Impress Graphic’s Alan Creber: a Northern Light
Many overseas buyers are surprised to find out that most of the UK’s bustling used printing machinery dealers are far from London, nestled around the Yorkshire towns of Leeds and Wakefield and often within spitting distance of each other. A few notable exceptions are in the south of England, with a small cluster North of the Border hanging-on-in at the northern margins of Western Europe.
Pre-eminent among these is Impress Graphic Equipment of East Kilbride in the suburbs of Glasgow. Impress is owned by Alan Creber, a colourful, gregarious and affable character whom I have known for many years and who has become a friend to me and many of the people worldwide with whom he has done business. Alan has been in the printing industry for over 40 years and sold equipment for some of the big name suppliers in the UK before starting his own business in the early 1990s and building an impressive network of customers overseas, particularly in Asia where his straightforward style and sociability has endeared him to many of his clients, so I thought he would be a very good guy to chat to for our Dealers’ Profile.
A: I started work as an apprentice litho printer in the early seventies, during the notorious three-day week! Once qualified as a printer I joined Heidelberg as a demonstrator, training printers on the GTO and the Kord - the Speedmaster SM 72 was only in its infancy. After a while I thought that selling the kit would be more interesting so I joined Michael Knight selling Ryobi Presses. I was mentored at that time by Colin Handley, the Sales Director, who was a tremendous motivator but also terrifying, particularly when I lost a sale to a competitor. I learned a lot from Colin and leaving Knight’s was sad as I had made many good friends there.
A: I got an offer to join Pershke Price Service, the agents for Roland, Solna, Wohlenberg and a host of other top-end brands. At this time Roland was the undisputed leader in offset press sales and technology, and being their man in Scotland was a very big boost to my career. I got to meet the main men in the most prestigious printers in Scotland - Robert Bartholomew of Bartholomew Maps, Francis Thyne of Thyne Cartons and Graham Wilson of Pillans and Wilson. Then there was the almost legendary Hamish Thomson of J Thomson Colour Printers, a wonderful man and a great fan of Roland presses. Often the PPS boss, Eric Tanzer, would fly up from London to help me land the big deals with these guys. Mr Tanzer was a remarkable man, revered by his employees, his customers and the industry in general. He was a tiny figure but an enormous presence – I don’t think there’s been anyone like him before or since and from him I learnt the importance of integrity and fairness to your customers. But the whole company was staffed by great people and I’m friends with many of them to this day.
Creber and Derek Bell MD GPS Belfast with their newly supplied Komori LS 840P
A: Yes. It was a major wrench, but forming Dornier Scotland with you gave me the chance to build up a business from scratch and become, in many ways, my own boss. Of course I was now selling used rather than new equipment, and many of the people I’d sold new presses to in the past now sold them back to me, nicely completing the circle. Finding good machines is always the most important part of our business, and my old friends and colleagues at PPS helped me a lot in finding the right machines to offer to the very Roland-orientated markets in Hong Kong, China and Thailand – areas where I love doing business.
The main Dornier company got into financial difficulties and restructured as a smaller entity in 1990, and that gave me the chance to build on what I’d achieved with you and Dornier and to start on my own. My old friend from PPS, Roy Glanfield, with great financial skills and a deep knowledge of the industry and its players, joined me, and we were also able to bring in John James, a colourful and likeable guy from the finance and leasing industry, and so Impress was born!
A: In those pre-internet days selling to Asia meant a lot of travel, and I loved it! I built up great relationships with many of the dealers there and I’d set off on 10 day trips loaded with bundles of print samples and snaps of presses that I wanted to sell to them. There was always a tussle over those snaps. The potential buyers would mull over the pictures and then want to keep them to show their clients. But I often only had one copy, so these to us were extremely valuable and would be given only to a buyer or potential buyer, perhaps dependent on how many beers they plied me with!
During this time maybe I set a trend by nearly always travelling with another dealer – as much as anything to have someone remind me what discount I’ve agreed after a big night out with clients! I travel a lot in the company of Jerry Curtin, a chum and colleague of 30 years - not bad going as you learn a lot about people in 10 days - ask Jerry! Travel can always be fun, and we had a great time in the early 90s when I took a party of 12 Scottish printers to Japan and Thailand on a study tour. We all had a great time and many have since become great chums!
