If possible, what positives are you able to draw on from the experiences of 2020?
Far more positives than negatives! Trust in the utter commitment and resilience of the Mercian Labels team when under sustained pressure for much of the year to meet demand for food and medical label products, big steps forward in automating our manufacturing processes, record sales and profits, and some exciting ‘world-class’ projects prepared for delivery in 2021.
What trend do you think has been accelerated because of the pandemic?
Flexible and home working obviously, and of course the boom in e-commerce at the expense of the big high street retailers whose business model looks increasingly difficult to sustain. We’ve gone well past ‘clicks and mortar’ now, and any retailer who doesn’t have a highly differentiated experiential offering to drive footfall will not compete against the online e-tailers. It's now the norm to order anything you can online (logistics companies have done very well!) and we won’t go back to normal retail again. And that ancient thing called a ‘banknote’ – what was that again?
What do you think will represent the single biggest opportunity for printers in 2021 and why?
Anything to do with e-commerce will offer sustainable growth.
What are your hopes for 2021?
Government policy for managing the pandemic should be driven more by economists and businesses than by medical scientists. We have lost so much perspective on our civil liberties and freedom in 2020, we have to learn to live with and manage this new virus, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle now no matter how hard you lockdown or vaccinate.
We can't believe we're asking this question for the fourth year running: what is your one-word view on Brexit?
Overdue!
What was the best piece of advice you have ever been given?
The harder you train, the luckier you become.
What, if anything, will you do differently in 2021?
Prioritise scaling up for even faster growth than 2020; our focus in recent years on delivery reliability has won us some quality new clients during the pandemic when others failed, and we will spend a lot of 2021 onboarding this new business without compromising on OTIF [on time in full] performance.
Sprouts: yes or no?
Yes, with bacon bits!
Are you making any New Year's resolutions? If so, what?
No, successful change comes from embedded routines not one-off exercises, and there is no point waiting until 1 Jan to start these, it's contrary to continuous improvement.
