Stephen Edwards is a client-focused manager with a difference – his key customers are also part of his company. The new Snap chief executive has made it his first order of business to strengthen the relationship that Snap corporate has with the network of Snap centres. As he puts it: “If the team doesn’t want to play for the coach, you won’t win many games.” 

There’s no shortage of sports metaphors when speaking with Edwards. After all, he is a bit of a sports nut, having played representative level soccer at home and abroad, as well as completed the gruelling Iron Man competition – seven times. 

While Edwards has his own game plan for the business now that he is in charge, he has nothing but praise for the old coach, former chief executive Grant Vernon. Edwards says the pair were a great team, on the field and off. It was Edwards who got distance runner Vernon to try his first triathlon, while Vernon repaid the favour by encouraging Edwards to run a marathon. As Snap’s senior management on respective coasts of Australia – Edwards in Sydney, Vernon in Perth – the two men also spent the past decade working together to grow the business. 

Now well and truly settled in the “coach’s” chair, Edwards has revealed an audacious strategy to open up 120 new stores. And that’s just in Australia. There are already operations in New Zealand Ireland, or China, and he has plans for the US and the UK. 

These growth ambitions follow the course that had been established under Vernon, who had led Snap to become the country’s biggest print franchise operation after taking over a distressed company a decade before (more on that in a moment).

But beyond grand ambitions and a love of sport, the two men are very different. This is particularly apparent when you compare the printing industry credentials on their respective CVs. Vernon entered the business from a finance background. Immediately prior to taking the Snap role in 2001, he had been general manager of Asgard Wealth Solutions. 

Stephen Edwards, on the other hand, is a print man. This is a fact that hasn’t escaped the hundreds of business owners across the franchise network, many of whom have praised the elevation of one of their own to the top job. 

Edwards’ career started with a cadetship at Coca-Cola Amatil, which owned some printing companies. “I got a fair bit of grounding with a big company and started to like what that was all about,” he says.

As his career progressed, Edwards flitted between both big and small firms, which seems the ideal training to lead a big/small organisation like Snap, which is a nationwide giant but is also the sum of its SME parts.  

After Coca-Cola, Edwards’ next step was to “an even bigger company”, News Limited, with particular emphasis on continuous printing through its Multiform subsidiary, which printed the Census as well as invoices for Woolworths. His next step would be to that venerable name in printing – Moore’s.

“What I learned at Moore’s was the art of print management. All sorts of print management companies have started from people who have left Moore’s,” says Edwards. It is an art that he has put to good use at Snap. 

But before joining the franchise company, Edwards tried his hand at running his own businesses in the mid-90s. “I was a property developer, so printing was becoming secondary, but I kept going with it because I had built up a lot of contacts. I started running a printing company that dealt with my contacts, and I jobbed the work all over the place.”

It wasn’t just broking. Edwards also operated single-colour presses, and everything was chugging along smoothly. 

Damage control

But things would take a turn in 2000, after Snap bought printing chain Pink Panther out of receivership. The company, which was a trading name of Current Knowledge Print, was a franchise operation with 12 stores and a 300-staff, 24/7 production hub at Mascot, Sydney. After the buyout, it was swiftly renamed Snap.com. But like so many companies with the dotcom handle, the early 2000s would not be kind to this new acquisition. 

Thanks to the Mascot hub, the buyout gave Snap its first taste of centralised production, which Edwards says was the right idea but the wrong purchase. “When they bought [Pink Panther], they very quickly found it wasn’t the thing they thought it was. It had been a great company, but it had fallen into disrepair.”

In an effort to resolve the misfiring acquisition, print person Edwards and “financial services guy” Vernon were both brought into Snap, with the hope their respective skills sets could get Snap.com on track. 

“They thought Snap.com should get into print management; that could be the saving grace.” But he says he quickly found that the new acquisition “was a mess”.

Edwards’ entry into Snap “wasn’t fun”, he says. His initial assessment was that Snap needed to exit Snap.com. It became a multimillion-dollar exercise that took six months and included “a lot of retrenchments” and “a lot of negative brand damage”.

Go East

You could forgive Edwards if he’d wanted to do something different after such an arduous experience. He says he weighed up other opportunities. As a contemporary of the likes of Andrew Price and Phil Okill, Edwards saw clear possibilities in the fledgling print management movement.

“But Grant and I had struck up a great friendship and so I said, ‘Why don’t I help Snap grow its corporate portfolio and be the executive the East Coast?’” says Edwards.

This was the start of an increasing shift from West to East (something that has continued more recently since Edwards became chief executive). Snap’s heritage is in Perth, where it was founded by the Watt family, who still own it to this day. Some might be surprised to learn that Snap is a fourth-generation family business. The Watt family prefer to stay under the radar and leave the executives to be the face of the operation, says Edwards. However, they remain emotionally attached to the company, which is one reason Snap never floated on the stock exchange. “They have liked to keep it in the family.”

In his new role, Edwards very quickly got some runs on the board by bringing on corporate-level contracts with Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and Stream Solutions. He sees this part of the business as a continued focus. 

