To raise cash, she and her husband Bob Nicholas had already mortgaged their house three times. With payroll to meet, hefty ongoing expenses and an order from a big oil company that required her to buy $850,000 worth of paper with money she didn’t have, she realized she was at the end of the line. Nicholas was able to complete the job — luckily, the client paid up front for the paper. But it had become clear that she could not sustain her operations and would have to lay off her employees if she was unable to get a cash infusion.

One of her best clients, a woman named Hilary Sharon, who was with Bank of America at that time, had been encouraging her to secure a strategic partner. Many businesses that aim to add scale quickly take on partners who can offer both money and expertise, and firms with multiple owners do make more money. Yet women entrepreneurs don’t sign on partners as often as men do and tend to run smaller companies; 89 percent of firms entirely owned by women have just one owner, according to the National Women’s Business Council.

“We want to send you more work, but you don’t have the capital,” Sharon told her. “What you need to do is partner with someone who has what you don’t have.” Nicholas says: “We needed equipment… We only had one location, and, of course, there’s never enough money.”

Nicholas did have some leverage to negotiate a partnership, though. “We had run out of money, but we still had our customers,” she says. “They had faith in us.” But of course, being in financial straits, she was not in the strongest position.

Scoundrels and Then a Savior

Nicholas began talking to some smaller printing companies about partnering. And another type of suitor started to appear — the kind her husband Bob, a former television news anchor with a deep, rich voice, calls “scoundrels with slick schemes in mind.”

One representative of an investment group, eying Nicholas’ certifications as a women-owned and minority-owned business, offered her a half million dollars and a monthly check to simply stay home and relax. Such certifications can help attract new business, because many large companies and government purchasing agencies have programs to steer a certain percentage of their business to firms that have majority female or minority ownership. But Nicholas had no intention of becoming someone’s figurehead. “We are honest people,” she says.

Time ran out one Friday, and Nicholas shuttered her printing plant. But the next Monday, she received a miracle phone call. On the line was Robert Kashan, the chief executive of EarthColor, a much larger printing company based in Parsippany, N.J., whom Nicholas had met once at a conference. Word of the bind she was in had reached him via a brand new salesman in his organization, a man who had been Nicholas’ top salesperson until she had to shut down.

Kashan wanted to talk about teaming up and was ready to jump on a plane to Houston. He looked like a Godsend. EarthColor had a good reputation and many locations. “It had integrity,” Nicholas says. “I met with him Wednesday morning, and by Wednesday afternoon we had a new company.”

“I’ve got everything you need,” Kashan told her, she says — money, equipment and multiple locations. “It’s going be like a marriage.”

arita-in-warehouseNicholas said yes to him. “And for 13 years, it’s been just that easy,” she says. “We happened to find the right partner, and it has been heaven.”

Kashan took a 49 percent stake in their new Houston firm, Nicholas Earth Printing, and left Nicholas to run it. When she needed additional printing power to complete a large job or to the use of one of EarthColor’s locations, she could send work to there. Likewise, EarthColor could send jobs to her.


Out of Purgatory and on to Heaven

Today, Nicholas Earth Printing is humming. It does printing for a host of giant corporations, working with their marketing, advertising and design agencies and in-house printing specialists. It has four digital presses, approximately 20 employees and annual revenue in the $25 million-to-$50 million range. Each week, it sends out 300,000 to 500,000 pieces of direct mail from its in-house post office, depending on the season and clients’ promotional calendars.

This happy ending is getting even happier. About 5 years ago, Nicholas began to increase her ownership of the company — buying a little bit more most every quarter. Now she owns 62 percent.

That’s something major corporations like to see when they consider doing business with her. “They question 51 percent,” because it’s the slimmest of majority ownerships. But “62 percent demonstrates the integrity of the partnership,” she says. “It shows that our partner is really with us.”

Nicholas says she wants to keep Nicholas Earth Printing growing so she can keep hiring people. After experiencing the pain of laying people off, one of her most important goals is to create more “secure jobs.” Another wish is to continue to be able to support key charities she is involved in, foremost the Houston Ladies Lion’s Club and The Rose, a breast-health organization.

She also wants to make sure she has a strong asset that she can pass on to her children. Nicholas has two grown daughters, and they have shown some interest but they, too, want security, especially now that they have children of their own. Of course, they know well the difficult road their entrepreneur mother has traveled. “We can’t offer them anything if it isn’t stable and growing,” Nicholas says.

