What positives are you able to draw on from the experiences of 2022?
Four areas come to mind:
- Market pressures - Our robust business strategy has withheld the market pressures to ensure we keep delivering in a tough climate
- Growth – We’ve secured multiple new clients across our key sectors in Retail/FMCG/Film/Gaming and OOH. Including our significant growth in our agency, experiential and compliance services
- Partnership - Although our relationships with clients is contractual, we have further developed a much stronger collaborative partnership with our clients in 2022
- Our people – We’ve recruited some exceptional talent across all service lines, however aligned to ‘Partnership’ you’re only as good as your people serving our fantastic clients. Our people are pivotal to our growth and I’m incredibly proud of their achievements and the feedback I get regularly from clients. As Richard Branson says, ‘If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients’
What trend do you think has been accelerated because of the impact of inflation?
We have history of being first to market on new technologies that critically align to our client’s needs. We currently have some world and European firsts to market technologies at our site at Waltham Cross, whether that be serving a trend around personalisation, lower consumption aligned to sustainability or automation. Inflation is a catalyst/accelerant for change, primarily because it directly influences the price we deliver to clients, which also affects demand. Therefore, the trend we’re focusing on as business to suppress the wider inflationary pressures is automation. Not just in our manufacturing, which is critical, but across all areas of business, whether that be in our creative agency output or the ability to calculate Co2 emissions for each project we deliver.
What do you think will represent the single biggest opportunity for printers in 2023?
To embrace sustainability and automation. We identified in 2019 that to flourish in our market and for print to be taken seriously as a channel for promotion, it had to align to our client’s sustainability practises. Year-on-year, since 2019 our development of our award-winning Delta Net Zero strategy has helped us support our clients and deliver value. Automation is also a key business strategy that we have been pursuing for the last three years. 2023 will see further benefits to our clients whether that be in a creative agency around or manufacturing.
What are your hopes for 2023?
That the market demand remains buoyant and continues to recover to pre-Covid levels, and inflation normalises. However, from experience your ‘hopes’ are generally self-fulfilling by how much attention you place on your clients. We will maintain our focus on delighting our customers with our forward-looking approach to continuous improvement and innovation, to achieve the right outcomes, aligned to our business strategy in 2023.
What piece of advice do you wish you had been given in December 2021 to prepare you for the year you’ve just had?
Personally, to place £100 on Arsenal winning the title in 2022/2023 season. Professionally, to always expect the unexpected, who would have guessed the Ukraine invasion and the supply chain inflationary challenges this created in our industry, along with the turmoil in our financial markets created by our political masters recently. Thankfully, our progressive supply chain strategy is managing to ride and withstand the turbulence these events have created.
What was your word or phrase of the year in 2022?
It is what it is, let’s work with it!
What, if anything, will you do differently in 2023?
To place more focus on our supply chain strategy and leverage our scale, as we enter a recessionary period to ensure we deliver for our clients in these difficult times, suppressing market impacts. We’ll also place greater emphasis on continuous improvement to drive innovation, productivity, and ROI of campaigns we deliver. Ultimately, it’s all about our clients, whilst running an efficient business.
What’s your favourite Christmas cracker joke?
What did the printer say when it ran out of paper?
Oh sheet.
Are you making any New Year's resolutions?
To be mindful that for the past 50 years I haven’t kept any of them, so I won’t be this year!
