Lourdes Madsen
President
lourdes@rapidpress.com
After the most important job that anyone can have, raising children, Lourdes became active in the family business, Rapid Press. She was our first delivery driver, our janitor, and started our purchase order management system. As our purchasing agent she learned about paper, inks, film, plates, and the chemicals that we use to make your products.
After extensive OSHA training she became our Safety Director and authored our Safety Procedures and Manual. She began helping with estimates and interacting with our clients and became an expert on that facet of the business as well. Lourdes trained at the executive level of the business under then president, Mary Madsen, and soon learned to run the corporation. She purchased the business when Mary and Norman Senior retired and has been running it since. In 2001 she qualified Rapid Press, Inc. to become a Certified Minority Owned Business.
When our clients asked us to include mailing in our range of services, Lourdes trained at the USPS to learn their (millions of) rules and regulations so that we could help plan our clients work to qualify for the best postage discounts available.
Lourdes was a substitute teacher here in Leon County, worked for a group of attorney’s in Miami, and put herself through college in the 1970s while financially supporting her brother, sisters and grandmother.
Having fled Cuba when Castro took power to live through very hard times as a foreign immigrant in the United States, Lourdes is no stranger to hard work. One could say that “printing is in her blood” as Lourdes was greatly influenced by her Great Aunt Ester Zayas, the former president of the largest newspaper in Havana, Cuba. The tenacity and determination that forged her character growing up is one of the keys to her success as President for Rapid Press, Inc.