To borrow a theme from a Honda TV ad, Blue is not depressing, Blue is confident, Blue is positive and Blue is buzzing.

The printing company located in Harlow is in fact surging ahead. Sales are predicted to be close to £9.5 million for this financial year (even in recession), up from £6.8 million in the year to May, and will shatter the £10 million barrier next year. Its growth since its start in a back street in Hackney Wick eight years ago to a 4.645sq m plant in Harlow, Essex, has been rapid and runs counter to common belief that the days when it was possible to build a company from nothing into a sizeable business in print are long gone. Leading the charge is Paul Mursell, who is absolutely besotted with the business. He is not a financier who has spotted the main chance, but a down to earth Essex bred, hard working committed printer. “I’m a hunter,” he says. “I wake up every morning live and breathe this business until I go to bed at night.”

He has help from his father Bob Mursell who in a life-time in the print, has been involved with many businesses on the Essex side of London and at 72 when the golf course and Costa del Print beckon most of his contemporaries, is still in the business every day. “He wouldn’t be able to drive a new Jaguar if he didn’t,” says his son. The father has been a rock, particularly during recession which other companies may have little experience of. By contrast Bob Mursell was managing businesses during the three-day week so knows what is required this time around.

The growth has come through opportunism for sure, but it has been an opportunism that has come from Mursell’s drive and his father’s experience. “I talk to as many print businesses as I can so I know what’s out there,” Mursell says. Blue has picked up people and machines and customers from failed businesses in the last year or so, but mostly through a business strategy that has the company operating in a spread of markets which though different are inter-related. And there is a mind-boggling dedication to driving down costs and making the assets, whether computerised, mechanical or breathing, work. There may be no charts tracking Overall Equipment Effectiveness or charts of statistics to relate to lean management techniques, for the simple reason that Mursell has no need for these tools – it is all buried in his head.

But for all the ideas that fly from Mursell, there is a serious properly managed business underneath. The company has the ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certificates that are required by its customers; its Tharsten MIS runs every aspect of the operation, keeping close tabs on cost and efficiency and when quizzed by customers about its financial status, as is increasingly the case, Blue comes up clean. Says Mursell: “Increasingly we are getting clients vetting us now, checking our financial status before they place an order.” Too many have been let down by printers that couldn’t deliver.

In other words the company has not got lucky. Like others it looks at the cost base, and takes action to drive it down. The company was not alone in trimming wages as the recession hit last year, nor in shedding some staff. “It has left people here that really want to work,” he says. But other businesses have done this and continue to complain about prices being driven down and the difficulty of achieving a margin. If this is a concern that keeps Mursell awake at night he doesn’t show it. Instead he says: “At the start of this year, we decided the most important thing was to be upbeat as we saw it as a time of opportunity.”

Three years ago the business in Hackney was primarily a financial printer, producing M&A literature, analysts reports, books of financial data and so on to the tight turnaround times that the financial sector was prepared to pay for. It had installed two perfect binders in the belief that this would keep a margin in house and help it meet these short time schedules expected. Perfect binding would also be something that competitors did not have.

In 2009 those premises have gone, so have the binders and financial print, while still a key sector, accounts for just 10% of sales.

He explains: “We found that the two secondhand perfect binders we had just weren’t reliable enough, so we have done a deal with Diamond to handle our perfect binding. For financial printing you need two of everything which we have, down to two compressors on the roof should one fail, so I don’t see the point in having just one new binder. It’s just too dangerous.

“We learned a lesson three years ago. We discovered that if we relied on the financial market we wouldn’t have a business today. Today our commercial clients are the more important part of our business even if financial is the most profitable. Both parts are as important as each other.”

The speed of turnround demanded by financial – Blue had received an order for 9,000 16pp brochures in the morning and had delivered them four and half hours later – stands it in good stead as commercial customers look for the same speed of service.

Since moving to Harlow and acquiring the long perfecting KBA, the company has been busy building the company through taking on specialist staff to help the diversification strategy. “We have never bought for turnover, but always to get the range of products we offer right. If we get the balance across the range right we will get the profits right,” he explains. Mursell reckons the company is now operating in nine market sectors, each of which overlaps and can draw on other assets the business has.

Its stationery business is built on the former Dudley Stationery (including Royal Warrants from The Queen, Prince Philip and the Prince of Wales). This involves fulfilment, typesetting and small format printing. The fulfilment area is handled by the same person as operates the wire binder, as she is able to move between the two tasks. “We no longer have two people partially employed, but one person working all the time and we have saved £30,000 for the business,” Mursell says. Its three van drivers can also be called upon to operate digital presses and mailing lines when busy and using agency staff for drivers. “It’s about flexing the business,” he continues, “allowing it to breathe in and out.”

