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Andy Wilson

The most immediate change when lockdown hit was to try and establish how the rules set out by government effected PressOn. The guidance was very clear - only go to work if you cannot work from home. I considered many of the team at PressOn to fall into the category of being unable to work from home, but it became clear very quickly in late March, that there was going to be little point in being on-site anyway.
Suddenly you are faced with a whole company of people looking to you for guidance - not just for how they are going to work, but for reassurance that there is going to be a future for them. Furlough when announced, and once understood, became a massive relief and gave us the breathing space to start crunching numbers, develop a new P&L and a cashflow forecast - I hadn’t done one of those for a while.
Realigning the business was basically a tearing up of the pre- vious plan and writing a new one. It’s chicken and egg - what cuts need to be made to achieve a profit, what turnover needs to be achieved to cover the cut costs?
Its pure economics really, we have a number we have to hit to keep the P&L black, and that is the focus plain and simple. How we do that is by having regular conversations with our already diverse client base and looking hard at what we think will be a good sector to engage in for the future.
I established ground zero as 1 April 2020, and ran a new P&L and cashflow to run 12 calendar months from there. That was sobering, as it showed that at our usual rate of spending when we would run out of money. From there the calculations are quite straight forward - if we make cuts in one area what’s the impact on the cashflow, and where does the P&L sit - how much revenue do I need to get into the black and when will that happen? It’s systematic - cuts and borrowing until the scales sit level again.
As it stands, we have lost 25% of our staff from all depart- ments. We run a tight ship anyway, so general staff costs were not where the big gains were going to be made on the P&L.
The fact of the matter is that we need the economy to bounce back and that is unlikely to be accelerated until a Covid-19 vaccine to comes into play.
The retail market was challenging even before Covid-19 mind - OOH advertising is largely digital now. While nobody could really see the spectre of Covid-19 looming before lock- down, and what impact that would have on our industry, as a business owner or manager it is for us to build businesses that are diverse enough to sustain market change or correction.
We are printers, we have been diversifying since Gutenberg, and we will print our way out of this crisis! A good example of this, is those within our industry that have adapted to printing signage and graphics to inform and direct the public about where to stand and what to wear. Social media is virtual - when you get out into the real world you still need a sign to say ‘stand here’, ‘don’t stand there’.
I don’t know how the industry will change exactly is the honest answer, but I’m confident that the market will bounce back quickly and adjust to the new norm - whatever that will look like.
Realigning the business was basically a tearing up of the previous plan and writing a new one
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Widthwise 2020