Even Courier's earliest ancestor, The Chelmsford Journal, was quick to spot opportunities in printing and publishing. In every issue, the newspaper, founded in 1824, ran an ad for itself directly under the headline: "Book and job printing...executed on new type, with neatness and expedition, at this office." Ever since, through a series of name changes, mergers, businesses launched, developed, and sold, and the change from privately held to public company, Courier has retained its interest in a wide variety of printing and publishing markets and its eye for opportunity.

With $500, a clever salesman bought 100 years of business. One of the biggest opportunities the company spotted in its early years was telephone directories. In the late 1800s it wasn't yet clear that telephones would be big business - even though Alexander Graham Bell had been to nearby Lowell to lecture and give a demonstration phone call from Lowell to Boston. But the fledgling directory business did offer newspaper publishers a way to keep their presses running during down times; so this young salesman was annoyed to keep bumping into a competitor each time he made a sales call to the telephone company. "Look, you and I both know there ain't enough business for the both of us," he said to his counterpart, "I'll give you $500 in cash right now if you'll stop calling on these guys." The guy took the money, and Courier published the first Boston telephone directory and nearly every directory published in New England for the next century.

Courier revolutionized the forms business - just as the insurance boom took off. In the two decades after the end of World War II, the insurance industry grew at record pace, and so did Courier. By then Courier had become one of the premier forms printers in the country, having entered the business early by servicing accounts such as Western Union, American Cyanamid, Atlantic Refining, Uniroyal, United Fruit, and General Motors during the 1930s. But in the postwar years, the place to be was insurance, and the sheer size of the market - spreading from coast to coast with more than 300,000 agents receiving documents - prompted Courier to innovate new methods. The company set up systems for printing, distributing, and warehousing forms and manuals, maintaining mailing lists and inventories, and managing both random and scheduled reorders. It even created a clearinghouse for keeping Courier and its customers abreast of changes in state laws affecting the insurance industry.

As important as knowing when to get into a business is knowing when to get out. In 1988, the company's CEO tried to make a phone call from a London hotel room but couldn't find a phone book. When he called the hotel operator to complain she replied, "We are participating in an experimental computer program that no longer requires the use of telephone directories." The episode was timely since the company was trying to decide how to exercise a "trigger clause" in its contract with a partner that owned 50% of the Courier directory business. Many factors were being considered, including the cost of ongoing technology investments and the rising demands of customers, but for Courier's CEO this personal experience was the clincher. The company sold its half of the business, and just in time. Not more than a month later, AT&T Nynex began discontinuing some of its directories. The number of printed pages industry-wide dropped like a rock.

In the 1980s, Courier also got out of the forms business, which until then had been so lucrative. Computers, the company saw, would make many printed forms obsolete. So when a private investor approached Courier took it, and used the money to take an early position in the coming digital juggernaut.

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