You can check out anytime you want but you can never leave – so go some of the lyrics to one of the world's most famous songs, Hotel California, by legendary 70s supergroup The Eagles, and it seems this week it can be equally applied to the print industry with the news that two of the industry's heavyweights – Bob McMillan and Andrew Price – are back in the fray.
McMillan isn't strictly back in, he doesn't own a printing company, he is just a financier of Sydney Allen which apparently needed some financing, something it now has through the McMillan Investment business. The company is moving into his old print factory, but McMillan is not a director of the business. Still the fact that he is putting money back into print is a good sign for the industry, he has lots of options for his cash, and knows print as well as anyone.
Andrew Price is back to where he made his name – well, in the same field at least – after a tumultuous tussle with Paperlinx that saw him try to oust the board, then get invited on, then become CEO, to then getting sacked. Price is now head of the Asia Pacific arm of a global print management business, and having successfully built his Stream Solutions business from nothing into this country's biggest print brokers the directors that have now appointed him at HH Global will be looking for strong growth.
Not everyone stays in print of course, there are plenty of former owners and managers that either jumped or were pushed and have never come back, but many do, never leave that is, or leave only to quickly re-appear, and some of those that do leave are constantly angling to get back in. Why, we may ask, as to the outsider print seems like something of a sunset industry?
Well it may indeed have seen better days in terms of making a shekel, but the print industry does retain its dealmaking air, it is fairly easy for anyone to enter, and it is a proper industry, based on machinery and manufacturing, no-one can fail to be impressed by a massive press pumping out pages of perfectly readable products at high speeds, and for those that have been in print for any amount of time there is a strong element of sentimentality there. For all that we complain about print the reality is that this is an industry that provides opportunity and challenge, why would we ever want to leave?
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