The following article appeared in The Herald on Saturday 21st October 2006:
Sticking to his Principles
Scotland could do worse than take as its model Alex Mulvenny, Gorbals-born apprentice printer who 23 years ago set up a labels company on the old Singer site in Clydebank.
Labelgraphics is now the biggest independent employer in West Dunbartonshire with 98 staff, an £8m turnover, and the highest reputation both locally and globally.
What drives the 69-year-old whose company is regularly showcased by Scottish Enterprise is ’a passion for learning’, personally and throughout his company, which has created an exemplar for the knowledge economy in which post-Singer Scotland must sink or swim.
He says ’We are involved in globalisation, we are a global company, and I suggest it is possible to be a global company from a single location in any country in the world, as long as your customers are multinational and have a worldwide market themselves.’
Mulvenny this week won a lifetime achievement award from the flexographic printing industry in which Labelgraphics’ main customers are the world’s biggest names in drinks, electronics, health and pharmaceuticals. It follows a fourth consecutive year of beating off the rest of the world to win a prestigious category in the US labels institute awards. ’We were up against three to four thousand label printers worldwide,’ he says.
This week’s citation said Mulvenny had ’given outstanding service to the printing industry for more than 50 years and used his success to help revitalise and inspire business and community life in a deprived area of Glasgow’.
Two years ago Labelgraphics won the UK industry ’Oscar’ for its labels which combine multiple printing processes - flexographic, screen printing, foiling and embossing - on one label, and the business has been a constant takeover target.
But Mulvenny, who is set to become chairman next year and hand over to his two sons Alex and Peter, says the business belongs in Clydebank and that is where it should stay.
’My first interest was to recruit young people and take them as far as they could go,’ he says. ’That is why we moved here and that is the challenge I have always set for myself....I listen to people complaining about kids, I find the very opposite, I find them inspirational at times, they ask the right questions.’
He has led the way in lifelong learning. ’I should be in the Guinness Book of Records, I attended the Glasgow College of Printing in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties - in the end they told me not to come back I was too slow a learner - we do the same with our people, and we send them to different parts of the world to learn.’
Not surprisingly, Labelgraphics became the first in the industry to gain Investors in People status - 80% of the workforce started with the company at 18 and are still there. The sales team, however, is largely over 50, in declared support of the campaign to reduce ageism in the workplace by recognising that more experienced staff may be better at dealing with customers. ’I say to them, listen to what the customer is saying, don’t anticipate anything.’
Mulvenny says ’When I left school I felt I had to start my education. Maybe I didn’t have the right attitude.’ His only break from 53 years in the industry was two years of national service, aged 20, in Paris - ’it was the best thing that ever happened to me’.
Mulvenny served his apprenticeship with Glasgow printer Aird & Coghill, worked as a production manager for a UK major, then set up his first business, Ayrshire Labels, which became part of the Macfarlane group. Mulvenny had already sold his shares to co-directors and crossed the world to learn blue-sky techniques and processes from a pioneering Australian company.
In 1982 he went on a part-time business start-up course at Glasgow University. ’What I actually did, with the encouragement of the lecturers, was write my own business plan and implement it two weeks after the course ended, because we had already opened.’
In January 1982, Labelgraphics appeared in the Clydebank enterprise zone. ’Nobody was saying to me you have to start a label company, I said we have to look for customers who are major users and more importantly who will pay our bills on time....By the end of our first financial year we were supplying Motorola and other multinationals with labels.’
Giants in the drinks and pharmaceuticals sectors, both notorious for their exacting standards, followed, and the company is involved with both sectors finding ways to combat counterfeiting through innovative work on labelling and packaging design and production.
’The label very often sells the product,’ Mulvenny says. ’It enhances it and adds value to it.’
The company is ahead of its rivals in developing bespoke extranet access for customers, and won in 2004 Scottish Enterprise’s excellence award for e-business.
On profitability, he says ’We have always been able to create a healthy profit which we have reinvested in the company. None of our equipment here is more than seven years old and we have renewed it several times over the 23 years.’
Mulvenny has had a close relationship with the Glasgow college and a personal input into the new structure of the new HND in printing, as well as contributing to the entrepreneurial studies course at the Caledonian University.
He has been actively involved in a number of Scottish Enterprise initiatives and was a board member on the three Clydebank economic development initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s.
On what is still to be done, he says ’The people themselves have got to be a bit more pushy and I think some of the local politicians could be a wee bit more helpful - too many people hark back to the days of John Brown and Singer, that will never come back, we have to look at what is ahead of us.’
Having outgrown its current premises, Labelgraphics is currently designing and building a £5m plant half a mile from the existing premises, part of a five-year plan which includes a £4m-plus investment and at least 17 more jobs.
The learning goes on. ’I used to play the sax and clarinet when I was a teenager - five years ago I bought an electronic keyboard, and I am going for lessons with 10 and 12 year olds....I am also doing something I said I would never do - I took up golf.’
In his award citation, colleagues applauded ’an integrity which has become almost legendary in the industry.’
He comments ’You have got to be honest with yourself and pass that on through the way you act and interact with people. They pick up on that immediately and respond in the same way - and you keep your promises.’
Alex’s Main Achievements:
Born: 1937
1953: Aird & Coghill, joined as apprentice
1865: Avery & Dennison, production manager, UK & Europe
1973: Founded Ayrshire Labels
1981-2: Worked with BMS in Australia
1983: Founded Labelgraphics
2003-6: US Institute (TLMI) award
2004: Flexographic industry top award
2006: Industry lifetime achievement award |
