Part way through the first lockdown, Flexpress owner Steve Wenlock was not sure what to do. He considered closing the company to become a printer in name only business and outsourcing customer work; he considered downsizing to a smaller operation as many were doing at the time; he thought about carrying on as before. And he considered changes and investment to support those changes. Wenlock chose the latter option. It has involved installation of new equipment, knocking down a few walls and development of both its digital prepress workflow and physical paper workflow.
As it happened there was probably little choice. Having taken out a CBils loan, the company needed to pay that back which would have been hugely difficult had it made cutbacks.
“When Covid arrived we had just geared ourselves up and gone through the transition to become a trade printer,” says Wenlock. “Then the bottom drops out of the market. At that point we took the CBils loan to keep ourselves afloat. That’s when we sat down and thought about the future – we were only just making a profit at that time. But we needed to pick up turnover in order to to pay the CBils back or we could cut our cloth and slash cost, and down size. But we realised that wouldn’t pay the overhead even after cutting employee costs and we didn’t like that concept. Instead, because we felt there would be a lot of printers down sizing and cutting production capacity, there would be a need to outsource in future. It seemed like an opportune time to hang on.”
That has meant taking out labour costs by automation where practical and investment in technology that is more efficient than what was already in place. The company reduced its headcount by eight during the lockdown (two have since returned) and has automated production steps to maintain productivity. Where two people would be engaged in producing folders by hand, this is now done by machine with a vastly increased capacity. And Flexpress continues to invest.
The Leicester company has in 2022 installed an HP Indigo 100K, a new RMGT 924 LED, a Moll (for those folders) and has doubled down on it does best: books (wire, case and perfect bound), stitched leaflets and folders. It is not exclusive to these categories, there are newsletters and business cards alongside for direct clients, but it no longer competes hard for that style of work. Much of the work and all the growth arrives through its website but it is a narrow choice of products, which Wenlock says helps make the marketing messages more controlled.
“I had read the messages about the need for diversification. We did the opposite, by becoming more specialised and expert in certain products – those that printers would not want to do for themselves and which would not work for the gang and batch online printers,” he says.
The company had gone along the diversification route to some extent, accumulating different pieces of finishing technology that as a result were rarely used. Now with specialisation the emphasis is on production efficiently. “We had that many pieces of equipment it was difficult to find customers to sell them to,” he adds.
The company was quick to spot the potential of the internet, says Wenlock. In 2010 it was still a garage business and had just amalgamated with another local company Flexprint. It had moved on from a single-colour Hamada to a Ryobi 3304 with Océ toner machines and had just decided to buy its first premises. “We were no longer a lifestyle business,” says Wenlock. There were a couple of web developers on the team who created an online editing tool for business cards, ahead of much of the competition and equally ahead of much of the customer base. Rather than persevere, the embryonic web to print venture was closed down, one of a number of misfires Wenlock will admit to.
This was still very much local business linked via local business networks like BNI with other local commercial printers feeding from the same pool of customers, stealing jobs from each other and finding that Vistaprint was stealing from everyone, as he describes it. The company continued to invest to expand its services, but by 2016/17 was finding it harder to earn a profit.
Wenlock sat down and examined the customer list: which were profitable, which were growing, where were the opportunities. “We had assumed that trade printing was the enemy, but when we filtered the customers we realised that it wasn’t,” he says. “We might be on to something. Flexpress would become a trade only printer.”
That meant keeping ahead of what printers would do in house for themselves. That led to investment in a Duplo DuSense, for example, as few would have enough work to justify the digital embellishment machine, but would send work to Leicester for finishing. And it means too investment in a B2 Indigo. People liked the Indigo quality, but only a few printers would invest in a B2 machine.
“We already had the SRA1 RMGT with LED UV and a B3 Indigo, then took what might be considered a reckless step and put in a B2 Indigo, quickly discovering that we didn’t have enough power coming into the building and that we would also need a compressor and chiller. But we survived and it turned out to be the best thing we could have done. The B2 Indigo took off.”
The company held an open day for Indigo earlier this year after installation of the 100K to show off the technology at which Wenlock explained the company’s approach to business and how much of its work arrives through the website.
“There were some large printers there, and not one of them was selling through their websites. Many printers are stuck in their ways. With a website it’s easier to get new customers. We don’t want to be keeping existing customers happy when they do not bring the same value as they used to bring and are not as loyal as they used to be. Many printers are so embedded in doing what they have always done, it’s really really difficult for those people to change.” There are, he adds, still opportunities online.
