David Leach: Renewal for life

In one of those delicious contradictions of life David Leach’s progressive and dynamic Look Print business is located on one of the most clogged roads in the country. The total lack of investment, strategy, innovation and impetus that has gone into the infamous Parramatta Road is in direct contrast to Look Print, which has been determined in all of the aforementioned, and has grown to become one of the most innovative businesses in the industry, under the ownership of Leach, who has just become the new president of the PIAA.

Leach is certainly no doomsayer when it comes to print, he begins our interview by saying ‘I love this industry’, and his outlook is founded on embracing the concept of renewal. He says, “I love the excitement of the renewal that is occurring in print. And not just in print, but in society as a whole, and as that renewal occurs it is impacting on every area of our industry. We live in the most exciting times, I appreciate that it is not always easy to stand back and marvel at it, but I think future generations will look back and wish they were here. “

For many people the term renewal is an easier one to deal with than change, it has less disruptive connotations, and is more in line with the natural world, which Leach came face to face with during his time as a jackaroo in the outback. He says, “Human beings are progressive, society is moving forward, and the print industry should be moving forward. Too many people have tried to defy or delay renewal but that is untenable, the world is not the same as it was 20 years ago, embracing it is a much better option. We all have two choices, to move forward or stay as we were.

“Print was predominantly an order taking ink on paper business, whereas when you look at it now it is so much more. These days the graphic arts business involves software, imaging, data, it involves printing onto so much more than paper, it means printers engaging with innovation to develop new applications and promoting those applications to new markets.”

Leach is certainly practicing what he preaches, his company has a commitment to innovation, with a high level of investment that is reaping rich rewards. Among its developments Look Print has launched a method of printing high quality graphics onto concrete, and it has just launched a website that enables the public to create their own posters from collections of photos. Leach says, “Thanks to mobile and digital technology we are taking more photos than ever, but there is growing demand for those photos to be available to view, rather than sitting on a server somewhere. Photobooks have grown massively over the past ten years, and our photo poster application PosterCandy provides people with another outlet to present their stories.” PosterCandy software enables the public to collate their photos into posters, which are all sized to fit Ikea frames. Look Print of course takes care of the print. Already the website has been licensed to Europe and the US.

Leach says, “Mobile technology, digital technology and print can serve each other, and there will be great opportunities for print businesses who are prepared to think outside their current fields, who can assess where demand is coming from, what people want, and can create a service to fulfill that demand.”

It is not just in mobile and digital technology though that Leach says printers will find new applications and new markets, he points to Look’s ability to now print in concrete, with early clients including a Perth hospital and a motorway tunnel operator. He says, “Graphic communication is a key component of society. Information needs to be presented in a way that the public can access and engage with, and it always will do. Some of that information has transferred to digital presentation, directories are a classic example, but as one area fades others will emerge, and with them opportunities. Whether that is a self-created poster of the photos of your latest holiday, signage in a tunnel or a thousand other applications print is crucial, necessary and welcome.  For printers the challenge is to renew themselves so that society sees value in print, so that they can create and fulfil demand, and so develop a sustainable business.

“If anyone thinks renewal is too hard I can tell them that being in commodity printing is far harder. Selling a product that can be produced by a host of similar companies means you are in a race to the bottom in price, and that is not a sustainable business model. It may be that you still produce that 16 page A4 leaflet, but you may be offering some added value to it in embellishment, or in the finish, or in the design, or by producing it on demand, or by personalising it, or regionalising it, or by offering a website landing page to go with it, then the margin becomes realistic. There has to be differentiation in what we offer, because as we all know customer loyalty isn’t as strong as it used to be, and anyway customers expect more these days. Printers on the front foot who are going to their clients with new ideas and solutions will find themselves in a much stronger position than those who are just doing what is asked of them. We need to get out there and tell the market that print is so much more than ink on paper.

“Commoditisation is a fact of life, all products have a life cycle, innovators create them then other companies enter the market, but smart companies keep pushing on to stay ahead of the pack. Ink on paper should become a smaller and smaller part of what print businesses are offering to the market, and smart operators already know this. What we offer though has to be of real value, it has to work for the client, and if it does they will want more.”

Leach sees the challenge for companies that embrace renewal is in the new learnings necessary. They are costly, time consuming, require thought and investment, and may not have an immediate payoff. He says, “Print businesses small or large need new skill sets. Renewal doesn’t come without its pitfalls. In nature we see that the pattern is that something has to go. Snakes for instance shed their old skin before they create the new one. Seeds fall from the tree and go into the ground for some time before they emerge as saplings. As human beings we often seek to build on the old structure, without appreciating that if we let go of the past we will be in a much better position to build for the future.”

“We at Look have experienced the full gamut of experiences through our commitment to innovation, we know the pains, the frustrations, the challenges first hand. If something was easy everyone would be doing it. We produced print on some 4000 square metres of concrete for a Perth hospital, there were challenges, but we got there. Now we’re quoting to put graphics onto 28 kilometers worth of freeway soundproofing and offering a 25 year outdoor guarantee. We need to move on from our legacy markets and into new areas of opportunity.”

