20. Building your team

20.

Building your team

We’ve been through some of the reasons for making a digital journey. I hope you start to feel the passion to change, or find your strength to keep on doing it, or simply feel inspired in your day-to-day work. It all depends on where you are today. Now, get ready for some hard work. Let’s dig deep, train, exercise, and feel some pain. It’s time to get stronger and more profitable.

If you do this 100%, it will pay off, I promise. Don’t just buy and install a machine and continue with your old way of doing business. Don’t stubbornly believe that you are better off doing what you have done for the last XX years. Instead, accept the challenge of going through every part and detail of your company – and change! Be brave and adapt even if it hurts.

Climbing the mountain is the easy part and you have just done that; the hard part is going down. Most people who climb Mount Everest don’t hurt themselves going to the top; they crash on the way down. This part of the book will bring you down safely, so you can start executing your own climbing.

PREPARATIONS

Do your own investigation and analyze your own operation. Take control of what you have. Be fair and objective, that’s crucial. If you overvalue or underestimate your setup, you’ll pay dearly for that mistake later on. It will only give the change a lesser effect and your efforts will be wrongly focused later in the digital process. So, be honest for your own sake. In this chapter, we’ll split the preparations into different parts, or teams, that you need to address.

COSTUMERS

Start with your existing customers. Except for your employees, the customers are the most important ones we have. How can you attract them even more than you already are? Start by speaking to them! Not a monologue but a dialogue. That means you’ll hear what they want to say and not what you want to hear. They are the ones paying your bills, it’s not the other way around. If you can add more value to them, both will have a win-win situation.

Don’t go to all your customers at the same time. Begin with your favorites. Begin with the most important and the ones you have a close relationship with today. Build a document together. How do they see your relationship today, what is working and what could improve? Are you one of many suppliers today or alone in your bracket? How will their business develop over time and how will that affect your values tomorrow? I also mention this in the “how to do” chapter later in this book and in the story of building sisters and brothers. It’s important. In short: it takes 1/3 of the cost to develop an existing customer compared to getting a new one on board. To win a new customer you often need to lower your price to beat your competition, which means cutting your margins and dropping profits. That’s not the best way forward.

MANAGEMENT TEAM

You also need to get the management team on board for this kind of change. You need to convince them with well-substantiated facts and lead the way. It’s all the same if you’re in a big or small company, owner led company with management onsite/inside, or dealing with employed external management on behalf of boards and owners. Everyone named with a C, like CEO, COO, CMO, CFO, CTO, must be on board. The purpose of the mission is the same, but how to get approval for this kind of change differentiates – yet it’s always important. If the “top dogs” don’t approve the change, it will never fly, I’m sorry. It will only take a small mistake down the road and everything will be stopped. For you as the initiator, the mission of change then turns into a mission impossible and you will not reach your goal. In a larger company with external management of different Cs, this preparation not only needs to be exact and correct – it also must be thoroughly documented. This detailed documentation is both for the board, which will evaluate the investment, and for you as a leader having a “clean back” during the

whole process. It’s also something to fall back upon if something unexpected happens, and it will. Good documentation must be from A–Z. In this book, I’ll try to guide you through these steps in the “how to” chapters later on. A smaller and/or owner-led company has to go through the same exercise, but for a different reason. Here it’s more about helping your motor skills, keeping you on the road for the goal ahead even if you have 1,000 other things to attend to at the same time you establish this new change in the company. Be fair to yourself, you as a leader/owner of the company. Don’t do everything on your own. First, it’s impossible. Second, it makes no sense. Involve at least the team leaders into this change and delegate as much as possible. A good leader delegates about 90% of their entire job. A good leader also accepts and learns from prior failings. A good leader employs good people and gives them room to learn and grow. As Steven Jobs says: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do”. We’ll come to staffing later on. The way to choose people today is different because times have changed. That doesn’t mean you have to change your entire staff, but see them with different eyes.

FINANCE TEAM

You may have had an admin system for a long time based on big orders and a small number of jobs. Find out how many orders you are handling today and how big they are. Go through the last 5 years. You’ll find that the numbers have increased but sizes of orders (run length) have been shrinking year after year. So, draw a line from the last 5 years up until today. Then extend the same line 5 years forward and consider your future needs. Prepare for your upcoming 5-year-period. You have to go through and check that you have an ERP (admin system) that can cooperate with the upcoming new business. It will be a lot more jobs to invoice, from small to big, times 100 and maybe if you go into e-business times 1,000. Small orders must fly automatically through the system without manual intervention. Small orders (e-business) also need connection to a payment system (credit card, PayPal, or something similar). Preparing for this will save a lot of time and trouble later in the process.

PROJECT LEADING TEAM

How will the project leading team be affected by going digital? First, we need new tools for managing many more jobs than what’s being done today manually. They will go from handling maybe 5–10 jobs per day to maybe 50–500 jobs per day automatically. There are many good systems for this today and it’s all a part of a full end-to-end solution for this upcoming transformation. The exception is when you get a brand new customer or a new kind of job that needs a different set-up depending on the complexity of the job.

MARKETING & COMMUNICATION TEAM

Whether you have or don’t have a team for marketing and/or communication – today you must sell the true value of your services. If you don’t, you will only work for your existing customers with things you always have done. Probably with lower margins than your competitors; otherwise, they change the supplier. And your customers are in the same situation. No change, no value, no future, I’m sorry. Also, no new clients will ever come to you. The time when customers found you via the yellow pages is forever gone. We have already left the period when graphics and printmaking was a handcraft. It’s the same with customers calling you up, asking if you could be kind enough to produce a box while they pray for delivery within 10 weeks. Those days are also gone.

