PHIL PAYTER DOES NOT ALWAYS DO WHAT IS expected of him. At school he would turn his chair to face the back of the room rather than pay heed to what the nuns were trying to teach him. Into his 40s, he still hurtles down mountains, on boards if it’s snowing, on two wheels during the summer. And the risks seem to continue: his printing company has this year installed a 10-colour Komori Lithrone to join two five-colour presses at PPG in Portsmouth.

Payter never wanted to be a printer. Ideally he would have joined Vosper Thorneycroft as an apprentice draftsman, but his school record would not allow that. Instead he went to art school, not for graphic design but to train as a technical illustrator. “When I came out of college I had to relearn everything,” he says. “I started to work as a freelance around the local studios, turning what the designers were doing into artwork suitable for print. That was in 1980.

“That led to me bringing work back to my own studio where I got a Repromaster camera and started to gang work up. It was a different way of doing things and I earned more money.”

Not much has changed about his outlook. Payter is always questioning what would otherwise be considered received wisdom, even as the business has expanded. Today it employs 48 and last year generated £4.25 million in sales. This year he is looking to take that to £5 million with the extra capacity that the 10-colour press will bring on one side and a first investment in digital will bring on the other.

But he never planned to become a printer. The artworking business had employed eight or so designers, he says. “But I became fed up because unless I took the brief, work would tend to be returned by the client as unsuitable and we wouldn’t get paid.” A lesson was learned. He was working closely with printers. “I found I got on better with printers than with the ad agencies,” he says. “At that time there was more work than there were printers to handle it.” A good relationship could mean getting a job on press.

With the 1980s came typesetting, the Apple Mac, a scanner, and by the end of the decade the business had evolved into a repro organisation producing separated films on a Linotronic L330.

The reasons for success at this stage had not changed. Payter was adept at taking in work from designers and publishers and delivering work that printers could use. Add into this some of the colour knowledge he had picked up in college and PPG gained a reputation as a quality repro house.

That emphasis continues to this day, even though the origination side of the industry has changed beyond recognition. The work that PPG handles includes photographic and design-led projects alongside jobs associated with Payters’s love of mountain-biking. There is also more mundane work and an avowed intention this month “to chase everything that moves” to measure the impact on the business. The staff are on board even though it could mean some long days. In April the business processed more than 500 jobs, many sub-£1,000 in value.

The affiliation with Agfa, which started in the darkroom, continues into a twin Palladio platesetting installation, which sits on the upper floor of the factory (designated a mezzanine) among the account handlers and prepress staff. The installation looks pristine. “We clean them every week, even though it’s non-profitable time and we perhaps don’t need to,” he says. Payter has plans to replace this with a chemistry-free or process-free system in the near future, tying in with a sustained move to be environmentally friendly. “We are close to achieving ISO 14001,” he says. “The presses have always run IPA-free. And the Komoris always print sharp, which plays to our strength in repro. I have always wanted to please customers by working to very high standards.”

Into the 1990s printers were not always doing this, though they were starting to put in their own prepress, which was starting to eat away at the PPG business. “I looked at buying a print business, but as I went through the due diligence, I could not believe what I uncovered about how those businesses were run. We had just moved to this factory and printers coming round would say, ‘you can get a press in there’.”

That press was not an entry-level machine, a two-colour GTO for example, but a five-colour Lithrone 528EM. “Immediately we were making ready faster than anyone else and printing sharper,” he says. “We should never have been allowed to start up like this, but at the time most small printers – those with sales below £3 million – were absolutely stupid about running their business.”

Nor has his opinion greatly changed, though there is respect for Bishops Printers, the largest local company, which provides another spur driving Payter to succeed.

To make space for the 10-colour, the company has taken on extra units in the former military workshop it operates from. Some of its finishing equipment has been moved around, so that the long-perfector is isolated from the other presses. But this is no bad thing.

Like that first Komori, the appeal is in the speed of make ready and the running speed the press offers. “Make ready is at 12,000sph,” he says. “With the ink stripping down and prepared for the next job thanks to the ink profiles, we can be running in 15 minutes. And with the PDC-II closed loop control we get consistency on long runs.” It will produce mostly section work, leaving the five-colours for work and turn.

