Hunts customer focus pays off

19/12/2011 Hunts customer focus pays off

Hunts use Tharstern MIS to support business growth

Hunts People in Print is not so different from many SMEs across the country. The company has a factory in Kidlington, just north of Oxford, where it has a five-colour B2 Lithrone, a five-colour Anicolor and two-colour SM52. There is a Fujifilm prepress set up to low chem plates, a pair of digital presses and a Tharstern MIS. It is a profile that the business probably shares with hundreds of printers across the UK and beyond. And two years ago managing director Timon Colegrove would have agreed that Hunts was slap in the middle of the commercial print industry. It not only had a similar line up of equipment, it employed the same sorts of people and was making the same sort of wafer thin margins. It was not a recipe for success.

The business turned 50 last year and Colegrove had already begun to face up to the need for change. “Last year was also a time that we realised that we had to start making some changes, we knew we couldn’t keep doing what we have always done.” Over the 50 years, he says perceptions of the role ‘Printer’ have changed, slipping from being a professional alongside the accountant or banker, losing that as DTP and then print management companies took a grip. The internet has mounted a further challenge, both to print itself and through the ability to sell print products by the most efficient companies on a pile it high sell it cheap commoditised model.

Colegrove’s analysis might have been grim, but for the fact that he had already decided on an alternative strategy, having seen a presentation by then chief executive of the BPIF Michael Johnson. He remembers: “What he said was crucial to any business, not just print. He presented four models. The first is the commodity route where price is the deciding factor. Second is the product focused approach, based around the press and quality of a job that can be produced. But this is still highly competitive and price remains king. The third is the customer driven approach, where the customer is king and you focus on service, but even here you will always face a few smarter and better competitors. We operate a lot in this area as our suppliers do also. The fourth model is the customer- centric approach and is about taking stuff to clients and telling them what they don’t know. It’s about us engaging with our clients in a number of ways, and at the end of 2011 this is what Hunts has been striving to do.”

Getting there has not been easy. There were redundancies and last year for the first time the company failed to increase sales. The change of approach needs the right kind of commitment throughout the company and Colegrove continues to ponder the best way to engage shop floor staff and get them to relate to customers in this way. In the Print Cafe that was opened at the beginning of the process and serves as a meeting room, board room and showroom area, four words have been painted above the window: Finesse, Enthusiasm, Engagement and Truth. It is a mantra that is being applied to how the company carries out its business both internally and externally and is aimed at instilling a new trusting culture. Teams of staff regularly participate in outside charity events as part of the engagement policy for example.

Hunts called in Vision in Print to look at how to become more productive. As a result, the touch points that every job might go through was cut from 166 steps to 69. Part of this has been to adopt digital job bags, investing in its Tharstern MIS to keep track of jobs and data up to date. “We think we are one of the first to use Tharstern’s virtual job bag,” Colegrove adds. This aspect is far from complete: it needs to continue to work on its production processes and will be adopting 5C protocols, the first of which is to clear out anything that is not necessary to leave as clear and understandable a process as possible.

It has also introduced a creative services element to the business. Hunts has long offered training courses to help clients understand some of the intricacies of printing and the Print Cafe acts a training area. Now it is offering design and strategic thinking, not to the level that a marketing agency might, but enough to satisfy clients that don’t want to use an agency. Simon Lithe has joined to develop this aspect of the business, taking Hunts into the world of Purls and cross media marketing. “It’s about enterprise selling,” he says. “There are 101 ways to deliver the message today – social media, Facebook, LinkedIn – the new generation are the ones buying these products and services. We are tapping into all the different channels because success is about understanding how to send a message to a customer and what the response looks like, using personalised print, data to profile customers and understand how they want to be addressed rather than being forced in one direction.”

For Colegrove it has meant “learning to employ people better than ourselves”, and the early evidence is that it is working. While the company has to look at each job on its merits still and cannot survive just by focusing at the top of the pyramid, sales are up 30% on last year’s admittedly tough experience.

Colegrove has a clear view of where the business should be headed, much clearer than three years ago when there was an idea that something should be done without knowing exactly what they should be.