Charles Jarrold is blessed with a name that resounds in UK print, and his personable way with people seems to make him popular with his employees and his clients alike; these ingredients combine to help make, at this point anyway, a heady brew for Southernprint.

The Poole printer has won numerous awards in recent years, and winning its second consecutive PPA Production award as Magazine Printing Company of the Year suggests these things are now being delivered on a conveyor belt. Nestling next to it on that belt this year though was a bonus award – Jarrold was himself honoured as the Industry Personality of the Year.

As you would expect, he is modest about the award, describing it as “a complete surprise – a lovely surprise”. Having moved his wife and two young children from Norwich to Poole when he left the now defunct New Jarrold Printing to take up the reins at Southernprint in March 2005, he considers the award to be as much a reward for his family, as well as “recognition that putting the time and effort into the business appears to be delivering results”.

Two factors of Jarrold’s approach to business seem to define him: firstly, his belief in taking modern manufacturing techniques and applying them within the print company he runs; and secondly, his great interest in knowing his customers, meeting them and understanding their world, and how they view his role as a printer. That he spent some years on the publisher’s side of the fence, if only on the finance side, before returning to the family print business, has given him a two-way perspective on magazine production.

Of his ideas on management, he says: “I’ve read everything you can read about world class manufacturing and companies like Toyota. What’s interesting about modern manufacturing techniques is that it’s a journey, and quite a long one. It’s an incremental, year-in, year-out process of improvement. If you look at volume car manufacturing now, Toyota has been doing this for 50 years and I believe Toyota is the most profitable car manufacturer by some margin. It’s a very interesting area and we are seeing now with Vision in Print these things come into the print industry.”

Southernprint and Jarrold are enthusiastic supporters of Vision in Print, and the graphs which show the extent to which Southernprint has embraced its programmes of cost reduction and efficiency improvement are to be found throughout the print plant.

On notice boards at the site of each of Southernprint’s seven presses, which range from a Roland 700 press for covers up to a 64/72 page Lithoman, are displayed Vision in Print’s five Cs to help improve press performance: Clear out, Clean & check, Configure, Conformity, Custom & practice. These are accompanied by photographic records of how each work place should be kept, easy to use best practice guidelines for press maintenance, and charts displaying each press team’s performance throughout the year.

In the upstairs training room, the walls are still plastered with the A3 sheets of paper where the last Vision in Print trainer that came in took a group of Southernprint employees through the practices that can make the printer work smarter and more cost effectively. Jarrold himself and his operations director Paul Toms sat through the very first of these programmes to prove to the employees how important the lessons were considered at the top of the company.

None of this is to say that Southernprint was in a mess when Jarrold arrived. It was, he says, well invested and was respected throughout the industry. However, there were ongoing union negotiations between management and employees at the time about changes to working practices, which the previous managing director, Stephen Clark, who moved (briefly) to run Polestar’s Sheffield gravure plant, had initiated in a bid to move the company forward. Jarrold describes the state of these negotiations when he arrived as “a bit acrimonious”.

“In a way, just a fresh face coming in helped. Stephen had done a very good job of identifying the changes that needed to be made in the business but the negotiations had got to a point where a fresh MD could change the tone. I had experience of these things at New Jarrold Printing and an established track record in the industry, which meant we could move things forward fairly quickly,” says Jarrold.

“We now have a much more positive atmosphere on the shop floor. It’s not perfect but it’s a step in the right direction. The energy and enthusiasm levels are a lot higher and hopefully employees enjoy their jobs more, so we end up with a better business.”

Jarrold explains that he has refocused the way Southernprint approaches customer service. Early on he saw that the company was very good at delivering on quality print and on schedule, but that it didn’t score so highly on its interaction with customers (60-70% of the work is magazines, with catalogues and commercial making up the balance). “It was sometimes a little bit fractious,” says Jarrold.

As managing director, Jarrold embraces his own part in customer service enthusiastically, and spends about half of his time out and about meeting clients, either for structured reviews or just to talk about and understand their needs better.

“I’m personally very interested in how customers see the world and the problems they face,” he continues. “Most publishers are going through very significant change. New media is impacting on customers’ markets and while magazines have a great future for the foreseeable future, that world is changing and we need to be sensitive to that and make sure we grab opportunities.

“Understanding what customers’ experience of Southernprint is like is pretty key though: Are we easy to deal with? What can we do better? It gives us a slightly more objective view of the things we need to think about, so it’s less likely that we will head off in the wrong direction, or that fundamental problems will remain unaddressed.”

The importance of fostering these close relationships with clients has been more marked than ever in recent, tough economic times for UK printing, and Southernprint has by and large been successful in holding onto many of its contracts with large publishers, which include Emap, IPC and Future Publishing.

“If you get the business side and the relationship side right,” Jarrold reasons, “people want to work with you and then there’s a good chance that the right deal will be done. It doesn’t help us achieve a significant premium, but it helps us do that deal. Once we’ve established that relationship we can then understand customer requirements and look to develop those.”

There are the beginnings of a thought process towards investing in further press technology at Southernprint, but Jarrold says no decision has been made regarding when or what this might be. And though he speaks about consolidation in the industry as the norm in a capital-intensive, mature industry like print, he won’t be drawn on any plans for Southernprint to acquire or branch out in this regard. It would, in any case, be a matter for Newsquest and ultimately Gannett, which owns Southernprint. Instead, Jarrold and his company are concentrating on the basics:

“We are not near the end of improving this business so we wouldn’t want to be distracted, but our reputation and performance have improved significantly. First and foremost, we have tens of millions of pounds tied up in manufacturing assets, so we have to be a brilliant manufacturer, and that’s about applying and learning from the best manufacturing organisations out there and applying it here.

“And we need to have really excellent relationships so that customers want to work with us. Those relationships come through communication, through being a great manufacturer and through delivering on our commitments. If we are a great manufacturer and our key customers want to work with us, then we’ll be very well placed to build the business on the back of that.”