By insisting that clients physically sign off on jobs before they go to press, a printer catches more errors and minimises disputes.
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Entrepreneur: Ray Keen, Managing Director
Company: Printgraphics
Business type: Large format colour printing
Founded: 1979
Employees: 28
Turnover: (2002 - 2003) $7.5M
Head office: Melbourne, Victoria
Contact details: +61 3 9562 9600
The Printgraphics Story
Ray Keen bought out his business partner in 1984 because of differences about their business philosophies. At the time, their company was a small, Melbourne-based printer. Keen’s partner wanted to make the business a quick-print operation; Keen wanted to go after the quality end of the market.
After buying out his partner and purchasing a four-colour printer, Keen focused on printing high-quality magazines and journals for his expanding client base. Twenty years later, his company does monthly and quarterly magazines for employer organisations, local councils, industry groups, and commercial work. Printgraphics also does magazine work for Holden and Mercedes-Benz. Keen says: “These are glossy, high-quality magazines. But we quickly discovered that our clients want not only high-quality printing but high-quality service.”
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Key learning points:
- Meeting deadlines - Never make promises to customers that you cannot fulfil. If a deadline is too tight, quality will be compromised.
- Dispute prevention - Insist that clients approve in advance the key steps of a job. Approval in advance minimises conflicts because clients must focus on what they really want.
- Mistakes - Tell clients about mistakes quickly - and fix them fast. Use errors to improve procedures or restructure parts of the business.
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In the mid-1980s, Printgraphics did a customer survey and found that people were dissatisfied with the reliability of printers. The common complaint was that printers would promise customers to complete a job by “next week” - and next week would never come.
Keen says it was a market niche waiting to be exploited. “We promise on-time delivery. We won’t take a job unless we can deliver it when the client wants it. Also, when we get an order confirmation, it has all the detail as we have interpreted their order. We send it to the customer to check it, sign it and return it. But it also has a delivery date that is recorded by our production staff. They record any jobs that are late and have to explain why they are late to our board of directors.”
Negotiating the details of jobs with clients can be a delicate process but good systems make it easier. For example, Printgraphics insists that clients sign proofs before the final print is approved. If customers change something, they will receive another proof until they are satisfied.
Keen says: “We think that the customer is king but is not always right. Sometimes, clients don’t take as much responsibility for their errors as we feel they should. We might print a job based on proofs that a customer has signed off on and that customer will then find something wrong with it and want us to reprint it for nothing. There is sometimes a battle over that.”
Keen says that companies should be honest with clients about any mistakes they make. “If you stuff something up, you have to admit it and respond to it very quickly. You have to make sure that you do whatever is needed to fix it, even if it requires a lot of time. If you have to reprint a big job, it’s going to take several days.”
A bad mistake can be painful or expensive, but it can also be a valuable catalyst for internal reorganisation. Keen cites “a major disaster” that Printgraphics suffered in 2004. In collating several 16-page sections for a new client’s magazine, procedures were not followed. The sections were assembled out of sequence and the magazine was sent out to the clients’ customers. Keen says: “We lost a client there as we should have. But the incident prompted a reorganisation of that department and a review of processes. We now have a new manager in there as well.”
By strictly following procedures, Printgraphics can fulfil its marketing promise of attention to detail and on-time delivery. For example, most printers ask customers to approve a job before it goes to print but some only ask for verbal approval. Keen says that is dangerous. By insisting that customers physically sign proofs, customers focus on the job - and frequently discover errors. Keen says: “If you had only gone on verbal approval from that client, you would often end up with a fight on your hands.”