In the face of an infuriating number of red tape hoops for printers to jump through, and in an economic climate that still shows no signs of settling, it may well seem to many small printing firms that they’re the wrong size.
But then regardless of the challenges faced by micro-businesses, they are in good company. The Federation of Small Businesses recently calculated that there are now 4.5m small business in the UK, accounting for a staggering 99% of all firms in the nation. And according to an Office for National Statistics report, 85% of all UK print firms employ fewer than 10 staff, and two-thirds, four people or fewer.
And the really good news is that there are plenty of people who still value the more hands-on approach and competitive pricing that working with a smaller firm can offer. Not only are small local firms keen to work with someone of similar size who will really value their business, but larger customers, even public sector organisations, are also finding that good things do often come in small packages.
DENBIGH BUILDING PLASTICS
Denbigh Building Plastics (DBP) offers PVC window, door, conservatory and roofline products to customers in North Wales. Established relatively recently in 2004, and as a small local company of 18 staff, the company really values not only print, but also marketing and design advice from its print suppliers. Although they occasionally place work elsewhere, including at larger printing companies, DBP finds the 11-strong team at nearby Fineline best for advice on how to design and print its flyers, and for fulfilling book, installation schedule and stationery orders.
DBP company director Sian Gough-Roberts says: "The range of work we order from Fineline is quite varied. We’ve been doing a push on advertising recently so we ordered 15,000 flyers at once. Then there’s our ordering books where we go through about four 100-page books a month, and our schedule information which is an A3 poster to go up in our office to show us where we’re planning work and where we’re at with that.
The most important thing we need from our printer is advice about the strategy behind our materials and help with their design. With our most recent batch of flyers for instance, Fineline was excellent because we just gave them an idea of what we wanted and they drew it up.
Working with a small company is excellent because they just know us, they know how to design things to suit perfectly. They just know what we need, they know what sort of information we’ll want to put on the adverts. For example, they were brilliant when we designed our logo. The logo they designed is the one we now use.
We really like the fact that we can go in and talk things through with them really thoroughly. When they’re giving us advice about a proposed new job, they’ll talk through different ideas without worrying that we’ll take them and go elsewhere, which is invaluable for a small business. There’s a mutual trust between us. But then if we don’t have the time to go in to see them, then we can just email them and ask ‘can you do anything with this?’
I don’t think we’d get that level of support from a larger company. And in our experience, a bigger printer requires you to do things in certain ways, which we don’t always have time for. It’s one shot with the bigger companies – you have to know exactly what they need. That’s fine for a big company, but for a little company like us, just starting out, we need more help and guidance, because we’re not advertising or marketing professionals.
For instance, we leave the technical side of things very much up to Fineline at the moment. They’ll just take whatever we send them, whether it’s on an email or a USB flash drive and then work from that. Whereas other printers might need a specific format, such as TIFF or JPEG or PDF. Even if we faxed Fineline a simple drawing, I’m sure they’d be able to do something magical with it. They wouldn’t throw it back and say ‘it’s not good enough, we need this, this and this.’
We’re in the process of building our own premises and I think when that’s up and running, we’ll really go and sit down with Fineline and try and think of the best ways of promoting the new location, along with any new products we’ve got coming onto the market.
Fineline are just a cracking local company that we trust and love dealing with, and they’re not overly expensive either."
LONDON OVERGROUND
London Overground Rail Operations (LOROL) was established in 2007 to bring under one brand local London rail services previously run by several different companies. LOROL’s print requirements include printed timetables for the public; posters for public use and posters informing staff of certain changes in procedure or track availability; terms and conditions booklets and weekly operating booklets for train drivers; and stationery items such as business cards and letterheads. Also put out to tender by LOROL are items such as pens, wallets and e-reader cases, personalised with the London Overground logo.
LOROL works with a range of printers, one of which is PrintExpress, a Printing.com franchise in Colindale, north London.
LOROL operations strategy manager Les Bird says: "Most of the print we order is very time-sensitive. We have timetables and posters that need to go to the public at certain times, then we have the materials going to our train drivers, such as the booklets about how to deal with faults on certain train types, for example.
The most time-sensitive document we produce is a weekly operating notice – that’s an 80-page booklet that’s issued to train drivers to tell them for example about any speed restrictions where work is being done on a certain part of the track.
That’s printed by PrintExpress. We don’t get the information from Network Rail until Monday afternoon, but probably by Thursday afternoon at the latest I have to have made sure that every train driver has a copy. The delivery of that is massively important to us.
The thing that keeps me going to PrintExpress is simple: their reliability and the cost being in line. It doesn’t matter what the weather’s like or what’s happened, Mike [Moradian, managing director] at PrintExpress will be there.
He rings me all the time about things, if he feels something’s not right. If he hasn’t had the file on Wednesday afternoon, I’ll be getting a call from him. He’s had the odd corrupted file and things like that.
I think you get a closer working relationship with a smaller printer. If I ring PrintExpress, I know I’ll be speaking to Mike nine times out of ten. With a bigger company, that doesn’t happen; I’ll probably speak to a different person each time. So Mike and I are sort of phone buddies. Because we have these conversations, we’re able to help each other. He’ll tell me how to make the whole process more streamlined and what his machines can and can’t do.
There is also an element of trust there that I don’t think you’d get from a bigger company.
For example, one Christmas our finance department forgot to send the purchase order for a terms and conditions document for our train drivers. When I realised and sent it through, we got the print the next day because Mike had heard me mention that I’d hoped to issue the document the first week of January, so he’d just gone ahead and printed it.
We have a procurement manager, so anyone we’re purchasing from does have to meet certain requirements. There are a number of things that need to be proven, such as using recycled paper; that all adds value to the bid.
Another element of the procurement criteria is having a diverse workforce. If you’ve got an all-male, white workforce it’s difficult to get a contract with us because under the TfL umbrella, there are rules we have to follow. But the fact that PrintExpress meets the criteria shows this doesn’t rule out smaller printers.
The only drawback with a smaller company is that the product range is likely to be more prescriptive. For instance, it’s handy if you can go to your printer for little things like e-reader cases and wallets with our logo on. We’re always on the lookout for companies who can print onto those kinds of products as those sorts of printers seem fairly few and far between."
