Cyndie Shaffstall, Founder and CEM

Cyndie Shaffstall has been a member of the publishing, print, and software industries for more than three decades. Her career spans many interests, specialties, and job verticals, but first and foremost, she is an entrepreneur.

Shaffstall headed down the creative path in 1980, working in print and type shops until discovering the Mac in 1986 and focusing more on the implementation than hands-on execution. As a corporate trainer, her clients included commercial publishers such as United Airlines, Pearson, and the Clarinda Company. In 1992, Shaffstall self-published her first book, QuarkXPress: Making the Most of Your Negative Experiences. After the book was acquired by Peach Pit Press in 1993, she contributed to or authored nearly a dozen more after-market software manuals.

Shaffstall founded The World-Wide Power Company, LLC, in 1995 as the world’s first distributor of plug-in technology for applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and others. In 1998, she acquired (competitor) XChange US and their publication X-Ray Magazine, which she used as a vehicle to support the launch of QuarkXPress 7. In addition to leading her own company, Shaffstall took on the additional role of consultant to Quark, Inc., as the manager of their XTensions developer program. In 2005, the role was expanded to include the worldwide QuarkAlliance program, and beginning in 2007, she worked at Quark full-time to develop the program both internally and externally, authored QuarkXPress 8: production tricks and expert tips, and completed a 102-video series on QuarkXPress 8 for the Video Training Company.

As the worldwide director of the QuarkAlliance program, Shaffstall was personally and wholly responsible for managing international and local partner relationships and contractual obligations between Quark and third parties, including Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Atex, and internationally recognized publishers, software companies, and systems integrators. In 2009, Shaffstall sold ThePowerXChange and in 2010, X-Ray Magazine. With these two projects behind her, Today’s POV (a development project) and Spider Trainers were launched and in 2011, garnered her full attention as she authored Small-business Guide to Winning at Web Marketing. Shaffstall invented and was awarded a patent for Sassy Strappings in 2011.