Change is working for Flexpress. Business has soared with the decision to focus on online trade work. It was growing at 20% a year right into Covid. And the nights of soul searching that followed during lockdown are paying off. Along with the decision to stay and fight, to automate where possible, to examine workflows and to invest, there was a further culling of work. It removed the lower added value products “or at least we would no longer sell them cheaply”. It is working. The company still produces thousands of business cards, but not at the lowest price and frequently with the touch of pizzazz that the DuSense offers. Once passed from the Indigo via a guillotine to the DuSense, the sheet of cards runs through the Duplo DC646 and ready to be delivered with minimal labour, and therefore cost, involved.
Flexpress removed too the work that was awkward to pack and apt to be damaged in transit, resulting in a reprint. This was typical of large format work and that too has gone.
It is, says Wenlock, the opposite strategy to what he calls the gang and batch online trade printers that take on any kind of work. “It is a different approach to the likes of Route 1”, he says.
The work may be different, but frequent buyer rewards leading to discounts are in the mix and Flexpress continues to handle more bespoke projects. There is room for the different approaches, he says. The company makes it very clear that non standard work, in terms of formats and numbers, take second place to the dictatorship of delivery that rules for online trade printing. In other words those placing bespoke jobs cannot specify delivery in 48 hours but must wait until it can be fitted around the flow of standard work that is easier to plan in.
That scheduling process is holistic. It takes account of finishing as well as printing and strives to keep as many machines busy for as much of the time as possible. “We used to like getting a job with a Pantone special colour. We could charge for the wash ups, more for the ink and the makeready time. Now we realise that the time we would spend on washing up, we would not be finishing anything. That hour is lost to guillotines or booklet makers. It took us a while to realise that not all work is good work,” he adds.
Now the aim is to keep as much equipment working and earning a margin for as long as possible and why too it has invested in additional printing capacity. It keeps the finishing area occupied. The Indigo 100K was originally scheduled for installation in October last year. This is the busy period for Flexpress so when HP suggested that another customer was in dire need of the additional capacity, Wenlock agreed to wait for another machine. That duly arrived in January. “It gives us 50% more capacity because it is 30% faster and considerably more reliable from the same footprint,” he says.
That footprint is considerably larger than the four-colour SRA1 litho press that has just been installed alongside it. Flexpress had originally specified an RMGT 970 long perfector, but again ran in delivery schedules that would have cut across the second busiest time of year and would cause too much disruption. The slightly larger sheet would help with perfecting work because of the extra grip area needed.
Perfecting would also help maintain capacity as the new press was to replace two machines, an SRA1 and B3 presses. When the company ran the figures again, it realised that a single highly reliable straight-only machine would cope.
As the company reverted to a straight press only, there was no need for the larger format which would also have meant a larger platesetter would be needed.
While on paper this is a like for like investment, the levels of automation are significantly greater than on the seven-year-old version. Technology has also been migrated from the true B1 press in the RMGT stable, cutting makeready and increasing running speeds. The press has closed loop colour controls making it more stable from the user point of view and easier to run.
From the press room work travels to the two guillotines and then for the collator feeding the stitcher or to the binder. There is no folder on the ground floor to fold sheets for section work. Everything is flat sheet he points out. This means running from the collator into the Horizon StitchLiner MkIII, or by using the collator as a gathering line, to create the book block for the Horizon BQ500 perfect binder running a PUR adhesive which suits this non traditional method of production.
Wenlock has always been happy to break with convention. It dates back to the earliest days when buying the first offset press, a single-colour Hamada with one day’s training as a litho starter kit from the Exchange & Mart. At the time the company was a services business offering key cutting, engraving, scissor sharpening, rubber stamp making and colour copying. Wenlock cheerfully admits he knew nothing of printing, but worked out that rivals with litho presses could outcompete his copier on longer runs. He didn’t take the printing down frame as there was something similar for production of rubber stamps and could be adapted. The learning curve for litho was still frustrating – he had launched a local advertising magazine to get the poor quality mistakes out the way – when he learned about Silvermaster paper plates. Others scorned them. “I felt I was at a disadvantage against people with printing experience, but then started using Silvermaster plates and realised I had a big advantage by being open to anything that saved time and effort.”
