The group was formed just over three years ago by the merger of Precision Printing, Proco, and Prime and with ambitions to become a £100m turnover operation. That goal is now in sight under the fresh setup.
The new structure has involved months of planning and legal complexities to separate the entities and assets, including HMRC approval, and with a flurry of filings at Companies House related to the changes appearing over the past fortnight.
Precision Proco remains as the main production business, while e-commerce operations Where The Trade Buys (WTTB) and Custom Content Technology, which trades as Found, become independent entities.
Jon Bailey, formerly group COO, becomes CEO of Precision Proco, which will also drop the word ‘group’ from its identity.
Gary Peeling, who was group CEO, becomes CEO at WTTB and Found.
Bailey and Peeling each become chair of the other side of the business “to ensure consistency and continual partnership”.
Andy Skarpellis, previously chief production officer, becomes COO of Precision Proco.
The changes are effective from 1 December.
Peeling told Printweek: “All of the shareholders that owned the original group, from majority to minority, have taken the same shareholding in the new entities – so there’s no change to the shareholding.”
The complex filings related to the separation should conclude this week.
Peeling said that turnover across all the businesses would be around £70m in the current financial year, which runs to the end of March 2024.
The production wing includes Photobox’s manufacturing hub, acquired two years ago, and the sites in Dagenham, Sunderland and Sheffield.
“In a nutshell, what we’ve done with Where The Trade Buys is what Photobox did, which is de-couple it from production,” he said.
50 employees have transferred via Tupe to the e-commerce side, with 450 employed on the manufacturing side.
“We’re expecting WTTB to be £15m next year, Found to be £12m and the production business to be £70m-£75m,” he added.
Found was born out of HP’s incubator division and allows people with large social media followings to easily publish books, such as recipe books and journals, for sale to their followers.
“They were considering closing it, and we acquired it,” Peeling explained.
“It’s a new space. When we started with Found in February we were turning over £3,000 a day. Last Sunday we turned over £100,000 in books sales for creatives – that’s how fast that’s growing.”
A decade ago Precision Printing spun-off its own in-house workflow into a separate entity, OneFlow Systems, which was subsequently sold to HP.
Peeling said “perhaps” something similar could take place in future with the new e-comms wing.
“Like all businesses we work to create shareholder value. But the immediate focus is on accelerating the growth, so that may require investment rounds in the e-commerce businesses to speed up technology development and marketing.”
He said that peak season was happening “later and later” and it was now a four-week window of intense activity.
“We’re currently outputting £332,000 of print-on-demand work a day and that will continue to pretty much the Friday before Christmas as there will be Special Deliveries right up to Christmas Eve,” he added.
In a statement, Bailey said the move would give both companies the opportunity to “continue to thrive and fulfil their potential in a fast-growing creative economy”.
“Precision Proco will retain the manufacturing facilities and capabilities across all sites and will continue to service commercial and mass integrated business clients directly with a continued focus on automation, connectivity and productivity through enhanced API integration, product expansion and increased mass-customisation capabilities.”
In October WTTB secured the European rights for Cami, an American web host service for QR-code based video messages.
