services that were originally shared across the board by all ATS employees, as time allowed.
“Labor is an issue for everybody in the world right now and we looked for many different avenues. We've tried to look at non-traditional avenues, because we think that there's valuable people and valuable assets in there, said Coppens.”
Periodically the owners will grill hot dogs or have fish fry’s, pancake breakfasts, pop bars and ice cream trucks come in to keep their employees engaged and appreciated.
“We had an ice cream truck come in and invited everybody back into the shop that day,” said Coppens. “One of the customer service representatives called me and said, ‘What a difference those people make in everybody's mood. It was amazing.’ He says ‘We're as busy as we've always been, everybody's stretched super thin and everybody's happy. Then there's those people there that make everybody happy. It's something I wasn't expecting.’”
For owner John Gillman, hiring from Do All and seeing the joy on the faces of all the employees has been another perfect piece in their family fabric.
“There's a core group here of all of us that have been here a long time and family. Everybody is on the same page, which I think has made us successful to the level that we're at. To be honest, it's funny when they walk in, anyone in a bad mood, Do All workers will change the mood. Perma-grin every day.”