Alex Bowell is Managing Director at Infigo, where his focus has always been on scaling technology, simplifying processes, and building teams that deliver measurable impact rather than just more headcount. Here’s what he tells the businesses that think their problem is people.
Nobody calls me to say they have a promise capacity problem. They call to ask why they have more staff than they have ever had, every one of them working hard, and the business still is not growing the way it should. They want to know what everyone else is doing differently. By the time I am on the phone, they have usually already tried to fix it the expensive way.
The account I think about most
The account I think about most was a good-sized, genuinely successful business. Demand was there and customers liked them, but the press could take more work than it was getting. The problem, as they saw it, was onboarding: new customers came in slower than they wanted, and once in, took longer to settle than they should have.
For years the answer was people. More staff on order intake to absorb the volume. A support team to keep the customers who were waiting happy while they waited. It worked, in the way that throwing people at a process always works, for a while. Then it stopped working, because the cost of more people does not stop at the salary line. There is the management overhead, the pension contributions and the bonus structure, and the simple fact that the more people you employ, the harder every decision about those people becomes. They had been managing a growth problem as if it were a headcount problem, and it only gets worse the longer you run it.
Eventually they rebuilt the foundation. New order intake. A new MIS. The two systems actually talking to each other, rather than a team of people sitting between them translating one into the other by hand. What struck them, and they told me this directly, was how much of what their people had been doing all along had never needed a person at all. Jobs that used to take six separate touches now move without anyone laying a hand on them. They now onboard new customers in less time than it used to take to chase the ones they already had.
Four of the touches print businesses stop noticing,
because each one feels too small on its own to count as a problem.
The comfortable case for headcount
I have sat in our own budget conversations and watched the same instinct play out from the other side of the table. The easiest case to make for additional headcount is the one that says give me two more people, and I can deliver this much more. It is a clean, persuasive line. What it skips over is that finding good people takes months and real money, and keeping them takes more of both, indefinitely. It is a much harder case to make that the actual problem sits upstream of headcount entirely, that nobody has properly looked at where the time is going. Hiring is the comfortable answer because it does not require anyone to admit they do not yet understand their own process. You end up hiring your way around a system problem. I have watched other businesses do it. I have watched the same temptation sit in our own SLT meetings.
The other thing I notice, every time, is how little anyone inside a business can see this until someone shows them. I have sat in product demonstrations where a prospect brings their operations manager and their whole team, expecting a sales pitch, and what actually happens is they start talking to each other. Not to us. To each other, about their own working day, because they are watching something that makes their current work day look unnecessary. That reaction only happens because nobody had pictured an alternative before. You do not object to a workload you have never been shown a version without.
Understand it, simplify it, then connect it
On top of that, loyal customers are patient, more so than they probably should be, but that patience has a shelf life. I know what I expect as a customer of anything now, in this economy, with a phone full of apps that show me exactly where my delivery is and exactly when it will arrive. Most print businesses I talk to are still trading on relationships built when the bar was lower. That bar is moving, whether their customers say so out loud or not.
What I keep coming back to, conversation after conversation, is the same order of operations. Understand the process before you automate it, and simplify it before you connect it to anything else. Most businesses skip straight to automation, or skip the thinking altogether and hire instead. None of it starts with a person. It starts with someone being honest enough to look at what is actually happening between the order and the press, instead of assuming the answer is more hands.
The margin was never gone. It was being spent on people doing work the process should have absorbed years ago. The businesses that work this out early get to decide what their people do next: the part of the job they were trained for, the part they’re actually good at. The ones that do not will keep hiring their way around a problem that hiring was never going to fix, right up until a customer they thought was loyal finds out what fast and easy actually looks like, somewhere else.
