Customark’s latest acquisitions have taken it to £9m in turnover – up around 55% since December, with CLC’s acquisition alone making up £1.8m of that growth.
Both deals have seen Customark take on the companies’ full staffs, with the previous directors of both companies taking the opportunity to retire.
Customark managing director Greg Lerigo told Printweek that conversations with CLC stretched back to the middle of 2023, after Lerigo approached a number of businesses he thought might be suitable acquisition candidates.
“The owner was looking to retire, so we agreed a commercially acceptable deal for both of us,” Lerigo said.
CLC is a major supplier of parking enforcement print – among other things, parking tickets – and produces print for other industrial applications from its Loughborough site, where it runs six- and seven-colour flexo lines.
“We’re not a food labelling manufacturer, and I don’t wish to enter that market – it’s too cut-throat. [CLC] has the parking segment, and the rest of their customers are industrial,” Lerigo said.
“It’s clear that CLC has a good management structure already, and it will flourish under our stewardship.”
Customark’s end-of-August acquisition of sister companies Kingsbury Screens and Industrial Screen Print has been a welcome bonus, with the companies’ two employees coming over to work at Customark’s Royston site following the retirement of the firms' director Adam Kingsbury.
The two companies screen print graphic overlays and direct print for the aerospace defence and medical industries.
“It was third-generation owned, and has been going around 80 years – he was just looking to retire, and it was a natural fit for us,” Lerigo explained.
“The company had a lease obligation that runs out in six months’ time, so the staff will relocate from Southend, because they live equidistant between the two. It won’t add significantly to our revenue, but it will add a number of good customers and a good recurring revenue stream.”
Both new acquisitions will be brought under the Customark brand over the next three months, Lerigo said.
“Our goal is just to be a good, very profitable industrial labelling provider to the UK,” he added.
“Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity.”
