Postal group wins record sales in age of email

May 21 2009 by Peter McCusker, The Journal

The business, on Hertburn Industrial Estate, makes 2.5 billion envelopes a year – equivalent to 10% of a year’s deliveries made by the Royal Mail. Half the company’s business comes from customers including BT, Lloyds TSB, Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Inland Revenue and Employment Service, with the other half being direct mail.

Mr Croisdale and his two partners, finance director Mike Williamson and production director Dave Cooper, bought the business in early 2007 from its founders Dave McGuire and husband and wife team Tony and Jane Gill.

Last year Encore paid off about £1.5m of the “substantial” debt raised to buy the company and hopes to pay off the rest within three years. The company’s accounts for the year to last November 20 have just been released and show sales rising from £27.2m in 2007 to £29.6m. Encore’s profits rose to £1.9m from £1.3m over the same period.

Mr Croisdale is in the process of recruiting two extra sales staff with competition heating up and fears sales may be well down on last year.

But he believes the financial services market will eventually pick up and says Encore’s reputation for quality and quick processing of volumes will stand it in good stead.

The company recently won the printing award in the global Flexographic Technical Association Excellence awards.

He said: “We have a good bunch of skilled staff and our sales success is down to everybody here.”

Paper costs have gone up by almost 20% and we cannot pass that on to customers.