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The Client: Bear Creek Smokehouse

The Account Representative: Dillon Driscoll

Tucked away deep into the pine curtain, the facilities at Bear Creek Smokehouse are much more difficult to find than their renowned reputation would lead you to believe.

Yet there was Dillon Driscoll, traveling down the tree-lined, two-lane highway of TX 154, in search of just about the only business between that rural stretch of road between Harleton and Marshall. As difficult as its facilities are to find, Bear Creek Smokehouse is a holiday season staple for a majority of East Texans and patrons beyond, delivering freshly smoked meats literally all over the country (they recently shipped 20 pounds of meat to Alaska).

“My family personally has bought their hams for many years at Christmas,” Dillon said. "I definitely knew of them. And I'd been prospecting this account for some time." 

Preparing smoked meat? Bear Creek has it perfected. Shipping it? All the time ... especially during the Holidays. But the company's printing process was far from perfected — most notably,creating  the labels that go on every package shipped out to the hungry patrons across these great states.

The Business Challenge

“They were running multiple desktop printers trying to keep up with their labels,” Dillon said. “They were using the software Ship Station to create custom made labels at letter size (two labels to one letter size panel).”

Doing so many labels on the little printers simply wasn’t feasible. Standardization, and optimization, to the printing process was Dillon’s strategy for Bear Creek.

The Thought Process

First, Dillon had to find the Smokehouse, and then their business/production office, which was tucked even further away in the Piney Woods.

“There’s nothing but pastureland and piney woods down a country road,” Dillon said. “It’s not the easiest of companies to just pop into.”

After several prospecting calls, and an initial Discovery meeting, Dillon made a recommendation for a Canon ImageRUNNER MFP, to create a more efficient and consistent means for printing labels.

“They were so receptive to understanding that there’s got to be a better way to do this,” Dillon said.

The issue arose once the MFP was installed, and the team struggled to get it to work with the label software. Field Service Representative Chris Hoefer jumped on board to help readjust the label template to a standard size that “clicked” with the multifunction device.

The Prevailing Results

“The most obvious advantage for them is, we’re able to standardize what everybody is printing to. Everyone who prints these labels can do so to one device. And, they can do MORE with it – do letters, different types of labels, things they weren’t able to print off before,” Dillon said.

He says the end users are happy to have a more reliable machine; the office management is “thrilled that they doesn’t have to purchase ink or toner for all the one-off machines they had before.”