Page 15 - Print 21 Magazine Sep-Oct 2018

Print profile
“The days of having
margin on margin are gone. Someone’s going to outsource your printing and put a margin on it? Then they’re going to come to me and I’m going to put a margin on it? Come on, people are smarter these days.”
and a Nuvera, a Kodak Prosper, a HP Indigo 7500 and a couple of Océ6250s. The list is not exhaustive but it gives an idea of how diverse is the collection. Add a couple of large Hunkelers and it is a digital powerhouse pumping away at 9.30 on a Tuesday morning.
It’s now Finkelde’s style to leave good businesses as stand-alone operations. He reckons the advantages of geographically consolidating are outweighed by the costs.
Ever the passionate printer he holds forth at the corner café on the changes that have to be taken into account when planning to grow in today’s printing industry.
‘You pay for people out of profit.’
“There’s no doubt certain parts of the market are under great pressure, they are printing fewer pages, less quantities. And there is very little you can do about that. You have
to adapt and change,” he said, animatedly, as jets from Mascot roared overhead.
The drive to grow AAB is intense in him and has little to do with vanity or reputation; he has a down-to-earth quality, a sense of a bloke not overly impressed by the outward show of success. While very aware that his owners are looking for growth, he knows they also want to make profits. “You can’t eat from revenue but you can eat from profit,” he says.
His capital budget this year, apart from an acquisition war chest, has $3 million
in it for process improvement; upgrades, efficiencies, improvements, adding more capability and capacity. It’s targeted at taking costs out of the business in order to counter the upward pressure of prices. He is aware that his customers are no more capable of absorbing cost hikes, no matter how justified, than he is. His experienced belief is that only by continuing to improve how the businesses operate can he deliver.
Wayne Finkelde: the very image of a modern pragmatic printer.
15