Having a name like ‘Goss’ when working in the printing industry could be seen as both a blessing and a curse for Bill Goss, founder of Cambridgeshire-based Print and Publish. On the one hand, with Goss presses close to many people’s hearts, it could lead to greater networking success, ensuring his name sticks in people’s minds. On the other hand, he might get remembered for the wrong reasons, and probably gets a little tired of people asking whether he is any relation of the original founders of the press manufacturing giant, or in fact owns a Goss machine himself.

The answer to these questions is ‘no’ and ‘no’. For Goss is the founder of a company specialising not in newspaper or web offset printing, but short-run book production, for which the company employs an arsenal of exclusively digital machines – including a recently installed Konica Minolta C7000.

To understand this latest purchase, you first have to understand the way the business has progressed. Print and Publish was set up in 2009 to capitalise on the rapid growth in the short-run and self-published book markets. And the company’s significant growth in turnover year-on-year since being founded is testament to this being a shrewd move. "Book printing is still very much a thriving marketplace, especially for digital printers," says Goss. "There are so many offshoots that you can follow with it."

Goss is always on the lookout, then, for another report, manual, paperback or hardback book printing opportunity, or another market to branch into, an approach that recently led the company to add the Christian book sector to its list of key client areas.

"We’ve got a sales agent who is in with that crowd and so we recognised that the thirst for books is incredible within that marketplace," says Goss. "So we set up a website called Christian Book Printing which has got some big customers onboard with us now."

Other similarly lucrative areas are B2B publications, books used as marketing collateral for businesses, and the burgeoning self-publishing market, which the company offers various packages for, covering services such as distribution, ISBN numbers and publicity materials.

"We’ve diversified a lot over the past year but all coming back to book printing," says Goss. "For B2B, we’ll do 25-run or even 10-run hardback jobs, then we also print and publish a lot of books written by self-proclaimed entrepreneurs and business gurus – that’s quite a big market."

Colour supplement
A key area of growth that spans all of these sectors, says Goss, is colour printing. Spurred by talk of the affordability of colour, more and more customers are now wanting to include more colour pages in their books and manuals, reports Goss, and his company has developed a unique pricing model to meet this demand and make colour potentially even more affordable for customers.

"We’ve come up with a different kind of pricing structure for colour books," says Goss. "Some digital printers have just one price for a colour book and one for mono books, but we have a price-per-page model so a customer only gets charged the colour rate for those pages that are actually colour. I do look at the market quite a lot and I think we’re quite unique in that."

This pricing structure means that the team at Print and Publish have to keep up with the high demand for colour work that they have encouraged. Which meant that a new, more productive digital colour printer was needed at the end of last year.

"As we were bringing more work in and customers were pushing for more and more colour content, we realised we needed a faster machine than the small Xerox we had," says Goss. "The quality was good on the Xerox but it was an old machine so we were looking at upgrading so we could cater for the shorter-run book production we were branching out into."

And so the research process began. "We looked at the Xerox DocuColor 8000, a Canon imagePress and the Konica Minolta Bizhub Pro C7000," reports Goss.

"We didn’t look at the Indigos and that kind of machine," he adds, explaining that the criteria for the press was something a little above entry-level category. "It was more about getting a simpler box in first of all to see what we could strive to do with it."

In the end, Goss plumped for the Bizhub Pro C7000, having already been impressed by the quality, reliability and maintenance provision that came with a black-and-white Konica Minolta Pro Bizhub 1051 machine, installed last August. The company also felt that the quality on the C7000 was the best in its price bracket.

"The quality on the Konica seemed better than the others," says Goss. "They’re all very similar models and have probably got very similar make-up, but the Konica just seemed that slightly higher grade. It may not quite match the Indigo, but it is a more affordable machine and for the price it is the nearest we could get to the kind of quality we were after."

And, once the new C7000 was installed in December, it quickly became apparent that going for this printer had been a good decision, with the company impressed not only with its quality, but also its ease of use. "It’s easy to set up and the quality control is very good on it," says Goss. "It is literally the case that a monkey could run it," he jokes

And the service support offered has been on a par with that offered on the Pro 1051. "Konica will come out very quickly if there’s anything that needs updating on the machines, or new parts need putting in, such as a different kind of roller," says Goss. "They come within three or four hours of anything going wrong with it – if there’s any mechanical breakdown they’re very quick to deal with that."

Big benefits
Unsurprisingly, then, the Bizhub has had a very positive impact on Print and Publish’s bottom line. The machine has, reports Goss, allowed the company to process jobs more quickly and cost-effectively through bringing previously outsourced work in-house, and has allowed the company to pay a lower click rate.

"The click charge is very good for us, we’ve cut costs dramatically from using the Xerox," says Goss, reporting that the quality of the new printer and the per-colour-page pricing model the company has adopted has brought 50% more turnover to the company in the form of new clients and more work from existing customers.

The obvious question for a company reporting such strong growth of course is, where next? Goss says that the company would like to add another of the same, but is not entirely sure when this will be feasible: "Like everyone we’re always thinking about how to expand, but we’re not sure when that will be because every square inch of space is in use at the moment."

One possible solution might be to eventually upgrade to the next level up of Konica Minolta speed-wise. In fact, although the C7000 has certainly boosted  production, Goss’s only slight dissatisfaction with the machine is that he’d like it to be faster.

"On some of the short-run jobs that we do it can be quite slow on some of the colour stuff," says Goss. "That would be our only negative thing to say about the machine, but that could be our impatience more than anything else and every printer wants his machine to go faster. I think for this range it’s probably the right speed- that’s why we’re looking at the next one up potentially because we’d like it to be quicker."

Konica Minolta agrees that it will be a case here of trading up to a faster model. "On occasions when our customers have complex jobs or those printed on heavy stock, the running speed can be slightly reduced depending on the solution they are using," says Mark Hinder, production print market development manager, Konica Minolta Business Solutions. "We offer a wide range of high quality and high speed solutions for a diverse range of applications, and our customers enjoy the flexibility of being able to upgrade as their requirements develop."

And Goss is quite happy to accept this reasoning, satisfied as he is with the machine’s overall performance. In fact he would whole-heartedly recommend it to others: "I think you could use the C7000 for many types of printing not just books. It’s ideal for a print firm that are just a step up from being a start-up, and I think it would be ideal for printers wanting a smaller machine in the background to support a big production press."

And most persuasive for those considering acting on this recommendation will be Goss’s final verdict on both Konica Minolta machines. "I can’t really say a bad word about the printers," he says, "they’ve been fantastic for us.