Page 22 - Print 21 Magazine Jan-Feb 2019

People in Print
Patrick Howard
Despatches from the label front
Startups can be hard work. Creating a business from a standing start in the printing and label converting industry is not a task for the fainthearted. Doing so without established customers, and having to buy new equipment, makes the climb positively vertical. Roger Kirwan made the decision six years ago to greenfield Foxcil (Labels & Stickers) as part of his new independent venture, which has became part of Kirwan Print Group. He shares his progress report with Patrick Howard.
On a hot December morning in his busy factory in Brookvale
on Sydney’s northern beaches, Roger
Kirwan is hard at work chasing label manufacturing quotes, programming jobs, and liaising with his team. It’s business as usual for the former Geon executive, but his SME operation is light years from the scale of the great private equity disaster that defined much of the local printing industry this century. As general manager national operations, Kirwan was an integral part of the executive team, responsible for nearly 1000 people before he left the business to fulfil an ambition to run
his own race. He also worked for book printer Opus as national operations manager for around six months while working on his Foxcil start up.
Since then, the energetic Kiwi has been on a learning curve about the challenges of building a business from the ground up. Originally a chartered accountant, he weighed up the options of either buying an established business with customer lists and legacy technology, or going for the greenfield option.
“It was a question of purchasing
an existing company or starting from scratch. On the one hand, with an existing company you get a semi- guaranteed client base. But then there’s the existing old gear, old technology.
At some point you have to reinvest to get the quality and turnaround, which is what we’re all about. Second option, pick the gear you need and start with zero clients. That’s what I did and that was bloody hard,” he says, shaking his head in bemusement.
Deciding to start from scratch,
he quickly came face to face with
the derailing costs of IT when he attempted to build a unique speciality IT-based print business. Plan B was
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Foxcil, a for-trade label converting operation built around his experience and understanding of the label converting sector, plus a valuable network of industry professionals.
It proved to be an inspired choice. “I’m particularly lucky in that
Geon fell over not long after I started Foxcil. All of a sudden the people that I had worked with were now working in other print companies. So that’s how I became a trade printer. They knew me and knew I could be trusted,” he says.
Trust plays a large role in Kirwan’s world. Foxcil employs no direct- to-end-user sales personnel: it’s imperative that his clients trust him to never to go around them and make direct contact with the end user.
It’s important as well that printers can trust him to deliver on time
with good quality so as not to injure their relationships – so quotes are delivered daily, and jobs within a couple of days.
Accomplished printer
In an industry where technology often plays a defining role, Kirwan is unfazed by operating in a complex trade market. Over the years he
has worked in many different sizes of printing company with almost every type of printing equipment: letterpress, offset (sheet and web), web fed inkjet, flexo, and digital (both wide and small format). Gravure is about the sole exception
- “but there’s not much of that in Australasia,” he says.
At Foxcil, the main production units are a Xeikon 3030 toner-based digital label press and a Smag label converting line. During his time running Kiwi Labels in New Zealand, Kirwan brought the first Xeikon label press into the region. He is still a believer in the technology, which
is the cornerstone of the company’s reputation for quality and reliability. The crowded production floor may be a long way from the pristine
Specialists: (l-r) Foxcil CEO Roger Kirwan and general manager Carl Butchard