Wayne Sidwell; not a printer: Print 21 magazine article

As far as Wayne Sidwell is concerned printing is a back-end service, a value add for clients and not a seriously strategic part of the Wellcom business. Now embarking on a global push to extend his business model to international markets, he sat down with Patrick Howard to share his thoughts on how important it is to move with the times and provide a relevant service to the market.

It takes a leap of imagination to recognise the truth behind Wayne Sidwell's oft-stated claim that he is "not a printer". Coming from a man who operates printing facilities in four Australian capital cities, with the only two KBA Karat 74 DI presses in the country, along with three HP Indigo 5000s digital presses, not counting a 50 percent stake in Cadillac Printing, a full heatset web printing plant in South Australia, the claim may seem disingenuous. But it doesn't take too long sitting with the best-known scion of the family Sidwell to realise that he is telling the truth - on some deeply fundamental level he is not at all interested in being a printer.

"Wellcom is a data management company," he says, referring to the 450-people organisation that is in the process of redefining the parameters of the graphic arts in Australia and New Zealand. Still seen by many as a prepress company in the same mould as the previous Sidwell family-owned ShowAds, Wellcom is light years away from the traditional standalone proofing and platemaking business so long the mainstay of the industry.

That Wellcom is not the business it set out to be when formed in 2000 has come in response to changing market and industry conditions. It was around this time that advertising agencies began taking control of their prepress functions, such as proofing, thereby cutting the ground from under independent prepress businesses. Wayne Sidwell's response was to circumvent the agencies and deal directly with the clients. Luckily, at the same time corporations were starting to take more control of their processes, simplifying their purchasing and looking to leverage their buying power in items such as print.

Wellcom's offering of intellectual property security and access, along with creative control through in-house hubs, backed up by print procurement and production if required, was the right model at the right time. That Sidwell was able to adjust his business model so quickly is, in no small part, the key to its success. It is this strategic nimbleness and clear-sighted tactical approach that enabled the young Wellcom to re-engineer itself when scarcely of age.

"Markets change and there is nothing you can do except change with them," says Sidwell. "We didn't have any choice."

Although he maintains it was never his intention to found a prepress company, a move that in 2000 would have been like ploughing a track to oblivion, much of the early business involved doing just that. It was the market that changed his plans. It forced him to reinvent and concentrate on what he saw as the future - visual data asset management.

The hub of the matter
An integral part of the Wellcom business was and is the operation of hubs. These are remote sites on clients' premises where Wellcom staff provide a dedicated creative service to the marketing divisions. There are 18 of these hubs operating in the premises of major corporations throughout the country. In fact half of Wellcom's people are employed in hubs. Currently the ANZ bank hub in Melbourne has six Wellcom operators while Australia Post hubs have a total of 12. Even Melbourne Storm football club has a hub staffed by a Wellcom operator. (This enabled the club to create the now notorious viral email campaign impugning Manly's masculinity, 'WoManly.') Woolworths was an early client and is still vitally important, along with such corporations as Pacific Brands, Westpac, Repco and BP Australia, although Sidwell makes the point that the company is not dependent on any one customer for its success.

A recent addition is a Wellcom hub in Crown Casino, although here there is a difference. The casino has its own graphic arts personnel and simply wants to access the benefits of Knowledgewell, the proprietary Wellcom software backbone that Sidwell describes as "the core of the business".

"Corporations are in the process of reducing their costs, contracting out processes. Having hubs in their premises not only gives them control but also reduces costs considerably. Previously the workflow and time lines were from the client to the agency, the agency to Wellcom, Wellcom back to the agency then back to the client. Now the agency develops the creative and strategy, the hub executes the production and delivers it directly to the client," affirms Sidwell.

"The key is to make it easy for clients to access their own intellectual property, the logos, advertising images and copy. We were lucky to have a clean slate when we began, no legacy technology to integrate. One of the first decisions was to create a microwave technology network that would provide free access 24/7 to clients. At the time it was a totally new offer to the market, an essential point of difference."

Wellcom now manages 50,000 images for Woolworths; for ANZ it holds 15,000.

Right people, right technology
"Staff are very important. I would not be sitting here today without good people around me. You are only as good as your people," he says. He points out that the Wellcom managers in the hubs are in effect running mini-businesses. He describes them as passionate, dedicated individuals, "like-minded souls".

Following the partial float of Wellcom 18 months ago, when 30 percent of the company was made available to investors, all the staff were gifted shares appropriate to their service. It's a very Sidwell act of recognition.

