"Chase helps New Orleans company Garrity Printing save money"

Paul Garrity, co-founder: "Garrity Printing is a 25-year old company. I started in our garage 25 years ago and built up into about a 35,000-square foot building that we're located in. Rose, my wife's mother, worked for a large printing company here in town and wanted to make sure her future son-in-law had a trade and got me started in the business. I went from a helper to a pressman and moved into production manager and was working for a couple of large companies and...a lot of responsibility but wasn't making any money.

Right in '84 when the crash hit, I told Rose, I said, I really know printing, why not buy a press and put it in my garage and slowly but surely we began to grow. At first, we started doing printing for other printers and then as we began to grow, they wouldn't give us any business any longer. So, when we went to the first building, it was 1800 square feet. I went "We'll never fill this up." I don't know if it was two years until we were out of there into a 5,000-square foot building. I said the same thing.

Today, we have 42 employees and really modern equipment. Everything we had in those days was second-hand. We've spent a tremendous amount of money in software to be able to do good color, control color, match color from proofs to the press. We have some people here...we've only been in business 25 years and we've got people around here 15-20 years. We've pretty much dealt with the smaller banks.

The story with Chase is really a great story and kinda funny almost, because Keith Johnson stopped here and I had left cause it was 5:15 on a Friday afternoon. I still say, "What is a banker doing working at 5:15 on a Friday afternoon?" He told me about how great his bank was and I flat out told him, I said "Keith, I'll just tell you, I don't like being a small fish in a big sea, I just don't like dealing with big banks." He said OK. We had a nice meeting and he left.

About three weeks later, he stopped back in again and he just kept stopping in and stopping in. So I finally got, you know what...let me show this guy what I got. So I went and pulled out the loans, made some copies and said, look, this is what I've got. This is the amount of money, there's what I'm paying, and I figured, this way I'll get rid of him. So he came back about a week or so later, and we were sitting in the conference room just talking and he pulls out something...I'm almost kinda blowing him off a little bit...and he said he could save me $16,000. I mean, $16,000 is a lot of money. There's no two ways about it, but I don't know if I want to go through all the change.. change from one bank for $16,000...and he said, no, $16,000 a month. I went "what?"

It instantly hit me that, you know, somebody could've sat down.. they knew what I was paying...they could've come back and said, $8,000. And I was impressed by that.. they were really honest. We made the switch and they've done a wonderful job for us. We have so many people call up and tell us that, you know, you all were the best printing company we've ever worked with. I enjoy that. I enjoy talking with people and the fact that I can make them very, very happy with the product that we produce for them and help them make money. You help them make money, they're gonna come back and do business with you again.