PDS celebrated its anniversary on 21 September, inviting staff and their families to party the weekend before with dinner and a live band.

Festivities continued on 24 September, when a number of PDS staff and suppliers ran the Vitality 10km race – PDS’ eleventh turnout for the event – to raise funds for Speech and Language UK, a charity that helps children who struggle with speech.

“I’ve been very blessed with the staff we have,” Shelton told Printweek.

“We have grown because of the calibre of people that we have managed to get into the business, and because we have managed to keep them on, which is a big strength of ours.”

As with any company, PDS has had to change with the times, and Shelton said it is now a far cry from the paper company that it started life as in 1998. 

“Print is the base of our business, but we have invested hugely in digital [offerings] over the past few years.

“The studio, our designers – and we bought a coding business, bringing four or five guys over to the company,” Shelton said.

PDS, which has around 300 businesses in its supply chain, still gains about 75% of its revenue from pure print management, with the other 25% coming from this diversification into web development and digital logistics services.

“I do like to think we have the arsenal to compete with the big management companies, but obviously it’s a smaller setup,” Shelton added.

“I think we’re a lot more personal because of that, and I think a lot of our clients enjoy that fact.”

PDS employs around 60 at its two Wellingborough sites, turning over £22m.

The company has also recently invested in a new 4,700sqm warehouse to deal with increasing demand from customers to hold stock, an increasingly significant revenue stream for the company that ties into its ability to feed real-time data to its clients.

“It’s that sort of cradle-to-grave organic growth that we’re looking for,” Shelton said. 

“We’re very fortunate to be in our position – but as I said before, it’s the staff who are key to making this all happen.”