Gary Friedman was an accountant, not a printer -- but that served him well in helping his father's printing business survive the transition into the age of the Internet.

Mr. Friedman swore he would never go into the family business because he had grown up with his own father, Milton Friedman, dedicating so much time to the press that he was pretty much missing in action at home.

Instead, the younger Mr. Friedman became an accountant, first earning a bachelor's from the University of Maryland in accounting and then a master's in business administration from the University of Pittsburgh. He worked for a certified public accounting firm, then as corporate tax accountant.

In 1979 his father was considering selling the company to another printing shop. Mr. Friedman was convinced it wasn't a good deal and wound up working with his father.

That was the hardest part of their relationship.

"I thought one of us was going to kill the other," Mr. Friedman said.

Yet he learned the trade from his father. Together they bought a better press that printed two colors, so they could do half of a four-color run in one shot.

Milton Friedman retired in the mid 1980s.

"When he retired our relationship got a lot better," Mr. Friedman said. The father took on the role of mentor, offering advice instead of issuing orders.

Milton Friedman had years of experience to draw upon although his formal education stopped before he graduated from high school. A Jewish immigrant who moved in 1912 from Eastern Europe to Clairton where his father was a rabbi, he dropped out of school during the Great Depression to help his brother-in-law with the hand-operated printing press he had bought. That job lasted only two years because while Mr. Friedman thought he should become a partner in the business, his brother-in-law did not agree.

So, Mr. Friedman, who had been living with his sister and brother-in-law outside of Scranton, moved back to Clairton and started selling printing work for other printers while attending high school in the mornings.

In 1935, with the Depression in full swing, Mr. Friedman started selling printing for the Trust Brothers Printing Shop and setting type at the Hill District shop when he was not on the road. He described the Trust Brothers, Simon and Ralph, in a letter to his family as great craftsmen but poor businessmen.

He lost that job the next year, but persuaded his father and a friend who was an attorney to invest $500 each for him to buy his own press and the rest of the equipment he needed to start a printing shop in McKeesport. They called the new company Franklin Press both in a nod to Benjamin Franklin and because they thought Friedman sounded too Jewish.

Though the business was thriving, he had to sell most of his equipment and put the rest in storage when he was 29 years old. It was 1943, and he had been drafted.

He finished the war on the island of Okinawa, where he sold souvenir post cards and made $9,000 to bring home with him to add to the money from the sale of his printing equipment.

After the war he went back to work with the Trust brothers and other printers as a printing broker, eventually going into business with Ralph Trust, whom he bought out in 1953.

Milton Friedman was on a vacation in Copenhagen, Denmark, with his family, including Gary, when he was struck and killed by a car in 2000.

Since Gary Friedman took over, the company has expanded to add a four-color press, meaning that using four colors of ink -- cyan, magenta, yellow and key (which is black) -- the press can recreate any other color.

But while Trust-Franklin Press was offering custom printing, it also was being beaten out by its competitors on the Internet about three years ago.

That, combined with a couple of his big customers closing, meant Mr. Friedman lost about 25 percent of his business.

He had two problems he needed to solve: First, he didn't want any one company to be his main source of income, because he didn't want to be beholden to any single client. Second, he had to figure out a way to be competitive with printers that survived on Internet sales.

He teamed up with a company to do his mailing, so that if anyone wanted post cards both printed and mailed, he could do that.

And he thought about his pricing. The most expensive part of a job is the setup cost, which includes making the plates to put on the presses. So, if he could "gang" the jobs, or fit as many jobs on a single run as possible, it would spread that setup cost over multiple jobs. In order to do that, he put together a pricing schedule so that under the new system, there would be standard sizes, standard-size runs and standard paper; minimizing the variables meant the jobs could be run together.

"It wasn't a genius move," he said. His consideration was, "What do I need to do to be in the game?"

Now, with his new strategy, no single customer accounts for more than 5 percent of his business, and by ganging the jobs, he can print a lot more jobs at one time, spreading the costs over multiple customers. So, while his sales languished from 1993 through 2000 at about $1.2 million, this year he is projecting a 14 percent increase over 2007, with sales around $2.1 million.

When all was said and done, it was the accounting that pulled him through.