“The press may not print as fast as some, but when we did the calculations, we would be getting more production on the floor,” says Payter.

The speed ethos extends to the bindery where Derren Grout literally runs the department. He will appear on the internal CCTV network and will have disappeared at the next frame. The company has four MBO binders, chosen because the transport system produces less marking, enabling jobs to fold at speed. Each remains set up for standard format work, so that adjustment is minimal. The latest saddle stitcher is a Muller Martini Bravo chosen after a face-off between Muller and Stahl. It has all the automated bells and whistles, something that is more usual in a large magazine house rather than an SME commercial printer. Payter, though, has sound reasons. “Thanks to the level of automation, we go from job to job in 20 minutes, it runs at 12,000cph and has full Amrys,” he says. The two Senator guillotines were also the fastest available.

The number of folders is more than most B2 printers would carry, but Payter argues that this plus a split shift system means that he can “save a wage”, let alone minimise the work that is sent out. Only perfect binding and varnishing are outsourced.

Likewise he would rather run a single press around the clock than have two machines running on days only. “If you don’t run the press 24 hours, there is half an hour to strip it down at the end of the day and another half an hour wasted on preparation every morning. If I run one press for 24 hours, I’m getting an extra hour’s production,” he says.

He also managed to make a point about increasing productivity by the simple means of snipping a fraction from the T-cards on the planning board, so that each represents rather less than the 30 minutes allocated. “I cut 20% from each card, and we still managed in production. It was like getting 18 hours of production from a 12-hour shift. I find that there are far fewer mistakes when running at the speed the machines are designed for.”

The company has two apprentices, who are showing signs of being more adept at running the highly automated presses at full speed than the more traditional operators. But it has also employed a former KwikFit fitter and a chef from a Loch Fyne restaurant. Sales director is Carolyn Payter, Phil’s sister, who was bogged down with a job in insurance. She was given a chance and now commands sales of £2 million, he says. “She is a fantastic networker.”

While Darren runs the finishing department, the press hall is self-managed by the press operators. “We have really good operators, so why do I need a print manager?” Payter says.

There is a kind of banked hours system in place where, if the work is not there, people take the time off but work when the place is busy without the business incurring overtime. It seems to work, no doubt because at present jobs are hard to come by. But it’s also because Payter is the constantly moving dynamo that is driving the business. The ‘never say die’ attitude and love of living for the moment does not mean he is not attentive to detail.

“I will get reports from accounts every day and a 30-day turnover of how the business is doing. Where there is a large quote I will look at every aspect to see where we could do the job cheaper,” he says. “I tend to work on cash flow first, then profit second and only then turnover. I know if we were cheaper we could win a lot more work.” The Accura MIS is up to the job, working out too whether an investment will pay off. “I work out the maximum return it might earn, then halve it and halve it again to arrive at a realistic figure,” he says. “And then I never think of a press as an asset with a retained value. It is something to be used to earn money.”

The hard-nosed attitude to finance has led the company to buy paper in bulk, 20 tonnes at a time, from Korea. This alone saves £70 a tonne over a paper merchant’s price. He is not a fan of paper merchants, nor ink reps come to that. “They come in with a bag of cakes for the office and expect us to place orders with them,” he says. “That would be costing me £20,000 a year more and what do we get – a bag of doughnuts.” The preferred paper is a high-bulk 105gsm sheet that has the look and feel of 115gsm. The customer also wins from this unorthodox approach, paying less for paper than might otherwise be the case.

The next step will be into digital printing on an Indigo, as only this can provide the quality he is seeking. The volume of work needing digital has reached the point where it will be worth it, despite his instinctive dislike of the click charge. The Digital People will provide the press. No doubt as PPG gets used to it, ideas of how best it can be harnessed will start to flow. “We will always keep questioning what we do and how we can do it better and faster,” he says. “My mission is to achieve the best possible quality as fast as possible.”