In the printing world, there are two types of managers. The traditional variety came up through the press floor. They live and breathe printing; they have ink in their veins. But a new class is emerging. These types might walk through the door of a print shop clutching an MBA or at least a university degree. Some have come from different sectors, whether manufacturing, retail or technology. They are managers first, print people second. Unlike the dyed-in-the-wool printers, they have no back-ground in the industry. They are newcomers. 

In the closed-shop world of print, this kind of manager is not always popular on the factory floor. 

There are plenty of examples where people from either strands of experience have meshed within a printing company. Former Snap chief executive Grant Vernon came from an accounting background. He also umpired AFL football. Prior to joining Snap, he was general manager of financial services firm Asgard. The new chief executive, Stephen Edwards, is a print man through and through, having cut his teeth as at News Limited and done a stint at Moore. He was Snap’s chief operating officer for 10 years (it is worth pointing out he has also studied at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management). 

Opus Group chief executive Cliff Brigstocke is another industry leader whose management credentials elsewhere brought him into the world of print and paper. He had worked at consumables products company Bunzl in its logistics business where he was involved supplying companies such as Starbucks Coffee with all their consumables.

PMP chief executive Richard Allely came from a commercial and financial management background at companies like Tenix, Boral and James Hardie. His former executive general manager Andrew Williams came from a printing background. While the country’s biggest print group has had come bumps of late, the power pair of Allely and Williams had chalked up many runs on the board over recent years – evidence of the opportunity when financial acumen and industry street smarts come together. 

Small businesses tend to be run by ‘tradesmen done good’ rather than besuited management types. But even in the SME world, some have made a relatively seamless transition into print. Nathan Leong studied computer inform-ation systems in accounting at university and then went to work as a consultant at global accounting firm Deloitte. In 2005, he went and set up a design studio and started doing graphic design for printed publications, both digitally and with offset. Last year, he set up The Distillery, which does letterpress printing for niche markets like wedding invitations and bespoke business cards. The firm quickly outgrew its first home in North Sydney and moved to in Darlinghurst. The 10-15 staff all have university backgrounds, rather than the apprenticeships that are more typical in graphic arts. 

Back to school

Leong had to go back to school, enrolling at TAFE to learn printing. He works to combine the background of university and consultancy work with his new-found printing skills. “You need to be able to do both,” he says. “I would not feel comfortable telling my guys what to do if I didn’t know what I’m talking about. You need to lead from the front.”

He says printers of the future will need to be both book smart and street smart. “To be an effective leader, you need both.”

He regular talks to a colleague who has been in the printing industry for 30 to 40 years. “It’s a new industry to me, so he is my mentor. When I have questions, I ask him for help; he is a really great guy.”

Tim Gullifer, a partner at Deloitte Private, says Leong’s story is unusual. “That is an honest person with an emotional quotient but they are far and few between,” Gullifer says.

“You’ll get managers who think they’re so intelligent and so well-educated in theory and strategy that they can pick up the rest on the run.”

Nevertheless, Gullifer believes there is place for the MBA-educated manager because they have been trained to think broadly and laterally. They are more inclined to pick up new ideas and try them. 

“What the MBA does is broaden the horizon of the individual. It gives them an injection of awareness, of knowledge and of skills going into a broader sector. They are well qualified, they have fantastic theory and to do an MBA you have to be an intellectual. But what’s really good about them is that they can embed into staff a process of continual learning and push the ‘we must keep up date’ button,” he says. 

“The guy who came through the factory floor and has been promoted is still a very good professional manager of the process and the people but some of them lack the awareness, especially in an industry like printing where the global changes around equipment continually happen every year, where there is innovation.

“If you said to the factory floor guy: ‘What are you doing about innovation’, they would look at you as if you’re strange and try to work out what it means whereas if you spoke to the MBA guy about market trends, innovation and modernisation of technology, it would be top of mind.”

On the other hand, he says, many MBA-trained managers lacks something the ink-in-the-veins types have. “They are lacking in people management and process management but they have a lot of theory and they are going to try and put that into practice,” he says.

