Xerox has bought Go Inspire in a move to expand its digital services and customer engagement operations and speed the digital transformation.
The deal comes six years after Patrick Headley led an MBO of the Leicester marketing services business from Robin Welch followed by the acquisition of Eclipse in Kettering. It amounts to a doubling of the size of the business to more than £50 million in sales. It has been concentrating on using software and digital channels to improve customer communications, in what Headley has emphasised as talking in the C-suite about how Go Inspire can bring improvements to the customer’s marketing efforts while at the same stroke improving the group’s margins.
This is the appeal for Xerox. It led to a call from the corporation’s mergers and acquisitions department around six months ago. “They loved what we do,” says Headley, “And I have been very impressed with Xerox. I’m honoured that a $7 billion company sees the opportunity of my little business.
“A lot of what we do is still printing and they want to enhance that and encourage the digital transformation.”
Xerox UK & Ireland managing director Darren Cassidy is also senior vice president of EMEA Global Document Services at Xerox, and says: “Go Inspire’s capabilities will support the transformation of our transactional and direct mail services into multi-channel communications, accelerate growth in EMEA and create new avenues for us to help current and new clients.”
He adds that while Go Inspire “is a great printing company with truly impressive capabilities in printing”, “they are much more than that”. It is Go Inspire’s ability at creating interactive campaigns that combine digital and physical communications that explains the appeal to Xerox.
“We were really impressed at how they have driven that part of the business and what they are doing and how they manage data for customer engagement services.”
Xerox today generates the majority of its revenues from services including data management, extracting data from forms through scanning and then storing data digitally. Expanding this is a key part of the strategy, including the acquisition of CareAR last year.
There were four potential acquisitions Xerox looked at in this round. “Go Inspire was top of this list,” says Cassidy. “We will continue to be acquisitive. in the client communications. We do not buy companies that are in trouble.”
There are no plans for heavy intervention from Xerox (“The risks are that we could smother them with love” says Cassidy. “We will avoid that.”)
Headley will carry on and has no plan to step aside. “There don’t want to change the business massively,” he says. “I’ve no plans to retire. I love the job. Together with Xerox we will expand the portfolio of high value services for our expanding client base throughout the UK and beyond.”
Other deals to enable this acceleration are likely as Xerox will now need to keep pace with Communisis and Paragon Customer Communications. Either might have stepped in for Go Inspire as the company looked for the means to secure the next stage of its development. “We had also looked at private equity,” says Headley. “This is the better route.”
Xerox has a strong customer communications arm with its own print centres and partnership arrangements in North America in particular. The strategy is to be able to offer a wide spread of customers a whole range of communication and customer insight services, from both inbound and outbound communications. There is virtually no overlap between the Go Inspire and Xerox customer base.
With the acquisition, Xerox is now gaining an extensive manufacturing platform spread across sites in Leicester and Kettering. This includes HP PageWide T series continuous feed inkjet presses and Heidelberg sheetfed and web presses. Last year it invested £4 million on upgrading an HP T240 to the highest quality specification, on Böwe mailing systems and a Xerox Baltoro cutsheet inkjet press. All the cutsheet digital capability comes from Xerox.
The production line up is unlikely to change. Xerox no longer offers a press to challenge the HPs and Go Inspire has been a good customer to HP. Should Go Inspire continue to grow, HP would benefit.
Headley says: “We have a really strong plan and want to exercise that plan under the new ownership of Xerox. They are a really good bunch of people. We have told customers that there will be no changes for them. These are exciting times. I’m really chuffed.”
And the future will increasingly be about apps, websites, barcodes as well as mail, the digital as well as physical and the combination of the channels. “We like marketing platforms that we can scale,” says Cassidy.
And Xerox has an ace up its sleeve with the augmented reality CareAR platform. While this has been developed to help service organisations, including Xerox’s own staff to repair technology, there are clear opportunities in future to offer consumers a personalised 3D experience along with print and other digital communications. “That,” says Cassidy, “is really exciting.”
