Being located in Scarborough hasn’t dented Pindar Group’s progress – in fact the company has learned many lessons in business thanks to its base near the sea, as Peter Baber finds out from chairman Andrew Pindar.
Andrew Pindar, chairman of printing company the Pindar Group, has been sailing for years, but oddly only went on his first surfing holiday last October. He says mastering the waves reinforced a valuable lesson in business. “You are either flattened by it or fall off the back of it,” he says.
But catching waves in business is familiar to him. His company, based in Scarborough, is renowned in the industry for catching new waves of technology at the right time. In Print Week’s Power 100 this year, Pindar came in fourth, up five places from last year. He was singled out for his “vision and drive in pushing the Pindar business into new markets”. And you can see why.
The company was one of the first to spot the potential of desktop publishing in the 1980s and set up an offshoot in York that is now one of the UK’s largest catalogue producers, with clients including the Next Directory and Penguin Books.
Pindar says realising typesetting was no longer the preserve of large printing firms came from his conviction that “technology gravitates towards the end user”.
He also realised the internet and non-print media was the next big thing and moved into software development and data processing. Pindar says there are advantages: “You can only think about printing a certain number of catalogues worldwide, “but can sell software to every catalogue company in the world.”
Printing still accounts for 75 per cent of sales in value, and Pindar says new media has become an “alternative”, not a “substitute”, as Pindar realised by watching how his family used the Boden catalogue – another client. “They look to see what they like from the catalogue, check what’s available by going online, but for security reasons order over the phone,” he says.
The company has raised the bottom line, too. Turnover has grown this decade from £73.8m to £131.3m, and it has made a multimillion-pound profit every year bar two.
So what did Pindar learn from the waves? It reinforced, he says, something bred in the company from its base. “Being based here is part of why we have continued to evolve and test ourselves,” he says. “Living by the sea we know about tides and how if you try to hold back you will be swept away.”
But aren’t there problems being located in Scarborough, especially as a family firm? (Andrew is the great-grandson of the founder and his father is the company’s lifetime president).
How do they attract top management, for example? Pindar says that isn’t a problem because subsidiaries are located worldwide including Auckland and Salt Lake City, which is the headquarters of Alphagraphics, a company Pindar took over in 2000. “We have bought and sold many operations,” he says.
In 2008 this included selling Pindar Set, the business through which Pindar had become known internationally as the company that typeset Yellow Pages, to Yell itself. Pindar admits this was hard.
“We had 28 years of great business with Yell,” he says. “It had its own issues of why it wanted to in-source. But the deal has allowed us to reduce our debt provision, which is good given the credit crunch.”
The business hasn’t totally moved out of the family either. Pindar’s brother-in-law, in charge of Pindar Set under Pindar’s ownership, has moved on to run the business as part of Yell.
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