26 . Glasgow Business April/May 2016
Addressing The Glasgow Business Awards 2015
“We dealt with all the major whisky companies in Scotland and with a fair number of whiskey companies in Ireland”
customer as king. Tat to me is absolutely paramount. “We had a very flexible
production system which allowed us to produce labels – wet glue labels or self-adhesive labels – when the customer wanted at the right price, at the right-time and that was terribly important. It meant that we worked almost like a commando unit in print – we were there and had done the work before some of the bigger companies had submited a tender price to the customers.
“We dealt with all the major
whisky companies in Scotland and with a fair number of whiskey companies in Ireland. I sold the business last year when we were turning over £12m and we employed approximately 100 people. Te business is going on from strength to strength from
what I can gather with a new state-of-the-art plant being built in Clydebank.” Taking on and building John
Watson & Company to that amazingly successful exit was, said John, a ‘rollercoaster of a business life’. He started in the family
business in 1965 when he leſt Glasgow Academy. “My father thought it was right that I went to Leeds School of Printing and I was there for three years.” His father then appointed John
Watson as Managing Director at the age of 28. “From there I did a fair bit of work with Napier University and the Glasgow College of Printing and on the strength of that I was appointed the youngest ever Fellow of the Institute of Printing at the age of 33.” He constantly looked for ways
to expand the business from its role as a general commercial printer, taking it into working for companies in North Sea oil and into the expanding Scotish electronics sector, working for companies like IBM and Compaq. But its major focus was on the
whisky industry, building up a specialism that would eventually make it such an atractive prospect
John hands over a cheque to Stuart Patrick, Chief Executive, Glasgow Chamber of Commerce
for the American company that bought it – but it took a lot of steps and some missteps along the way to get there. “I rolled with the punches,” he
said. “Tere’s an awful lot that can happen in 50 years – you go down a few blind alleys and you think, ‘Well, that wasn’t maybe right’, but by and large it all came right because you’re living through a tremendous time of change. In the printing industry they say there have been more changes in the last 50 years than the preceding 600 since Gutenberg invented printing with moveable type. “In that time the industry has
gone from hot metal, the leterpress process, lithography
“There’s an awful lot that can happen in 50 years – you go down a few blind alleys and you think, ‘Well, that wasn’t maybe right’, but by and large it all came right”
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