Scott Conway, managing director of Venture Banners. says the firm was never interested in marketing to end-users, but is a true trade-only print company
A man on a mission
You have some noteworthy employment policies; could you tell us a bit about them?
When we set up our production facility in Witham we benefited from the government's Regional Growth Fund, which was set up the assist small to medium enterprises with the purchase of large value equipment, because at that time, just after the financial crash of 2008, it was incredibly difficult to get any funding. On the back of that assistance, we decided to ‘give something back’ and the decision was made to appoint long-term unemployed people in our production team.
The guys we eventually took on were unemployed for an average of 18 months each prior to joining us and the outcome is that we have a production team who are enthusiastic and delighted to be in employment and as a result do a great job for us. That’s what you call a win-win scenario.
Venture Banners allows a lot of sign-makers to offer a service they otherwise would struggle with; what was the founding idea of the company?
The founding idea was exactly that. Large-format print was very difficult to buy at trade prices unless you were buying in large volumes. We set up to offer access to this lucrative market, with a trade price structure utilising economies of scale companies could otherwise only dream of.
The first thing we did was create a completely clear and consistent price policy. Coming from a marketing rather than a print background this seemed the appropriate thing to do, but was a completely alien concept to the average print-service-provider.
We then geared ourselves for large volumes of work that consisted of many small orders from multiple customers, and the equipment we bought was all acquired with this business model in mind.
Our unique selling point was, and still is, that we offered an easy route to market for an existing print or sign company, giving them the information they needed to offer, sell, and be confident in the product Venture were supplying to their end-user. The ethos behind the company was always to help people offer large-format print. We were never interested in going out and marketing to end-users.
Our unique selling point was, and still is, that we offered an easy route to market for an existing print or sign company”
Over the last five years I’ve seen a few companies try to enter the trade print market, but it’s an extremely difficult market to get right. You are supplying a product to a reseller who needs to make a reasonable margin, whilst preserving your own profitability.
Over the last five years I’ve seen a few companies try to enter the trade print market, but it’s an extremely difficult market to get right ”
Every now and again, whilst leafing through the trade magazines, I see an advert that looks very similar to ours, offering prices that look on the surface better than ours. However, I can pretty much guarantee that the advert won’t appear next month, or if it does, it’ll do the company in question more harm than good. The reason; Venture are true trade-only suppliers. We are not trying to play both sides of the fence and slotting in trade work amongst all the retail jobs.
We’ve seen this before where companies try to integrate additional trade work in with their current end-user jobs, but very soon the trade work becomes the poor relation because it’s not achieving the same level of revenue. The trade work then quickly gets put to the back of the queue, leading to severe inconsistencies in levels of service and of course pricing, which certainly doesn’t help resellers.
We thrive on this trade work. Our trade customers can be assured of our consistency of service, prices, and quality of both materials and print.
What technology drives your operation, and why did you choose to invest in it?
The obvious answer to that is the VUTEk GS series printers, which are absolutely awesome and churn out thousands of square meters of print every week, but in reality the driving force behind the business is our management information system (MIS) or HAL, as we like to call it. There’s no point being able to print 400sq/m an hour if you’ve no way of collating and completing all of the resultant formalities.
Designed and built in-house, it is our workflow system, our MIS, and our customer relationship management (CRM) system. It accesses and displays information from our accounts software and also acts as stock management for our product and substrate range. It even uses QR codes to integrate into our TNT Shipping system and automatically fills in the addresses streamlining our dispatch process.
About 40 percent of our orders are completed online and the system communicates with our trade website, taking and handling the online orders. It also keeps an accurate database of customers and attributed orders, allowing us to segment the database and market accordingly. The system handles well over one thousand separate orders every month and, with the view that ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’, allows us to look at virtually any aspect of the business in detail, against last month, last year, or any point in the last five years.
I think it’s safe to say that if we didn’t have this system in place and we had to run around the building with job bags, we would fall over pretty quickly.
Ventue Banners is not a company that rests on its laurels, what new products or services have you recently developed?
We are always looking for new products to offer our trade customers; this year we’ve added wallpaper, DiBond, and additional exhibition display systems to our product line-up. However, the last few months have been very exciting; we’ve been developing version two of our VB Media Website System.
VB Media offers anyone in the print trade their very own large-format website complete with price calculator, which they can brand and build themselves with the very intuitive back-end system.
Venture Banners’ e-commerce portal is designed to allow customers to order and specify products for a set trade price without the stress of haggling with salesmen
The VB Media system offers our trade customers the opportunity to have a professional internet presence offering large-format print for a small monthly fee. The beauty of the system is that it’s not just our products you can showcase, but any products the user has access to.
Version two of VB Media will feature more templates, improved control of page content, enhanced functionality, and a host of new features. Although still in development, anyone interested should contact me.
Looking at the wider economic picture, do you think the government could be doing more to support core manufacturing sectors such as ours?
I have written before on the travesty of business rates and maintain that what I like to call ‘business prevention taxes’, i.e. taxes that are imposed on businesses that do nothing other than stifle entrepreneurship, are the single biggest threat to our economy. However, having said that, as a grateful recipient of the Regional Growth Fund, I find it difficult to criticise the Government too much.
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