Today I don’t travel as much as before thanks to the internet and WhatsApp video clips. I manage a lot of our enquiries over the internet from the office with the assistance of my colleagues Jamie Kirk and Alex Harvey. It’s great that Moira, my wife, takes a keen interest in the business and handles all the admin.
A: There’s been a change in recent years as markets have evolved. Previously sales were 70% export and 30% domestic. Time and change has seen this reverse to 30% Export and 70% within the UK and Ireland. Our core business is still primarily unchanged: supplying used offset presses. As well as buying and selling direct to end-users we network with the dealer community through the internet, but I still favour the safe route of working with dealers we know and who have a track record and trading history.
A: In many ways. Past trading has encouraged many clients to come back to us again and again – often if we haven’t got a particular press in stock they will commission us to find it for them. We also list our machines on some industry portals, and get enquiries that way, mainly through Presscity and pressXchange. We also use your extenso CRM software to manage our database and website, and this helps our management and generates further sales leads. We own a relatively large factory and have a number of clients drop to view and inspect machinery, so we continually buy for stock. This year we bought a large and complete digital printing facility so currently we have available a wide range of booklet-makers , auto creasers, small guillotines and the like. We would normally see our stock changing over a 90 day period
A: We try to minimise the chance of that by making sure that we only trade in good machines – we avoid buying other people’s problems by inspecting any machine very thoroughly before we buy it, unless it comes from a supplier we know and whose word we can trust. When we make an export sale it is invariably via a local machinery dealer at a dealer price which gives him the margin to offer a guarantee to his customer. When we supply a machine within our domestic market we normally offer a full no-quibble 6 months warranty. But with many of the new suppliers offering a two and even three year warranty we are sometimes compelled to increase our warranty on used equipment we supply. Modern presses are very reliable but much more complex than they used to be, particularly when equipped with some form of densitometry which can be unpredictable, so we can make ourselves vulnerable when we offer very long guarantees. In these cases we look to buy insurance cover from one of the companies that offer policies for this.
A: Buying a used machine can be a sound decision giving the buyer a massive saving compared to a new machine. Used doesn’t mean second best in terms of performance either: machines are available in the market today with current levels of technology such as “inpress spectral densitometry”. And buyers have a much greater choice than in the past - the internet has made everything much more transparent. Jump on Google or indeed Presscity or pressXchange and search for a particular model and you are spoilt for choice. Just ensure that you compare “apples with apples”. If you buy from a reputable dealer you can be confident of getting good clear title and that warranties promised will be honoured.
A: Where would I start? I am a used equipment dealer so meeting interesting characters is the industry norm! Nothing really shocks me in colourful clients and dealer colleagues. A funny story: I was in London in negotiation with a client on the supply of a multi-colour press. It was a big deal for me and I really wanted to close it. My competition was Ian Nuttal, a real gentleman, and getting the order was equally important to him. Anyway, I closed the deal and got a written order. The clients suggested we invite Nuttal round as they wanted to “wet the baby’s head”. Nuttal had come a close second and this was rather rubbing salt into his wound. Nevertheless, game as ever, Nuttal duly arrived and in good humour, and as celebrations continued, I teased him by waving my order in the air like Neville Chamberlain after Munich. Suddenly Nuttal grabbed my order and ate it! Now who was in second place? Ian was a gent living with a monster of an illness that eventually won, and sadly he came second to it! Whilst fighting to the end he still put his sheetfed enquiries in my direction. I’ll lift a glass to his memory at New Year, a dear friend.
A: 2016 has been a good year for us. A couple of the bigger deals were a very recent Manroland R706 + TLV from Poland that we sold to KSP Press in Irvine and a Komori LS 840P to GPS in Belfast; we are in the process of relocating their factory. 2017 is looking pretty good and exciting with the installation of an XL 105 6 + LX to MRP in Nottingham planned early in the New Year.
A: Brexit is looming ominously – it’s creating a lot of uncertainty at the moment with the pound plummeting. And God knows what will happen with Trump in the White House. We try to protect ourselves by buying or selling currency forward when a deal is done to buy or sell a press outside the UK, but we can still be caught out. Then as a Scot I’m concerned that my country’s leaders will use Brexit as an excuse to push for another independence referendum. That said the Scottish people voted to remain part of the UK and I am sure were there to be a further vote we would see a similar result.
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