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Widthwise 2024


The pleasure and the pain T


his year is Solopress’s 25th in business, and we’re on a particularly strong run at the moment, fuelled by strong investment, a clear strategic purpose and a tight knit team. In


our worst affected Covid year (2020) we achieved sales of just £18m, which hardly recovered in 2021 to £21m. Since then things have been much more exciting. In 2022 we achieved £31.5m, surpassing our pre-Covid revenue, then in 2023 we achieved £35.5m - and this year, at the half way mark, we are on track to achieve our target of £42m. Te old adage ‘turnover is vanity and profit is sanity’ however still applies, and I’m happy to say that our profitability has continued to rise at a steeper rate than our sales. In our first five months of 2024 we’ve achieved £3.3m in EBITDA compared with £2.4m in the prior year (which was a record year in our history) and our expectation is to achieve £7.8m for the full year. Tose increasing numbers are a definite


pleasure. Having a healthy company culture is another. Tis year we appoint- ed a new head of culture, Emma Har- vey-Bignell, to ensure that this objective remains a top priority. It’s my firm belief that the most important factor in driving a company’s success is to ensure there’s a team of connected, motivated and smart people on board. Beyond that it’s also criti- cal those people are equipped to do the job properly, understand the purpose behind it, and are given the autonomy to make decisions and solve challenges on their own. Tese are all things we’re focussed on achieving, as well as embedding a set of core values, and it’s enabled us to contin- ue attracting top talent from around the industry (Sarah Kilcoyne from Bluetree, Jane Wickens from WTTB, Phil Foster from Saxoprint and Paul O’Connor from Helloprint to name but a few). But it’s not just those that have joined


the team that have made the difference, there’s also the homegrown talent of Jack


mention it now, but it’s not going away. If I’m honest, it’s not entirely clear to me how this will impact our business. It can cer- tainly help us serve our customers better and quicker - that’s a given - and we have a certain amount of focus on making that happen. No doubt it will help to make our


What becomes


clearer and clearer, is the level of disruption that will be created by AI


From Simon Cooper Managing director, Solopress


Clifford and Adam Spicer-Bowen. Te former is our operations director and the guy responsible for ensuring we can fulfil our growing demand levels. Having spent 15 years in the business he’s seen a huge amount of change and in recent years has had to navigate covid and supply chain shortages whilst opening up new sights and managing the installation of new kit list as long as your arm, all whilst maintaining our impressive 99.6% ‘On Time Despatch’ rate. Te latter is the head of tech and marketing. He’s been with the business for 18 years (or 9,606,240 minutes…yes he keeps track of that). Everything the customer interreacts with touches a system Adam has been responsi- ble for building together with his fantastic team, from the website to the proprietary MIS system. So those are the things that are going


well and bring us joy, but there is pain is all around us too. It’s fair to say we’ve needed to navigate the most turbulent water imaginable over the last five years, and as they calm what becomes clearer and clearer, is the level of disruption that will be created by AI. It’s almost passé to


20 | Widthwise 2024 | www.imagereports.co.uk


equipment more efficient and reliable too - our new HP Indigo 120k (the upgrade to the 100k) is certainly making use of AI to improve up-time. However, the area most likely to be disrupted is in regards to content creation. On the one hand there is a school of thought that says this will have a positive impact on the print industry, by reducing the cost of design and artwork creation, meaning the total cost of having a product produced is reduced and there- fore there could be more of it. However, who will our customer be, and what will their expectations be? Will this continue to be a human driving an AI, or could it be an AI driven by a customer? One thing is certain at Solopress, our


focus will remain on the customer, making sure that through a highly motivated team we fulfil the needs of an ever wider de- mographic and capable of providing them with an ever wider range of products. Large-format has played an increasingly prominent part in that, now accounting for 14.9% of sales and an expected turno- ver of £6.25m. We certainly aren’t compla- cent - if we take our eye off the ball things will start to lose shape and before we know it, we could be on a downward spiral. For now, we’re enjoying the good times.


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