WOODRIDGE, Ill. — It all started with an auction that was silent, but wasn’t supposed to be.

When Martin Hozjan started Mah Machine Co. in 1976, a machine shop that manufactures a number of machine parts, including frames and rollers for newspaper presses, he never intended to be a press manufacturer. But it was a series of business deals and a failure by another press manufacturer that brought him, and his Tensor Group Inc., into the market.

Wes Turski, an assembly lead-man at Tensor Group,
works on a Tensor 2400 press unit.
Photo courtesy of Tensor

Mah Machine’s association with DEV Industries, a now-defunct press maker, started as just a supplier of parts. DEV manufactured its own presses when the company started in the mid-1980s, but was encountering problems with the work it had done.

In 1986, DEV approached Hozjan, asking him and Mah Machine to handle the manufacture and assembly of presses for the company. Hozjan then formed Mah Industries with two other partners to handle the work for DEV.

Things took a turn for the worse in 1993 for DEV, when the company declared bankruptcy after losing a $2.5-million lawsuit to Goss Graphic Systems. A court ruled that DEV has misappropriated some key parts from Goss for its own presses. When DEV went out of business, the company owed Mah Industries more than $2 million. The bankruptcy forced Hozjan to lay off most of the staff at Mah Industries.

A bankruptcy trustee was put in charge of liquidating all of DEV’s assets that were not related to the Goss lawsuit to pay off creditors. Hozjan was second in line, behind DEV’s bank, as a secured creditor. The assets were to be liquidated through three auctions — one for DEV’s technology, one for the company’s inventory and one for anything left after the first two.

Martin sent a representative to the auctions in the hopes of pushing up the price for DEV’s technology and parts, and recouping some of the money he was owed. The first auction to sell several hundred drawings of technology developed by DEV, did not go as Hozjan had planned.

“[The representative] put in the first bid, and no one else bid,” Hozjan said. “There were a lot of people there, but no one was bidding, and one, two, three, we ended up with the technology. It caught us by surprise, because I was very confident that someone else was going to bid.”

The same thing happened at a second auction for DEV’s entire inventory. Since he had acquired most of the company at the first two auctions, Hozjan went ahead and purchased the bulk of DEV’s other assets, such as office equipment, at the third auction.

Soon after the liquidation was completed, Hozjan was approached by DEV customers to build equipment for them. Hozjan had drawings for all of DEV’s technology, except for 46 drawings that Goss was given in the lawsuit. Hozjan then had a firm reverse engineer the parts they were missing, and Tensor was born.

Focus on smaller papers

For the eight years it has existed, Tensor has been a single-width company that has remained profitable from the beginning, and found success primarily through word-of-mouth.

Hozjan brought in Don Gustafson, former vice president of sales at Goss, to help bring Tensor more to the front of the newspaper press industry. Gustafson is looking to Tensor’s past to help move the company into the future.

Although Hozjan and Gustafson have made moves to expand the company’s presence, they plan to make it a slow expansion that will keep Tensor in the black, and most importantly, keep it focused on serving customers.

“Our bread and butter really is the short-run to medium-run newspaper, short- to medium-run insert market, and customers that want to run newspapers and commercial work,” Gustafson said.

Gustafson also wants to make Tensor a company that will make customers think of quality products and quality service as soon as they hear the company’s name.

“How do you achieve these things? If you’re not moving forward, you’re going backwards in this industry. You’ve got to continually improve your quality. We’ve got to continue to drive that equation. We also have to drive new product,” Gustafson said. “There’s some new product that we have to develop to take us to the next level, as well, but we must continue to keep this company focused as a single-width company. We don’t want to play in the double-width arena.

“It’s very easy to get lured into chasing the big elephants, that are roaming around today’s marketplace, out of business opportunity. However, to go play in that arena, not only do you need some different technology and resources, but those accounts take a lot of nurturing. They take a lot of your time and attention,” Gustafson continued. “If you put all that time into those large projects … you lose sight, based on my experience, of the smaller customer.

“The smaller customer says, ‘We used to be your bread and butter, now you’re more focused on those other areas. Whatever happened to us?’ I don’t want that to happen, plain and simple.”

Gustafson wants to make sure that as Tensor moves into other arenas, that Tensor’s current customer base, which includes more than 200 installations worldwide, is not neglected.

Relationships and customer service are the most important things to Tensor’s survival in the press market, according to Hozjan and Gustafson.

“The relationship with the customer means more than anything else,” Hozjan said. “When you have a small company, that’s much easier to do than with a large company. We get personally involved with the customers … and that always means a lot to [them].”

Continually raising the bar on customer service is another area that Gustafson said is important for Tensor.

“We don’t think our service is bad, but you never can have too good a level of service. You’ve got to have the mindset that you always want to improve when it comes to customer service,” Gustafson said.

More than blueprints

Although they started off with hundreds of blueprints for making a newspaper press, Gustafson said Tensor realized from the beginning that they would have to re-engineer the DEV designs and make the presses Tensor’s.

“When Tensor started, immediately they saw that they needed to take the DEV units, put those in the past and start fresh,” he stated.

“Since we started, every year there is something new on the presses,” Martin added.

“However, you can only evolve to a limit, and then you need to repackage the entire press into the next generation,” Gustafson added.

Tensor introduced a next generation press, the new T-400B, at this year’s Nexpo show in New Orleans, and has since sold three T400B presslines totaling 40 units.

The T-400B press is geared toward newspapers that are interested in adding insert and commercial work to their production mix, and is based upon Tensor’s 1400 series of single-width presses, but with added features to enhance the print quality for semi-commercial work.

Features of the new press include a 100-percent helical drive design that helps eliminate distortion of dots; rapid makeready; toolless plate change; bearers on both blanket cylinders and Tensor’s “bearing-in-bearing” design, both of which are used to help with support of the blanket and reduce print disturbances; reel rod-type, narrow-gap blanket lock-ups; and motorized registration.

The T-400B, which can be installed as a shafted or shaftless press, runs at a speed of 40,000 copies per hour and is available with cutoffs as low as 19 inches and as high as 24.8 inches, and has a web width ranging from 31 inches to 40 inches. The units are available in two-, three- or four-high configurations and can be adapted to run in any press line.

Gustafson said the newspaper is also looking to develop a presence in Latin America. The company recently signed a deal with Flint Ink Latin America that will make Flint the exclusive agent of Tensor in Central America, South America and the Caribbean.