“I started the printing management strategy for Snap. That division was basically zero in 2001 and is up to a budget of $20 million this year, with Telstra, CBA, Westpac etc.”

Snap operates in-plant printing operations within large corporate clients. For instance, the print room inside the Westpac head office on Sydney’s Kent Street is Snap-branded and operated. 

But the real meat of Snap’s print management model uses its network of owner-operator centres. Major print users like Telstra or Westpac already have print management suppliers. Where Snap can fill a void is for those quick-turnaround jobs that the clients need yesterday. Most customers are within three kilometres of a Snap outlet, so when there’s a rush job on, “we can do it in more places than anyone else, quickly”, says Edwards.

“Even in Kalgoorlie, which is an amazingly busy place, they need things printed. There are big companies there, and we’re there, on good pieces of equipment,” he adds.

Brand management

The Snap offering is similar to other print managers in terms of quality control. Big clients are extremely protective around, for instance, brand colours. Print managers have driven the national uptake of ISO 12647 and colour management among printers, and Snap is no different. Only certain outlets are part of the print management operation, and they are signed up to what is, essentially, a panel-style arrangement. 

“It is a participation agreement. Before the centres can be part of the deal, they sign up to the participation agreement that we control for Westpac. In that is price, service level and colour profiles. So we have consistent equipment, consistent colour profiles and consistent ripping. That is something we pioneered in digital. We were giving out colour profile books in digital before anyone was doing it, years ago,” says Edwards.

He may be ambitious, but Edwards is also enough of a realist to know that print management is a “very crowded and competitive space”. Rather than go into bat against the major print managers every time a tender comes up, the Snap philosophy is to partner with firms such as Stream and Blue Star to “round out solutions to clients”.

The print management giants don’t have the kind of nationwide footprint Snap can offer. “It’s not going to be easy for them to open up 150 centres tomorrow,” says Edwards.

The trend toward ever-shorter, last-minute, on-demand runs is also playing to Snap’s strengths,“where it used to be print a lot and put it on a shelf, and we’ll draw it down because the per unit price is cheaper.”

Anyone who has followed the Snap story in recent years will know the company is aggressively trying to position itself as marketing communications provider, rather than just a printer. 

This strategy was formalised in August 2010 under the banner ‘Snap Level 2’. The business began actively pushing online services such as website design, email marketing, e-publications and video production to its core customer base of small to medium businesses. The campaign included on bus sides and billboard advertising around the country. 

It was launched along with another service offering, Snap Promote, which used a Quark platform to give customers access to templates. In September 2010, Snap announced another new brand, Snap Direct, which hinged on variable-data software from Canadian developer Racad Tech.

Bolt-on branding

It is around this kinds of bolt-on branding that Edwards is making a clear break from the old regime. Perhaps it is a bitter memory over the catastrophe of Snap.com, but Edwards is against the idea of these sister brands. 

“Snap Level 2 will be dropped. We had a conflicting brand in the market and I have dropped it. We haven’t dropped the notion of what it is about but it got confusing. So we still believe in the products and services but we want our primary brand to be the brand that we market. “I have learned from the dotcom.”

That said, Edwards is a staunch believer that there are big wins for Snap in the marketing communications space. Not, he points out, in the corporate world where it pitches print management, but at the SME level. The reasoning behind this is simple. At the top end, big clients use major advertising and creative agencies, and Snap, with all respect, can’t go toe to toe with those guys. There might be a lesson there for other major print groups, such as PMP and Salmat, which are also trying to position themselves as serious players in agency-land with new media services. 

“The problem that a lot of those guys have is they are not at SME level, so they are trying to go into big places. It is very difficult, because you have big ad agencies in there, whereas our digital strategy is spread across 552,000 clients. We don’t go near Westpac or CommBank with our digital strategy, because why would they buy it from Snap?

“We have 150 locations and most of our clients are within three kilometres of a location. That gives you an interesting insight into the print industry. If you have one big factory, it is going to be hard to compete against us because research tells us that at a certain level, it is all about location,” says Edwards.

Digital services, such as websites and the like, currently comprise about 5% of Snap’s turnover, but Edwards want that figure to be closer to 30%. It is another big claim from the man who is adamant about opening 120 stores in Australia. It is especially bullish when many see printing as a sector in decline but Edwards says critics are viewing the business with blinkers on.

“We view ourselves in a broader industry than just print. We want to be a service provider to SMEs and above. We want to provide, print – both digital and offset – design and brand identity and we also have also been playing with e-products for some time, websites, emails and e-publications.” 

To achieve this, he needs to support of the franchise base. He has worked hard to rally this, having spent the first months of his tenure out in the field, meeting with centres to get them on board. 

“The big thing for me is I want to enhance the franchisee-franchisor engagement. It wasn’t as strong as it could have been, so I wanted to get out and listen. It took a lot of effort and time, but I went everywhere, because I wanted to hear what they were thinking.”

Stephen Edwards on…

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