Gullifer says there is a need for both mindsets. He says coming in with an MBA on its own is a prescription for disaster because the manager needs to have first-hand experience of the business. He recommends that university-trained managers spend some time working on the factory floor, either at the place where they want to finish or somewhere else. That way they know what it’s like to be on the pressroom floor, what it’s like to get dirty and greasy with the machinery and how to work under pressure to fill an order that’s just come in.

“They are quick learners, the MBAs, because of their intellect but they need that emotional quotient where they are willing to see themselves being as good as the person who has come up from the factory floor and knows how to get documents to completion. If an MBA can be brought down to earth and acknowledge the equivalent position as an equal, then the two of them will get on.”

New beginnings

Melbourne-based Newlitho is run by Seth Watts, who has an MBA from Melbourne Business School and who is now finishing his Masters of Marketing. Prior to becoming chief executive, Watts was a software developer. He had cut his teeth developing software for Newlitho. The company supported his study in Germany.

Newlitho chairman Paul Daley says Watts, who took on the role in 2005, was the perfect choice. “I was adamant that we had someone with solid business credentials,” Daley says. 

“Yes, we had a number of staff at the time employed with business degrees, some had Master’s degrees, but I was adamant that we had to have someone who was IT savvy, that could cut through the IT cloud as such, the bulldust and waffle, so that we weren’t getting spin from IT departments.

“That would help us make the correct decisions with respect to software, with respect to all the directives that one needs to make, without the spin. That was a very high criterion. I needed someone who could read a balance sheet, who could understand what a 21st century business has to look like and also reinvent and purge old ways of doing things.”

Daley, now 60, once ran the company, and says having an MBA in charge helped the business get funding and connect with customers. “In the 1990s, we could manage by walking around. In the 2000s, we could document a bit of stuff but post-GFC and even more so in 2012, a criterion of obtaining finance to run our businesses is to demonstrate that we have a level of management expertise.

“I have nothing in common with the person placing the order so I’m a dinosaur. You have to have people who look the part, speak the lingo and can at least break down the barriers and can still form relationships. That’s what Seth does. Seth only deals with the principals of the companies and this enables us to get contracts.”

Daley does not believe printers these days can survive without having someone who has these types of skills.

Skills handed down

Susan Heaney, managing director of Heaney Performers in Print on the Gold Coast, does not have an MBA background. But she did study business to further her skills when she took over the family business. She says print business leaders need to pick up these kinds of skills.
Like Daley, she says the old ways won’t work anymore. 

“I think I am very lucky to have both, because I can’t get any wool pulled over my eyes on the floor,” Heaney says.

“But these days, the dynamics are changing. Business is faster and more progressive and you need to be able to read balance sheets, know your limitations as far as the investment returns you’re getting because we’re becoming a commodity. 

“So you have to weigh what sort of investment you’re going to have against your returns as opposed to the old days where you start a business and fly by the seat of your pants, which was the way Dad probably started it.”

Susan Heaney implemented a number of new systems in the business, from credit control to the way all jobs are handled and followed up. She also introduced checking of quotes to the actual figures and quality assurance systems to eliminate mistakes.

She says many printers without advanced business skills are now struggling. “I deal with a lot of those printers because I do a lot of trade work,” she says. 

“They can make a living but personally I find it frustrating dealing with a lot of them because they don’t have systems, they don’t have credit control, they are not fully aware of their costs and how to pass them off, which can obviously can be damaging to the industry if they don’t know their price points and what constitutes the price point and profit.”

Peter Orel, chief executive officer of Finsbury Green, does not have an MBA. What he does have, he says, is an MBWA – “management by walking around”. While an MBA has skills, he says these often don’t work in the real world. It is more important to have the right mindset.

“I guess it depends on your skill set,” Orel says. “I have managed to learn lots on the job and I have a particular knack for absorbing information and learning. That’s just my learning style.