Expansion overseas is now part of the go-forward strategy - prepress house Visualise It in New Zealand was bought in January this year while Keenes in the UK came on board in October 2007. Wellcom is now looking at the prospect of opening a hub within the operations of a major retailer in Singapore.

"I'm very optimistic about Asia," says Sidwell. "It is important that we have a global presence." Already Wellcom has picked up the international business of Vodafone as a result of its UK presence. "It is important to be close to corporate headquarters."

A move into the USA is also on the cards, although not in the immediate future. The intention is to re-brand all the overseas companies as Wellcom. Keenes will change when it moves into brand new premises in Clarkenwell London this month.

In addition to overseas expansion by acquisition, Sidwell recognises "a lot of upside" in the hub business model.

"There are thousands of large companies out there," he says.

Print is a by-product
Print is a niche development for Wellcom, assigned because it provides a required service to clients. Despite not intending to be a prepress house, providing and assembling files and delivering proofing was and still is a major part of the business. The company was the first Australian customer for Kodak's high-end Approval proofing system and now has two of the machines at its Dockland facility.

Print procurement is another lucrative area for Wellcom. It has an equal partnership with Australia Post in iPrint, one of the initial building blocks of the company. iPrint currently turns over $58 million of print per year, servicing not only the print procurement of Aust Post but also those of other strategic Wellcom clients. It also provides print buying services for a range of other smaller clients, including Honda's motorcycle division. Again, like printing, it is not an area where Wayne Sidwell professes to see much future for the company. For him it is another form of customer service.

"We're comfortable with the amount of business we do in that area," he comments. "I prefer to concentrate on our core activities, being digital asset and content management. Content is king and we can then deliver the content to any medium, including print, internet, TVC, and all forms of moving images."

The digital print provided by three HP Indigo 5000s is a different matter. There the provision of customised print is an integral part of another module of Knowledgewell - local area marketing or LAM. This is a development where Wellcom presents companies with templates of marketing collateral, ready to be accessed online by remote sites, customised for the individual store and despatched to whatever media outlet they are designed for. Often that output is Wellcom's own print facilities, both digital or offset.

Currently the system is being utilised by the 700 stores of Homehardware, the large Victorian hardware company with its subsidiaries Thrifty Hut.

"We don't see ourselves as printers," maintains Sidwell. "It is a service to the back-end as required by our clients. We won't be scaling it up."

To him, Cadillac Printing in South Australia is simply another back-end service. The 16 A4-page heatset set web installation is used to produce catalogues for clients such as Toys'R'Us. It makes sense that Wellcom doesn't see any value in being recognised as a printer.

"These are niche offerings, services to our clients," he says. "They are not our core business."

Attention is more focused on swimming upstream, getting closer to the clients rather than capturing more of the back-end print. Analytics is a major growth area, developing the systems and expertise to let clients know what sells, how it sells and why it sells. Wellcom is in a unique position to provide this service to major corporations, especially those in the catalogue market. It is part of the development of the intellectual property side of the business.

"It is the type of detailed knowledge that is vitally important to our clients. Our engagement often starts with the merchandisers, the buyers. They want to know this information."

The track winding back
Wayne Sidwell's story is the stuff of industry legend. Having sold the family business, ShowAds, to PMP in 1995, he stayed on in a management role for another four years leaving, according to him, when the business was in the best shape it could be.

"I have no issue with PMP. I respected Ken Catlow but I felt there was nothing else I could contribute. I'd been managing the ShowAds business for 15 plus years. It had a turnover of $100m. It was time for someone else to take the business on. The fire had gone out for me."

He is the first to admit that in addition to the fundamentals of good technology and good people, luck is an essential element. His success is convincing Australia Post to enter into a relationship early on and then securing the Woolworths contract are the seminal footprints on the path to success. It could be argued that Wellcom was lucky to have the right offer at the right time. For instance, Woolworths was using something like 450 different printers when Sidwell presented them with the prospect of rationalising not only their marketing collateral in digital form but also their print procurement.

He maintains there was no intention to compete with PMP when he left in 1999, but he was only 49 and not about to retire.

"The business was my whole life, still is. You know how it is with family businesses."

And the family orientation continues with his son, Andrew, and son-in-law, Ben Power, both active in sales roles within the company.

At a time when the industry is often loud in complaining about commodity pricing for its activities, Wayne Sidwell has shown what can be done in developing a high-value service. Even as he still insists Wellcom is not a printing company.