The print and mail specialist has seen its turnover grow by 25% to around £40m over the past 18 months, aided by a number of major contract wins and quickly growing business areas, including Docmail.
The service, which was launched in 2008, enables customers to create and upload documents including letters, invoices, postcards and greetings cards, which are then printed and posted out.
It now accounts for around £9m of the company’s turnover, according to the company’s managing director Dave Broadway.
CFH recently decided to take its services, including Docmail, international. And as with all of the company’s recent ventures, which have been responsible for its rapid growth, thorough planning and a clear strategy will be crucial to its success.
The challenge
“We don’t see why we should be limited to the UK; the Docmail model is applicable to any country and most countries don’t have an equivalent,” says Broadway.
But CFH isn’t just jumping head first into the global marketplace, it’s taking small steps at first. “We’re keen to expand where we can but it’s always nice to have some starting volume to get you going,” he says.
The first of these steps has been to work alongside other firms to access previously untapped markets. The business, which has UK operations in Radstock, Bath, Slough and Livingston, opened new premises in Almere, just outside Amsterdam, last month after partnering with a major customer gave it an entry route into the Netherlands.
“We’ve got a major UK dental software customer, which serves most dentists in the UK, that uses us for sending out all of its documents through Docmail,” says Broadway.
“It previously provided a service which reminded people to come to the dentist by sending texts but that doesn’t always work so it wanted to add the ability to send a letter as well.”
The dental company also has units, software, sales and installations in the Netherlands, France and Spain. It asked CFH to work alongside it to provide the Docmail service in those countries as it has found local equivalents hard to come by.
“We’re starting in the Netherlands and we intend to use that customer as a starter but follow it up by then attacking the markets there that we’ve found successful in the UK,” says Broadway.
While breaking into Europe is the first part of the firm’s international expansion plan, CFH is also setting its sights on the US market.
“We have another customer, a shopping channel which we provide with paper services, which is in a similar situation and moving into the US,” reports Broadway.
“It’s rolling its service out over there and has asked us if we will support it. So the US should be the next step for us; probably some time towards the end of the first quarter. It’s a good route into international sales and something we’ve been looking at anyway.”
Keeping an eye on the ball during any period of extreme growth has its own challenges but CFH has dealt with this by ensuring that each member of the management team is tasked with a specific objective.
“Maintaining focus is down to individuals having responsibilities within certain fields; they know the areas they’re covering, they know what their targets are and they know what their role in the strategy is,” says Broadway.
The method
It’s this clearly delineated approach, which is implemented in the day-to-day running of the business, that has proved the key to sustaining rapid growth, according to Broadway.
“We’ve split our business. We have a strategy for the business that deals with strategic growth areas and one for what we call business as usual.
“We know the areas we believe we can grow rapidly into in the future and we know the areas in which it will be harder to grow. We will attempt to break into those too but it’s not key growth. By doing it bit by bit and breaking it down into small pieces you can focus on what you need to be doing in each area.
“We know what our growth plans are for production and we know largely what’s coming over the next 12 months or so. As a result we’ve been investing a lot into the production area to be prepared for it, rather than being surprised by it and having to try and play catch-up.”
To cope with its additional workload, CFH has increased its headcount from 268 to 322 in the past few months, taking on staff across all areas of the business. It has also continued to invest in new machinery to both increase its capacity and enable it to offer additional services.
In the second half of 2014 the firm heavily boosted its digital operation, taking delivery of eight Xerox presses. More recently, and reflecting the company’s commitment to investing in all areas of the business, it spent £1.3m on three Pitney Bowes machines: two enclosing lines and a sortation device.
The firm will soon buy additional continuous-feed and sheetfed digital laser printing kit to increase its capacity further in preparation for upcoming election-related work. Furthermore, it is planning to spend around £1m on its IT infrastructure over the next year.
“With more than 20,000 orders a day on Docmail, that is a huge amount of IT and data and a huge number of PDFs that need to be accommodated, and we need to grow our servers to meet that,” explains Broadway.
“We’re also targeting 5m users receiving their documents via [online document delivery service] Dotpost within the next four years, so we’ve got to have systems that will cope with that many people having access to all their personal documents.”
The result
CFH has already made a profit of over £1m for the current financial year, which runs to the end of March.
“We’re closing on £1.5m profit on a turnover of just over £40m,” reports Broadway.
Two recent contract wins, secured last year, have also been instrumental in the company’s most recent growth. One, for flight operations services provider Navtech, will see CFH regularly produce and update a range of on-board airside charts and maps for the aviation industry at its Slough plant.
Despite all this activity, Broadway is still keen to push CFH forward and is aiming ever higher, including heavy investment in energy saving initiatives, which have brought cost savings as well as environmental benefits to the business.
The company recently completed the first stage of a solar panel installation across the roofing at its 9,290m2 Radstock site.
“We’ve got 250kW installed so far and we intend to add another 150kW over the course of this year. That covers around 50% of the roof space,” says Broadway.
“I will be extending it to another area once we are able to. This will bring a saving in cost and, on sunny days, the whole factory will be powered by solar power.
“The other thing I want to do is find some kind of battery storage so that we can increase the amount of solar panels on the roof so that at times when it isn’t as sunny, or at night, we’ll still be able to power ourselves.”
Saving money and adding value to boost profits has been crucial to managing and maintaining growth and with major expansion plans in the pipeline for CFH, things look unlikely to slow down any time soon.
“If we can achieve the strategic growth that we want then we’ll be quite a big business I think,” concludes Broadway.
VITAL STATISTICS: CFH Docmail
Locations Radstock (headquarters), Bath, Slough and Livingston
Inspection host Managing director Dave Broadway
Size Turnover: around £40m; staff: 322
Established in 1977 as Continu-forms, a computer stationery printing company
Products Transactional mailing service
Kit Two Xerox iGen presses, three Xerox Colour 8250 production printers, two Xerox Nuvera 314 EA perfecting production systems, Xerox Nuvera 144 MX digital production system, nine-colour Drent Goebel VSOP, three Giebler litho presses, five-colour Morgan litho press, four Océ continuous-feed MICR personalisation printers, eight Xerox mono personalisation printers, multiple Pitney Bowes enclosing lines and sortation devices
Inspection focus Successfully managing rapid growth
TOP TIPS
- “Strategy, strategy, strategy. You need to have a plan and work to reach it,” says CFH Docmail managing director Dave Broadway.
- Make considered investments at the right time. Increasing capacity by purchasing new machinery may be essential if new work continues to come in. Specialist contracts may require more specific kit so ensure you have the capabilities to take them on.
- Divide responsibilities up between management to give each person a clear focus and set of goals to achieve that will contribute to the success of the business as a whole.
- Think about the impact that taking on a major contract will have. “We had a big discussion as to whether or not we should take one of the latest big contracts we secured, because you know it’s going to have a big effect on the business,” says Broadway.
- After winning and deciding to take on a contract, planning and execution is key. “You need to identify what it is you’re trying to achieve and what you need to do to achieve that. And then you need to go and do it. It’s about getting the right people in place, getting the equipment you need in place and doing that as quickly as you can to make sure the new contract is not slowed in any way,” says Broadway.
- Consider partnering with complementary businesses to minimise risk. CFH Docmail has recently started to expand internationally by supporting other companies moving into new markets and using them as a launchpad to expand its own services into those markets.
