MBE Parramatta is enjoying a boom, due to high demand for fast turnaround and fair price, which the Western Sydney franchisee says has kept his customers loyal and led to the growth of the business. The small business, which does full range of printing, has been on a ‘solid growth’ for the last three years. Two years ago MBH Parramatta grew 50 per cent in one year and 20 per cent in 2014. Speaking with Australian Printer, Charles Batt, owner of MBE Parramatta for nine years, says after many years in large corporates he was attracted to print because of the business model.

Owner of MBE Charles Batt (left) with production team member Tim Jones

Batt says, “It was not specifically print that I was aiming at but what I really liked about the model was the business dynamics of working with business people and developing relationships with others in the same boat.” But he says he wanted to get in the business and succeed. “Even though we are a small business, we put in a Xerox 1000 a couple of years ago, and that is a great machine, because it gives you the speed, it gives you quality and it gives you gloss. “It runs at a speed of 100-pages per minute and if you can run it for 10 hours a day, then you can do huge amounts of business. We also have a back-up machine that runs 80-pages per minute as well as a few other machines that help with offline finishing.” He says the current ‘on-the-go’ environment has trained customers to demand high quality and high speed, and with the Xerox 1000 digital printer he is able to say yes, which can also become a curse. Batt says, “A lot of the customers seem to want printing done immediately. They expect that they can walk in at five in the afternoon and have 10,000 pages printed by 9am the next day, so you need to be able to handle those kinds of things when it comes up. “It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because every time a customer comes and says ‘look this is a really ridiculous question, but can you print this by this time, and you say yep we can do that,’ you kind of train them that it can be something they can do next time. “So in one hand your doing yourself a disservice by saying yes but you want the business, so you can’t really say no to train the customer’s behaviour.” However, he says while saying yes creates a challenge, he is proud of delivering on time and charging a fair price, which ensures a return customer. “The reason people keep coming back is because they trust us. If you do what you said you were going to do when you said you will do it then the customer says ‘well they stuck to their word’ and they will come back,” Batt says. “The only reason they would go somewhere else is because they would feel unloved and ripped off and you have not done what you said you were going to do.” He also prints free samples for some of his big clients, who are in marketing and sales sector, and once they win the job they come and get the printing done with MBE. Batt is also looking at big offset printers, who can do wide format, which ensures he does not lose customers and maintains cash flow. “I know that there is a boom in wide format market. So there is a couple of things you can do; you either invest in the equipment, or get the knowledge and service your clients by outsourcing the jobs to big printers,” Batt says. “The idea is that you bring the ability to your customers where you print the product yourself or you will have the knowledge to essentially connect them to what they need, which will ensure the customer is happy and they will refer you to other businesses for printing jobs.”  

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