In eight years, Jim Slife has turned around an unprofitable commercial printing operation and added to it a niche publishing business that handles nearly a dozen magazines, including the Iowan, the state’s best known travel and tourism publication.

When he bought Waterloo-based Pioneer Graphics in 1995, the 50-year-old company had 20 workers and owned no magazines. Since then, its Waterloo presses have been modernized and capacity has increased. The company has won new customers and added 30 employees. Today, Slife oversees a growing collections of magazines as publisher of Pioneer Communications, a sister company to Pioneer Graphics.

“We were not doing any publishing,” Slife said in a recent interview. “We wanted to grow.”

The company’s magazine titles are diverse, ranging from Iowa Gardening to Illinois Trucking News. Under Slife and Pioneer Communications President Rick Thomas, the company has expanded by keeping an extremely lean staff and managing freelance writing talent. They have also been careful to hire the right people.

Slife’s career as a publisher began in late 1996, when Rick Thomas, an executive at Ft. Dodge-based Heartland Communications, a publishing company whose titles included Iowa Commerce and Iowa Golf, left the company to join Pioneer. His arrival laid the groundwork for Pioneer’s transformation to a publishing house from its commercial printing roots. Slife’s background was in corporate finance.

From his home in Clive, Thomas worked to win clients while Slife ran the printing business in Waterloo. The company’s first client was the Printing Industries of the Midwest, which hired Pioneer to sell advertisements, write editorial copy and handle the layout of its Graphic Impressions magazine. The magazine, published ten times per year, largely serves companies in the graphics arts and related industries.

It had been published by Heartland, but a combination of Thomas’ expertise with the magazine and Heartland’s desire to focus on weekly products led it to move to Pioneer.

“That is the magazine that got Pioneer off the ground,” Slife said.

From there, more clients migrated to Pioneer. The company bought Iowa Golf, the magazine sponsored by the Iowa Professional Golf Association, from Heartland. Publishing of the title had become erratic, but Thomas breathed new life into it. He and Slife won the endorsement of the Iowa PGA and set out to boost distribution at golf courses, in pro shops and with members of the association.

With two magazines in its stable, the company moved out of Thomas’ house to its current location in the Fleming building in downtown Des Moines. That title would get a big boost in the summer of 1999, when the U.S. Senior Open was held at Des Moines Golf and Country Club and Pioneer published 20,000 copies of the program for the event.

Over the next several years, the company won contracts to publish Illinois Truck News, which focuses on the trucking industry and The Profit Zone, a financial-oriented magazine. It purchased Grundy Center-based Collectors News in 2001, an acquisition that gave it two salespeople, an editor and two circulation specialists.

With the added skills, Slife and Thomas decided the company could handle a bigger magazine. It purchased the Iowan, which had been started 51 years before by Iowa publisher David Archie, from the Gazette Co., which was getting out of the magazine publishing business. It would later take over publishing of Iowa Commerce magazine from Gazette.

“It was an opportunity for us to take a step up in the publishing world,” Slife said of the Iowan. “I’d always admired the publication and I though we could do a good job with it.”

The Iowan acquisition added another four workers to the company. Today, the company has a dozen employees and has added such titles as Iowa Gardening, The BBQer and Collector Editions, which had been based in New Jersey but was moved to Grundy Center after the acquisition.

“We’ll go after any niche, as long as it’s well-defined and we have the expertise or we can partner with someone,” Slife said.