This past May marked a professional milestone for Jake Shaffer ’65, chairman and CEO at McCormick Armstrong: 50 years of working at Wichita’s venerable printing company. He celebrated the occasion with the decision to spend a little less time at work. “My plan is to start taking a few days off,” he says. “Now I try not to work on Saturdays.”
The coming Saturdays, he hopes, will find him spending quality time at area lakes and ponds fishing for crappie, channel cat and bass. “I do plan on doing some of that,” he says about his favorite pastime.
No stranger to hard work, Shaffer grew up working on his family’s farm and put in 32 hours each week at Coleman while he was attending Wichita State. “That’s how I paid to go to college,” he says.
After graduating with an accounting degree, he had a hard time finding a full-time job because of his impending draft into military service. “But McCormick Armstrong called the head of the accounting department and said, ‘We need to hire an accountant,’” Shaffer recalls. “They told me to go interview. I didn’t expect a job, but they made me an offer.”
When Uncle Sam did come calling – “I was drafted in the latter part of 1966,” Shaffer says – McCormick Armstrong did not fill the position he vacated. “They held my job, which I was very appreciative of,” he says. “I was gone about six months the first time.”
During his time away on active duty, McCormick Armstrong geared up for a big transition. “When I returned, they explained that things were changing,” he recalls. “The company was going from being publicly owned to privately owned. The process was finalized in 1968.”
Shaffer – whose first position as accountant was followed with work as controller, CFO, treasurer and president before becoming chairman and CEO – has had a hand in many other transitions. “I got very involved in bringing computers into the company,” Shaffer says of his early years at McCormick Armstrong. “They had no computers whatsoever.”
Ever a champion of using the best technology available, Shaffer has overseen numerous upgrades to the company’s plant and equipment over the years, including a $10 million expansion in 2008 to keep the pre-press and press operations state-of-the-art.
Shaffer is one of only two top leaders to not be a member of either the McCormick or Armstrong family in the company’s more than a century of operations. Last year, Shaffer hired John Bobbit as president to take over the day-to-day oversight of the printing, direct mail, catalog, fulfillment, distribution, and other brand management operations.
“I’m very excited to have John on board,” says Shaffer, who adds that this shift in responsibilities lessens his own workload and allows him to focus more of his attention on OnPoint Specialty Products, a Kansas City, Kan.-based division of McCormick Armstrong that prints high-end coffee table books.
Shaffer, who has always been dedicated to the task at hand – no matter how big or small – appreciates the efforts of everyone who works with him at McCormick Armstrong. “I never dreamed I’d be here 50 years,” he says.
“One of the reasons I’m still here,” he explains, “is to help make sure our employees have a future here at McCormick Armstrong. The keys to success are being committed and working hard.”
With a little time off for fishing.
