Page 40 - Print21 magazine Sep-Oct 2022

Print People
On the rewards
of experience
There is no substitute for experience. Insight gained by working across a broad spectrum of an industry in different roles creates a rounded view that is the mark of a true professional. Recognising from experience how technological change can disrupt business models and create opportunities is an invaluable insight when it comes to leading an enterprise. Russell Cavenagh has seen the printing industry through some of its most tumultuous times. He talks to Patrick Howard about his journey.
It is not surprising that the printing industry was one of the last craft-based industries. The knowledge required to function as a craftsman,
as a journeyman printer, could
only be acquired from a master experienced in the ‘black art’. No amount of outside learning could prepare for the unique challenges printing has to overcome. Every job is different, every job has a specific function with no possibility of being repurposed, and, for most of history, every printing press had its own characteristics that could only be mastered by experience.
Then the digital revolution arrived, wiping out years of craft knowledge, practically overnight. In a few short years in the latter quarter of the previous century, the apprentice came to know
more than the master, the youngster more than the grizzled veteran. Digital technologists were a new breed and their arrival heralded a new era for the modern printing industry.
Russell Cavenagh, now managing director Mutoh Australia, began his career as just such a digital wunderkind, cutting his teeth
on a three-year UK sojourn with Crosfield, one of the leading pioneers of digital graphics technology. As
a young technologist he travelled
the world – working in 29 different countries over the time by his reckoning – installing electronic pagination systems and servicing high-end scanners. This was at a time in the 1980s when white-coated scanner operators were regarded with the same kind of awe as magicians and necromancers. It was indeed a reinvention of printing as a ‘black art’.
Award: Russell Cavenagh with the Mutoh President’s Award for 2021
Bring it all back home
The experience Cavenagh acquired overseas with Crosfield made him
a prize recruit back home, and he was convinced to return to take on a role with Sydney prepress business, Mansfield Graphics. Then in 1988 along with partners, John Coote and Barry Paterson, he was part of the team that formed Network Graphics, one of the first successful digital prepress businesses in the industry. A $2m start-up, a massive sum for the time, was created as a model ‘new age’ business with such innovations as carpeted offices; “unheard of in the industry,” laughs Cavenagh. The Marrickville business quickly grew to employ 30 people over two years.
“It was easy for us to attract staff because we were progressive and modern and pretty much the first company to accept digital files.
We just took all the artwork being designed on Macintoshes, directly into our systems. We expected it to be a slow process, but within 12 months, pretty much everything coming in the door was digital. We called that correctly, and we were right at the front of that one.
“It came off the back of a research trip we made to the US. We looked at some equipment and visited
four major prepress companies.
The essential criteria was those companies had to be receiving artwork electronically. A key question was ‘why did you do it?’ The answer was always, ‘because our customers want to do it’. So, we decided if it was happening there, it was going to happen everywhere.”
This was cutting edge experiential stuff and instilled in Cavenagh the mantra of always listening to the market, to your customers.
Get big or get out
In a display of the business acumen that has proved a hallmark of his career, Cavenagh left Network Graphics after 13 years. He realised that
his trade qualifications were not enough to flourish in the business world. Thanks to an industry-wide scholarship from GAMAA, he enrolled and completed an MBA. He fitted it in to a full life that now included a wife and two sons.
Running his own business for
that long had a formative impact. It fired his personal business ethics, which have guided him ever since. “It [Network] was a one-off for me. It convinced me of the importance of always standing by your promises, and that the best customers are the ones you’ve already got.”
Following a three-year stint
with 7 Sydney, Peter O’Hanlon’s prepress house that was eventually acquired by global corporation Shawk, Cavenagh’s next move
took him across the line between producer and supplier when Ian Clare recruited him for the expanding DES business. Mainly a CAD and drafting equipment supplier, the ambition was for DES to move into the larger graphic arts market. It proved to be a very amenable move, and for the next 13 years Cavenagh ran the sales and marketing arm of the business, as well as being responsible for revenue.
40 Print2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022