Leach points as an example of renewal to a non-print industry association which reinvented its awards to not only recognise new areas, but where the judges who were industry insiders were all replaced by industry outsiders, in fact by representatives of the client base. He says, “So it is their customers who get to decide the award winners, which means that the industry has the clearest possible pointers as to which way their client base is looking, because the clients are telling them.” Leach isn’t commenting on the print industry’s own awards, which are currently being reviewed by former IPMG chief Stephen Anstice, rather using the tale as an example of how to think creatively in a way that brings benefits to both the producers and the buyers.

However Leach has just become the new president of the peak industry association the PIAA, and as such is now in a position to bring his experience to bear on the industry as a whole. He took the role he says to help encourage print business owners to ‘see the possibilities’, he says, “There are an awful lot of good people in print, and they are facing some big challenges. I want to share the excitement, help make the possibilities happen, to share some of what I’ve learned along my journey. Print has been good to me and I want to put something back in and make a difference. I don’t want to sit on the sidelines, I’m prepared to step in and make a difference. There is more than enough opportunity for everyone in print to develop their business. I believe in this great industry and in the people in it. They are hard-working, determined, creative, and I believe that by sticking together, sharing ideas and experiences, we will be able to forge a great future.

“One of my core values in life is that you should give more than you take, and the more people who do this the better placed our industry will be to contribute to society.”

One of the manifestations of the Leach’s philosophy is the creative space he provides free of charge for emerging artists, with a whole floor of his inner-west building set aside to enable young people to have the space to develop their art without having to worry about rent. He says, “Youthful street creativity is one of the drivers of society. Innovation, creativity and self-expression need support, and we’re in a position to do that. It is essential for human beings to express themselves, and society is a far richer place for it.” Artists in Leach’s space work with a wide variety of media including spray cans, drills, video. He says, “It’s a safe place, a free place and a place where creativity flourishes.”

Leach is waiting until his official inauguration as PIAA president before he outlines his vision in full, but says, “I have a great belief that whatever has happened in the past produces the result of today, and if we want a different result then we have to have a different approach. Print is a thousand times more than ink on paper. Most people are now finding out that future profitability is not in ink on paper, but by offering much more than that. The industry is beginning to expand its portfolios, but it needs to expand it a whole lot more. We can either build a brick wall around what we have, or we can knock down old walls, build bridges over the rubble and engage on a wider level.”

Pointing to the experience of Fairfax Media, he says, “It was so fixated on its rivers of gold from its print classifieds that it was completely blindsided by the internet. It had the wherewithal to develop class leading websites, but didn’t pay attention until too late, then had to pay millions of dollars for the likes of Seek, RSVP and Domain. Fairfax built walls, didn’t look over the top to see the rapidly changing landscape, and paid the price, literally.”

As the new president of the PIAA Leach would also be expected to have a global perspective, and indeed he is a well-travelled printer. From his overseas experience he says, “One of the issues for Australia is that we are a small country and relatively isolated. In Europe for instance the need for innovative thinking is far greater, partly because there is far more competition, and partly because the free flow of ideas is also far greater. One of our challenges is to move away from being trapped in the past, whereas in Europe it is more the case that they are forced to adapt, we can become comfortable, which leads to complacency.”

Another area of concern for Leach is the tricky issue of capacity, he says, “In a small market the balance between sustainable capacity and new investment is hard to find, and often I feel printers are sold more than they need or that the industry can support. It seems sometimes that the targets of some of the suppliers are more important than the well-being of the industry as a whole, and those targets can be reached at the expense of some hard working people.”

Having just won $11m of government funding for industry training and business development the PIAA is showing that it has plenty to give to print business owners, and with David Leach now its president, following the well-received three year stint that Susan Heaney put in, the industry association is also looking like it is renewing itself and moving on from its previous prime focus on industrial relations and into industry development. Leach says, “Renewal is the keyword, and outlook. Opportunities are plentiful, we just have to be prepared to renew our businesses so that we can meet them.”

 

Look Print

Leach didn’t inherit his business, he started it 23 years ago with just himself and one machine. Today there are some 60 staff operating up to 24 hours a day five days a week. Organic growth has been a feature of Look Print since Leach founded the company. Leach, who had been working in real estate investment, looked to capitalise on what he saw as an ‘opportunity in computerised colour printing’.

 He says, “It hasn’t been a straightforward journey and hasn’t always gone according to plan, and has definitely engaged the adventurous in me.” Today Look Print is one of the foremost display graphics printers in the country. It has a battery of wide format printers. Its new online consumer web-to-print offering PosterCandy enables the public to produce a poster from pictures posted on Instagram and Facebook. Leach says, “PosterCandy brings to life a story. The explosion in photo taking since digital technology arrived has proved that people want to capture their memories, and PosterCandy allows them to display them. Innovators are people who haven’t heard the term ‘it can’t be done’, we look to people like (the inventor) Thomas Edison who was and remains an inspiration.”

He claims the company has now reached the point where it hits the 'right first time, on time' promise 99 per cent of the time. Some Look clients have a success rate of 99.6 per cent, with the lowest success rate for a client standing at 98.7 per cent.

Leach estimates that 97 per cent of Look's work stays in-house, for a client base that includes print resellers and a wide variety of ‘high street’ retailers and brands.

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