“I know lots of people who have gone through MBA but that doesn’t necessarily make them any different when they come out the other end of it. If they are not particularly adept at learning new techniques and new processes, then no amount of study is going to change that person.”

But he says printers need to be more professional in their approach these days and that means picking up skills in whatever way they can. “There’s far less margin for error in terms of the choices that we make as a business. The risks are far greater for error. 

“Once upon a time you could make a decision on new equipment. If the basis of those judgements was gut feel only and there was some error in your gut feel, then you may have been able to absorb that error. Today we just don’t have that margin for error.”

He says he surrounded himself with people he can learn from. Some of them have had tertiary education, others have just had the right experience. That, he says, has been part of his learning style.

Industry outsider

Anita Lennox now runs a Minuteman franchise in Brisbane. Prior to opening the business in 2008, she ran sunglasses shop Bright Eyes with her father. The pair spent a year researching different industries and decided print was good because it offered longevity, stability and the flexibility to build a business to any size required.

“We don’t have ink in our veins unfortunately. But we have toner all over our hands,” Lennox says.

Lennox spent several weeks at the Minuteman headquarters in New York learning all about printing. It was an intensive course and she says she picked up a lot.

While she does not have print industry people working with her, she does strike alliances with other printers for sharing work. It’s a strategic way of building expertise.

Geoff Hunt, managing director of Chippendale-based Momento Pro, came from a non-print background (see Star Business, p30). He and the other co-founders had worked in technology. They established Momento, which creates premium coffee table books of people’s personal photographs. Wedding albums, trips, family histories, recipes are all part of the Momento mix – it’s a unique niche. 

“We ended up starting a business that was technologically based but which has an output on paper,” Hunt says. 

“It’s quite exciting to work on something that isn’t ‘in the ether’. We have worked on things such as temporary websites and once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. We have all done hundreds and hundreds of websites that don’t exist anymore so it’s good to work on something that’s tangible and physical.”

Learning the ropes

Hunt concedes there was a steep learning curve, but people were happy to help and it was not insurmountable. “In terms of working in the industry, we are obviously newcomers and had a lot to learn but I don’t think there has been any real disadvantage to us. It’s not like suppliers weren’t willing to deal with us just because we were technology people.”

Momento’s ordering website went live in 2004 and for the first four years, the company was outsourcing its printing to people who did have ink in their veins. “Then there was a crunch point for us where we had to decide for various reasons whether we continue outsourcing or to bring it in in-house so we bought in-house and invested in our first HP Indigo,” he says.

That’s when the learning curve accelerated. Bringing in experience and expertise in printing and binding skills made it seamless.

“It was made easier by the fact that we brought in some of the people from various companies that had been doing it for a long time. All the staff we brought in had experience at other companies. We weren’t flying blind because we had learned in the previous four years about what’s involved,” he says. 

“The learning experience was at a management level where we were running a very different type of business. We had to learn about the economics of printing and of ink and paper, of impression costs, paper costs, the life cycles of various bits of equipment, the maintenance cycles of all the different bits of equipment and the cost cycles that go with all of that.

“It tested cashflow in new ways and took a lot of planning to execute but once it was down and we had the team running it settled in quite quickly.”

Hunt says the key is to have a good production manager who understands printing. And it’s essential that production and IT people work closely together. 

If any critics think that ‘outsiders’ will struggle to produce the kind of quality work that print people spend years perfecting, now is a good time to point out that Momento was a big winner at this year’s National Print Awards.

So which is better? An MBA-trained manager or one who came up from the floor? One has the ability to think in terms of innovation and strategy, the other knows all about production and people. The reality is that you need both in today’s business world. 

The printing industry has never been tighter, and the market will expose any weaknesses. Conversely, the broader skill set within your company, the stronger your arsenal and greater chance of success. 

Managers should be picking up knowledge and skills wherever they can; whether that’s from doing an MBA, other courses, or surrounding themselves with people who have expertise. The printers who can combine both worlds will be the ones most likely to survive. 

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