Features

For those of you considering making more of foreign markets in 2015, Peter Kiddell of Fespa UK Association and the GPMA (Graphics, Print and Media Alliance) explains what help is at hand.

Simon Osborne,
MD, Oasis Graphics
http://www.oasisgraphic.co.uk

What’s having the greatest impact on your business at the moment?
Really it’s the volume of work we’re starting to see come in, which is all good news of course.

Walter Hale looks at why wide-format print companies should reassess their environmental and sustainability strategies.

“You cannot do business on a dead planet.” That was the stark warning Hunter Lovins, author and president of a non-profit organisation called Natural Capitalism Solutions, gave at a recent United Nations symposium on sustainability.

When it comes to staff, the adage ‘you get what you pay for’ is apt. But it’s not all about money. On the back of news that Apple and Facebook are offering to freeze eggs for female employees in an effort to attract more women, we share some of the less obvious employee reward schemes.

Duncan Smith, wide-format printing group director, Canon UK, explains what is being done to engage with creatives and other potential users of wide-format print. 

You only have to visit events such as Clerkenwell Design Week to see that the creative and design communities have an innovative and progressive approach to their work. Designers, architects and specifiers are willing to explore all avenues that will enable them to bring their - or their clients’ - designs to life in new and engaging ways. They are also very tactile by nature, keen to see and touch products to help them visualise their concepts and stretch the boundaries of their imagination.

Callprint is on the acquisition trail, and looking for companies with large-format print and project management capability, with a turnover in excess of £3m, and with room to grow. Callprint itself, formed in 1992 as a repro and print operation, currently employs 170 staff at 20 branches and has a turnover of over £12m. Its intention is to grow sales to £25m in the next two years. I met with MD Steve Cheek to find out what part wide-format plays in this strategic development plan.
By Lesley Simpson

Octink CEO Will Tyler was once a commodity trader. Though he had what he calls ‘an epiphany’ at 20 and left that scene to join his father Tony Tyler in the sign business he’d started back in 1962 as Allsigns, being financially savvy has stood the son and heir in good stead to lead the company that he inherited on his father’s sudden death in 1994. Then it had a turnover of around £380,000. Now it’s around £15m. And that doesn’t include any income from its sales/project management offices abroad, that he expects “will dwarf what we’re doing now in terms of turnover in the next two-to three years”.

As one of the earliest UK pioneers to adopt wide-format flat-bed printing, John E Wright’s investment pattern since those early days of UV-curable production has continued through the years so that it has always been able to take advantage of the newest technologies as and when they become established as quality production processes. A long-established business based in Nottingham, it was founded originally as a specialist supplier of blueprints adding computerised production back in the 1980s.

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Some 75 years after the father and founder of the Jet Engine, Sir Frank Whittle, formed his Power Jets Ltd. company in Lutterworth - another company is taking-off with its business. Working out of the same building where the foundation block of the jet aviation industry was born, Pure Point of Sale Ltd. has seen its sales and growth soar in its first five years.

When Valley Graphics in Essex saw scope to diversify into digitally printed wallcoverings it set up a sister operation with an independent identity - The Printed Wallpaper Company.

I met with founder and MD Matthew Adams-Eaton to talk about the diversification strategy. 
By Lesley Simpson

Ernesto Sirolli makes a good living coaching entrepreneurs. And whenever he meets a business leader for the first time, he says that leadership starts with four words: “Shut up and listen.” Here’s why.