The business moved from its previous office at Pelham St, Oadby into its new leased headquarters, at the Harborough Innovation Centre in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, last Wednesday (1 November).

John Roche, chief executive of Haybrooke, told Printweek the new site is efficiently connected to major road networks, with easy access to the M6 and M1.

Further outlining the move, he explained: “When Covid struck we had to reconfigure the working pattern of the business like a lot of companies did, and a number of our staff work from home. So we had an office that for a while was unoccupied, but during that period we found new ways of working and some of them turned out to be advantageous for us.

“We have staff that were office-based that are now working from home more or less permanently, and that gave us the opportunity to think about what we want as a business in terms of our business infrastructure. And what we felt we needed is more space in which to expand in general terms, but we also wanted more services.

“For example, last week we launched a new print training course and we wanted a space where we could invite people to participate on site in that and so we started to look for premises which had good conferencing and meeting facilities, and we found it really on our doorstep.

“The Harborough Innovation Centre is a wonderful, modern building. It’s eco-friendly and has every adaptation of a building that you could imagine to make it more efficient. It also has electric car charging points, as more and more people are driving electric vehicles, and it even recycles rainwater for the loos. They’re also going to get solar panels as well in a couple of months’ time.

“They’re doing everything right and we felt like this new premises represented an opportunity and fitted better where we wanted to go as a business. So while in a way our rethink of premises started with Covid, in the end it was driven just by the growth of our business and wanting more facilities accessible to us as we grew as well.”

Haybrooke has eight staff, plus two consultants that work with the business “more or less permanently” according to Roche, who said staff are still allowed to work at home but are coming into the office periodically.

“Fundamentally, we have a policy where most of our staff work at home but are encouraged to come into the office from time to time to keep connected to the business and to each other, and that seems to be working really well.”

Haybrooke now has hundreds of printers in the PaaS system and last month the business bought a record £208,000 of print for PaaS, which puts the company on course for an annual print spend of £2.5m. It is also currently forecasting a £3m print spend for next year but Roche said it could “easily exceed” that.

“That’s being driven by good success we are having in the office sector. We have a partnership with industry body Boss Federation but the access to the office sector marketplace is opening up to us and we’re winning new accounts in that sector and forging new partnerships,” said Roche.

“The great thing about PaaS and the office sector is that conceptually they seem to dovetail into each other because office dealers tend to work on the concept of buying from a single source, so they’ll often work with a single wholesaler and basically purchase most, if not everything, of what they resell from that single source.

“So when we moved into the office sector and offered the concept of single source printing – they’re coming to our portal and buying the print effectively through us – then it kind of made conceptual sense to them and therefore we didn’t have to sell the concept because they were already invested in it, having worked that way for years buying single source from the large wholesalers operating in the industry.”

PaaS was initially launched in January 2021 as a trade-only outsourcing service that connects print buyers with printers.

Last year Haybrooke added two major new features to PaaS: built-in instant messaging between customers and suppliers, and a module for supplier ratings by customers. While earlier this year it expanded PaaS to enable printers to use the system for outsourcing.

Earlier this year Haybrooke also went live with a new feature in PDQ that allows printers to automatically match the price of their competitors.

And this summer, Haybrooke expanded PaaS once more with the addition of a feature that offers a recommended selling price (RRP) to a print buyer/reseller.

Haybrooke will be exhibiting at the London Business Show in November, where Roche will be hosting one of the seminars at the event – a talk about print called ‘Print Wonderful Print’.

It has also been shortlisted once more for the SME National Business Awards, which are taking place at Wembley Stadium in December.