The ethos continues. Guillotined work is stacked on small black kick trucks that can be moved without the need for a pallet truck; the waste bins are positioned near the door minimising effort when emptying them three or four times a shift. These are the lean principles that make a difference. And they are infectious.
Sustainability is equally part of the ethos. As a trade printer it needs to be at least at the same point as its customers if not ahead of them. There are solar panels on the roof, motion sensor lights and LED bulbs to reduce the energy needs.
This year the flow of paper around the factory has been optimised while the workflow has become more automated with investment in Enfocus Switch. This includes a module that will calculate whether there is an advantage to running the Indigo in EPM mode. It will also link into the MIS that is next on the shopping list. Until now the company has run on a home grown MIS, built using Visual Basic that is called Print Wizard. The company now needs shopfloor data collection to bring greater transparency and to replace the green job sheets that dictate what happens to each job. Any changes are made by ballpoint rather than on the network. Wenlock wants this to change and to be in place before the end of the year.
Further ahead there is automation based on robots. He recalls a visit to a Horizon open house in Japan where one operator was running a book line, aided by an automatic guided vehicle to take finished books to the store. Currently such levels of automation are too expensive to be economic for the business, but so too are people and recruitment is already a challenge with the industry with an unfavourable age profile for the coming years, “and many are in the later stages of their careers” he says.
Flexpress is going to have to train its own people. Like his experience with the move into litho and Silvermaster plates, Wenlock is not restrained by convention, so when Flexpress decided that book printing was ripe for an online trade services, a lack of know how was not an issue.
Perfect binding was not the challenge; case binding was. “There was a big learning curve for case bound books especially,” he says. “We had to understand the different glues required and the different process steps to create books, largely self taught. Now we are producing some really nice stuff. There’s a great sense of satisfaction in books that is not there when printing leaflets. A book is a piece of print that is valued by somebody.”
Unfortunately which books the company has produced has to remain a trade secret. That includes self published titles for authors that walk into their local print shop asking for their sure-to-be-best-seller to be printed at one end and titles direct for publishers. For Wenlock publishers count as trade customers as they are professional print buyers in their own right. It is not about print on demand or book of one production.
There are limits to what the company will take on: 1,000 case bound books, 5,000 perfect bound books and 10,000 stitched products. Too many and the company’s flexibility is compromised. Everything is packed neatly in undistinguished, unbranded boxes; no more than 15kg in each. DPD, he explains, will accept a 30kg box, but this is difficult to handle at the other end so is impractical. “This is what we call attention to detail,” he adds.
It works. He reckons that the reprint rate is lower than for other trade printers meaning that Flexpress is delivering a better quality product. Its staff are trained and experienced in print, not pushing buttons or scanning barcodes to run machines, he says. While the Indigo is in the same room as the RMGT there is no spray powder to compromise quality of the digital press thanks to use of LED inks and curing.
The lack of powder helps ensure reliability on the litho press as well. “When we looked at the cost of the first RMGT I was staggered at how little we had spent on maintaining it, or how few problems we had with it at all. We had spent nothing other than for consumables. So buying another was a no brainer. The Japanese reliability on printing equipment is like their cars. It’s up there with the best in the world. And the guys love it.”
The transformation is working. The filtering out of unprofitable work and jobs that Flexpress did not want to do removed what amounted to 25% of its turnover, but it has paid off. “Our best year pre Covid was £2.6 million. This year we will be reporting around £3.2 million and with six fewer people,” he says. Flexpress is starting to build the foundations for its future.
That ultimately will be without Wenlock. He turns 61 this year and is thinking about his future. A management team is making day to day decisions leaving Wenlock with more time to be on the shopfloor to help out where needed. “I’m the flex person at Flexpress,” he says. There is plenty to be done. The original RMGT 920 has only recently been removed and already the impact of a smoother more logical flow of work is being felt. The fabric of the building will be addressed as the units it occupies have been restyled to accommodate the machinery, removing walls and parts of the ceiling. He is aiming to have the place looking like an F1 factory, he says. And then Flexpress can consider its long term future, including perhaps a move to a larger or an additional site. “I reckon that we can get a further £2 million of sales from this building,” he says. That may not be too far away.
The investments will pay off strengthening the company and putting it in position for the next generation. Although a younger Steve Wenlock works in the business, his father is thinking in terms of an Employee Ownership Trust to continue the business. “And any decision to move will not be mine to make,” he says. “It’s a few years away yet, but I will have had a good innings.”
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