If you don’t expose yourself to the market you don’t exist. It doesn’t have to be an expensive advertising campaign. You can arrange an updated landing page, a special web shop for new and existing customers that will do the job. Don’t forget to update as part of your regular work and combine that through the relevant social media and apps. Keep in mind; frequently renewing the material is more important than the actual amount of new info spread at each time. Be there – and be active.

SALES TEAM

We are all in sales! It’s the good, old way of seeing things. But the landscape within sales is shifting and you need to keep up. Selling big but few volumeorders is completely different from selling volumes with value, big or small. The conventional way often involves function, design, and price. However, the brand owners’ of today instead talk about the value they can get. Regarding volumes, they don’t need what you need to produce. This is something you will learn from your own customers if you start a dialog with them. Open up for a change! Your sales team will have to find new ways of serving the customer. Stop selling what you want to sell, start focusing on the needs of your customers. It’s all about flexibility, fast delivery, more variations (SKU), and letting it flow throughout the whole range of orders – from the small orders to the big ones.

PRE-PRODUCTION TEAM

The pre-press team needs to be a part of the transformation. Converters within packaging still buy pre-press and plate- and cliché-making outside of the company, this really is something that you now need to embed in your own facility. If you already have this team operating you’ll need to trim all the tools toward a digital workflow, automatically handling jobs end-to-end as long as possible for as many jobs as possible. They should work with a fully integrated workflow system together with sales and project teams.

Every job that flies through the system, automatic ones or big complex ones, must also be easy to track and find. The search, finding out where the job is in the process and what the next station is, must be easily done. This also allows you to communicate with the customer if the job stalls in pre-flight, missing a typeface or only stocked in the finishing line. Then, the customer receives the information or a message and can correct it themselves or let you do it. It’s a quick, easy and important cost control. The prepress team must be your “Houston control” for all jobs flying in and out of the system and then released to the next team, the production team.

PRODUCTION TEAM

We often get the question of what kind of persona should operate the digital press? One coming from the analog side, prepress, or which background is best suited? First, the number of jobs going through a digital press will be high. At the same time, the total number of sheets or meter of film is less than in conventional. Changes of media will increase, it happens a lot more often with digital. And digital will with less than 20% of the total volume still account for more than half of your profit. The key is to find the person who really wants this and has the passion, someone looking for possibilities rather than being scared of problems, someone who sees the potential and is passionate about new challenges.

When it comes to the production manager, they play an even more important role. The production manager must plan and balance the production as much as possible. The priority is to fill all the buckets with detailed control, having a good overview on how the order-status looks like, where there is space in the engines, intelligently filling both the analog and the digital bucket as smart as possible with print per second instead of job size in mind. There will always be a gray area where it’s more profitable in analog or digital, but the worse scenario is not having a balance in capacity. Putting another shift into analogue while the digital is not filled or opposite will soon drain your profit. This is without a doubt the production manager’s responsibility, not sales.

POST-PRODUCTION TEAM

This part in the whole chain of teams is underestimated when it comes to packaging. Printing itself is probably the easiest part, finishing is something completely different. Plenty of time is invested here, spent on you and your customers demand. In some cases, existing equipment fits straight into digital, roll-with or board-size, capacity, change overtime from job to job, etc. If not, this must be planned and scheduled for upcoming new demands. Still, in many cases this has to be tailor made and that comes with a long delivery time. Flexible packaging has an extra dimension, either you bake the ink in the media (E-beam), on top of the film, or you print under the film and laminate, to capsulate the ink inside the packaging film. When it comes to folding-cartons, normally you’ll have an inline coating unit to protect the ink from migrating on the next sheet.

SUPPLY CHAIN TEAM

This team, also known as assemblers or logistics, will play an increasingly important role when it comes to adding value to customers. To be able to sell assembling, to pack and take care of shipments to customers, amounts to a huge added value for many brand owners and more money for you. This team will go from storage-men to executors. What and how they ship is the impression you leave with the customer and invoices cannot be sent before the goods have left you. We’ll go more in depth on this later on, how to work within this team and that they are your real face toward your customer in every single shipment.

FINANCING

Yes, everything has a price. Remember: “cheap and good still haven’t been invented”. Going from analog to digital is a big investment. But if you do it right, if you gather fundamental knowledge on how and what to do, this will become the best return of any investment you’ve done so far. We don’t want you to transform 100% away from your old technology (only your business plan) made for analog only, letting analog and digital compete on the jobs. You’ll then fail and sit there with a cost instead of an investment and no added value will come your way.

The choice of hardware is very important, but choosing a partner is even more crucial. When it comes to partners, be sure to also include financing. You can now leave the old way of investing, buying a machine, and then writing it off over 5 or 7 years or even longer, then having to refinance the rest value at the end – stuck with a too-old technology. The conventional side is still performing the same as before, but to which level of value anymore? The overcapacity is still affecting you with low margins, together with limited (little or none) possibilities to follow demands from the market and the brand owners of today. Look at the investment as you look at other tools. It’s what the tool generates versus cost per second, day or month – and be sure that your supplier can and will follow you the whole way through, end-to-end, not only delivering a box on your doorstep.

95% OF PLASTIC POLLUTING THE WORLD’S OCEANS COMES FROM THESE 10 RIVERS