How prudent capital deployment returned Quad to profitability

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It’s tough being a commercial printer in the digital era. Who needs a Sears catalog when Amazon has an app? Why print a brochure when you can just give prospects a QR code?

Yet the 55-year-old, Wisconsin-based Quad—the fourth-largest printer in the US and Canada, according to the 2025 Printing Impressions 300—is growing net earnings and has its sights on net sales growth in 2028. Last year marked “an important milestone” in Quad’s quest to return to growth, according to CFO and Treasurer Tony Staniak.

Reaching its goal requires a balancing act—and we aren’t talking just about the books. Staniak said he and his team are tasked with controlling costs in Quad’s unprofitable businesses while investing in those that are growing.

“When we look at capex, when we look at M&A that might come into play, we’ve got to make sure that we get our value back from those investments,” Staniak told CFO Brew. This requires finance to “continue to tightly manage the 23% of our business that is facing year-after-year organic decline,” and funding the other 77% “accordingly with investment to drive that [expected] growth.”

The journey: Quad turned a profit last year, with net earnings of $27 million versus a net loss of $51 million in 2024. Quad’s turnaround comes “after years of exposure to the secular headwinds in the printing industry,” Barton Crockett, managing director and senior research analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, told us.

The company first went public in 2010 with its acquisition of World Color Press, resulting in North America’s second-largest printer, Publishers Weekly reported at the time. Through subsequent purchases, it added print capabilities like folding-carton packaging and in-store signage, and later got into the marketing-services business.

“With those acquisitions, we then had the ability to basically do all things for the chief marketing officer,” Staniak said.

Those acquisitions came at a cost: Quad had become “over three times levered,” according to Staniak. After a yearslong buying spree, it turned to paying down its debt to give itself “stronger balance sheet flexibility, to both weather storms as well as look for growth opportunities and have the dry powder ready when they present themselves,” Staniak said. The company shed more than $700 million in debt, from over $1 billion in early 2020 to $308 million in 2025.

Quad has also shifted its capex strategy, Staniak said. It previously invested in “really large presses for our large-scale platform,” but now focuses more specifically its capex on “the targeted print group,” including direct mail, packaging, and in-store signage. It’s also investing in AI technology “to develop new solutions to make our services even more efficient,” he said.

Quad aims to recover the cost of capex investments in under two years. “We have decisions on which are the very best projects to move our strategy forward and have the best ROI. I and finance are on the front lines of those decisions,” Staniak said.

At the same time, Quad has had to make some “tough decisions” to shrink its printing operations, which Staniak said company leaders make “with our head, but we try to implement them with our heart.” In December, Quad announced it was closing a large facility in Georgia. Its decision “reflects ongoing industry declines in long-run print categories” such as weekly magazines, Printing Impressions reported.

In 2010, the year it went public, Quad had 25,000 employees across 142 facilities. According to its latest annual report, Quad is down to 10,100 employees and 71 facilities, 33 of which are for manufacturing and distribution.

The destination: Presently, less than a quarter of Quad’s business remains unprofitable. But that wasn’t always the case—which is a reflection of the progress Quad has made, Staniak said. That’s the message Quad brings to investors.

“We’re trying to drive that home, because even in our stock valuation, we feel it’s low,” Staniak said. “People think of us as, ‘They’re that printing company that’s got declines that they deal with.’ Well, that’s true, we acknowledge that…We also are focused on growth areas, and how do we invest in those? And our job…is to have investors see the bigger picture of what Quad is.”

Crockett at Rosenblatt Securities started covering Quad in 2024. He said he felt there was “deep value” in Quad’s stock, yet the markets treated the company “as if there was not much life left.”

“Despite all of this tremendous secular pressure that [Quad has] been navigating for a very substantial period of time, this company has done a really excellent job in this period of controlling expenses and managing its capital structure such that it’s very meaningfully de-levering and…reducing debt,” Crockett said. “The captain of that part of Quad seems to be the CFO, Tony [Staniak]. So hats off to him, his team, and his colleagues in being able to accomplish these things.”