When the company takes delivery of a third stitching line in a few weeks, it will be set up so it can be run by the same operator as another of the stitchers, with the hoppers loaded by less expensive staff. It is a best use of asset approach. Walking around the business Mursell wants to know why a press or piece of equipment isn’t working when he knows it has a job loaded.

The HalmJet envelope presses are in operation, worked by the same minder who for half his week multi tasks by running the two-colour Ryobi.

Multi-tasking applies across the business equally to the strategy of operating in a wide range of different markets. A customer for stationery can be developed into a customer for direct mail, for commercial printing, for web printing and so on. For a direct mail campaign, the company can handle all aspects in house, the sheetfed litho printing on its ten-colour KBA and eight-colour Speedmaster 102, overprinting on black and white Océs, finishing any cardboard cut outs that have also been printing on the Rapida on a cutting and creasing Cylinder, the envelopes printed on the HalmJets and hand assembly work by a team of 40 women bench hands before mailing on its own mailing lines.

The expansion into mailing came through employing staff formerly with Masterange and Colin Clapp and installing the mailing lines. Every part of the mail shot can be handled inhouse and therefore all opportunities for a margin are captured for the business while for a client there is the reassurance that everything is contained under one roof.

“Any task that we have to put out, we ask ourselves whether we can do it inhouse next time and what we would need,” he says.

The strategy has allowed Blue to list the different services it offers and to bill itself as “The Campaign Printer”.

Earlier this year it expanded those services through the acquisition of a 16pp MAN Polyman web, once the heart of Southend printer Mayhew McCrimmon. That business failed but that business went down and Mursell offered Barclays Bank £150,000 for the web. He was turned away then and on a number of times over the following months. Then six months ago Barclays offered the press free of charge to the factory’s landlord. He in turn offered it to Mursell in exchange for a 15 year lease. Blue therefore acquired a fully spec’ed machine with new emission controlled oven, sheeter and inline gluing for finished products from the press. The plant has a platesetter, but nothing else. All administration is from Harlow, prepress and finishing are also remote from Southend. It keeps the costs down, and maximises productivity in the mother plant Mursell explains.

Customers for other parts of the business all have a need for web work he explains and other capacity has come from Webmart. “They have helped us enormously,” he says.

After that purchase, the business might have taken a breather to absorb all the expansion, but instead it has seized another opportunity. Well Print, a company specialising in bespoke boxes, had closed and Blue took the chance to bring the three key people under its umbrella. They are now lodged in offices in the factory next door, once the head office of WRH UK, the Ferag company.

The intricate boxes are a perfect bridgehead into the ad agency world for Mursell. It’s a market that the company has not established itself in and it’s one that buys a lot of print of all types particularly if it is to become The Campaign Printer Mursell is looking to be. At present he’s excited by the possibilities: the box board can be printed on the KBA with its double circumference cylinder arrangement; cutting and creasing can be done on the Heidelberg Cylinder and the boxes made up by the team of handworkers who are also putting together direct mail packs.

The Wellprint business failed because it was too small to justify its production equipment. As part of Blue that is no longer a problem, nor is it for any of the sectors the group is active in. But as much as growing the sales base, the drive to contain costs goes on. There is a separate paper company which allows Mursell to buy direct from the mills, providing paper to his presses for 9% less than buying through a merchant and also supplying other printers on behalf of customers. In the digital area he moved out the Indigo 3050s replacing them with two Océ 650s. He shows samples showing that quality differences are negligible. Then explains why. “The Indigos were too expensive with a huge monthly maintenance charge. The Océs were £40,000 each so I’m saving £9,500 a month. That’s the difference between survival and failure.”


Box of tricks
Wellprint, the acquisition which gives Blue a nap hand, was never really a print company, but a specialist cardboard engineering boutique. Its products may pop up, explode, have doors to open or slide out but are always interactive in some way. As a promotional item they have an element which means that the receiver is reluctant to throw them away so the brand message keeps working for longer than most direct mail.

The pieces can be small scale and fit inside and envelope or large scale short run pieces for luxury boxes. It designed and produced a football stadium for Coca Cola aimed at the buyers in the major supermarkets to remind them that a rep would call to take orders based on televised games that the drinks company was sponsoring. A bottle of Coke was stored at one end and Subutteo players to enact a five a side game at the other. It worked, the reps saw the buyers and the stadium went home to the family and continued to keep the brand name up front.

There are boxes for Sony’s Bravia launch with coloured balls behind a mock tv screen, special presentation boxes, Christmas cards which shower silver stars around the office. Everything is beautifully crafted and will be produced on Blue’s presses and by Blue staff.

Everything has high play and retention value and is a one-off piece, though the skills built up are transferrable across projects.

Importantly for the corporate strategy this is the sort of service that is commissioned by top line agencies for special occasions when they don’t know exactly what they are looking for, though have a budget in mind. For Blue this is the development that should open a lot more doors.