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Arita Nicholas – CEO – Nicholas Earth Printing

SOT Arita Nicholas (AN): So this is how you do that huh, okay, alright.

AN: I’m the CEO. I make sure that everything is the way it’s supposed to be and I go out and get as much business as I can. But being a woman sometimes is a hindrance. And then being a black woman, too, in the printing industry. It takes a bit getting used to. Yeah.

CARD: Arita Nicholas CEO – Nicholas Earth Printing Houston, Texas USA

AN: Nicholas Earth is a woman-owned minority commercial printing company, which means we do everything from posters, to annual reports, to booklets, uh, folders. It doesn’t matter how large your order is. We can handle it.

CARD: Arita became an entrepreneur later in life. The first decades of her career were spent at TWA.

CARD: In 1985 she met Bob Nichols, a local news anchor, at a charity event.

CARD: They married the next year.

SOT BOB: The next thing we’re doing right now is the catalog for them.
SOT Arita: Mhmm.
- Which will go out to all of their stores.
- Okay, great. That’s a nice national account.

AN: Bob and I were doing quite well and we have this family member who had a printing company. But it was a, it was a pretty small one and with all of Bob’s contacts he knew everybody. He says, “I can help them take this, this, this to the next level.” And I said, “Sure.”

CARD: The arrangement didn’t work out.

CARD: But Arita and Bob saw an opportunity to build a profitable, minority-owned company.

AN: We envisioned a, a bigger company that would handle corporate America ’cause we knew that, that was where the money is. And he says, “Really, Arita, all you need to do is just hire the best people. So you don’t need to know about printing. You just need to hire the best in the industry and you oversee it all.”

CARD: In 2000, with $3 million in savings and loans, Arita launched her company.

AN: We put the word out that we were looking for a pressman and producers, everything. And the printing industry is a small one. We just made sure that the people that were hired usually were were recommended by somebody else. I put together the best people that, that came to us and it was wonderful.

AN: My job was to, go out and get new customers. And I’d go out and make a presentation. It was a really, it was a real growing experience for me because I hadn’t made presentations to large boardrooms or anything like that. But, uh, I grew a lot.

CARD: Arita and Bob had not realized how capital intensive the printing business is.

AN: We were doing a job for a big oil company and the oil company said, “Well, we really like your work and we were gonna give you, give you this big job. We said, “Thank you so much,” but only to find out that the paper was $850,000, the paper, the paper. And we said, “Oh, oh my God. We don’t have that. Don’t have that.” Luckily they, they, they wrote a check and paid for the paper. But that is when we truly knew that there’s not enough money in our pockets.

CARD: To make matters worse, by 2002, digital technology was decimating the industry.

AN: We had no money to buy more equipment. We were barely holding onto what we had. And because we still had payroll to meet we went and mortgaged our house three times. One time they were going to cut my water off at my house. I had to call my daughter, who’s a nurse, uh, and say, “Honey, can you, can you get our, our water turned on?” I said, “We can’t go on like, like this.”

CARD: On a Friday in 2002, Arita closed the company.

CARD: The next Monday, Robert Kashan of Earth Color, a much larger printer, contacted her.

AN: Mr. Kashan had been looking for another company to partner with that was minority or woman because he said, “I have access to everything else but I don’t have access to the woman-owned minority market.” So we were perfect. Mr. Kashan says. “I know you need to run your own company.” I said, “Yes, I do.” and he says, “’I’ve got it, I understand totally.”

CARD: In just two days they formed Nicholas Earth Printing, with Arita as the majority owner.

AN: It was agreed that I would not go after his clients and vice versa. So uh, we, we worked out a, a great schedule. Anything that was too big for me was… perfect for him. So that, this gave me the freedom to go the, the Sprints and say “It doesn’t matter how large your order is. We can handle it. The last year, for instance, there was a big snowstorm on the East Coast and they simply sent the file down here, we got the job done, nobody knew the difference. People don’t wanna hear about your problems. They want their product, you know. I don’t care if it’s snowing, hailing or whatever.

CARD: Arita’s clients are among the biggest in corporate America.

CARD: She has 18 employees. Her 2015 revenues were $21 million.

AN: I think once you get clients and they see the quality of your work, at that point, color has nothing to do with it.

SOT AN: It’s really nice when they know they can send it to us and they know it’ll be done right.