Disrupting Print & Packaging: From Startup to $55 Million with Lewis Cook, CEO of Catapult Print

Join our host, Lee Murray in the latest episode of the CEO series as he sits down with Lewis Cook, CEO of Catapult Print, a dynamic label manufacturer in Central Florida. Discover how Catapult Print achieved $55 million in revenue by prioritizing customer needs, leveraging cutting-edge technology, and maintaining a commitment to quality. Learn how they're revolutionizing label manufacturing for major retailers like Walmart and Aldi with speed, precision, and competitive pricing.

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Lewis Cook (00:00:00) - Know, we, in our industry were we know from benchmarking that we actually make more profit than our competitors. Our margin levels are higher, but we can sell a product cheaper. And that all comes from the infrastructure that we built, the way we maneuver a product. we can we can maneuver it more cost effectively and quicker than our competition.

Lee Murray (00:00:25) - All right. Welcome back to Exploring Growth. Today we have the opportunity to hear from the CEO of a Central Florida company. Since we're in that series still that has been growing very fast and very consistently over the last six years, which is really amazing. So today I'm talking with Lewis Cooke, CEO of Catapult Print. Welcome to the show, Lewis.

Lewis Cook (00:00:47) - Thank you.

Lee Murray (00:00:49) - So out of the gate. Just tell us about like, your role at the company and what does the company do?

Lewis Cook (00:00:55) - So we're, we're a label manufacturer. So we produced, labels. A lot of the labels you see in the food products in supermarkets for manufacturers to supply to Walmart and the large box store retailers.

Lewis Cook (00:01:06) - my role as it stands now is CEO. I'm one of the founders, along with a few, family members. My dad, my brother as well founded the company, in six years ago now, our sixth birthday in July.

Lee Murray (00:01:22) - Okay. That's awesome. Yeah. So the labels you guys print. Yeah. We then a lot of us probably have seen those in supermarkets.

Lewis Cook (00:01:29) - Yeah. If you go all around the perimeter of a store, you fresh items that you see on the labels that you see on your, your beverages, your, cooked meats and salad packs, everything that you see in the supermarket, especially in Florida, a lot of them supermarkets, you walk around. So a lot of our labels in there. So for instance, we saw, I think this year, year to date, we've sold, 3 billion labels. Wow. It's a large, large volume.

Lee Murray (00:01:56) - Yeah. So, we shop for most of our groceries at Aldi. and so I, I think I, I don't know if they're one of your clients or through client, you know, channel, but I, I noticed like, they the way they package their salmon is very different than I've seen.

Lee Murray (00:02:13) - And it looks like they're sort of like framing out the piece of salmon. So it looks really appetizing and it's very thin. Oh yeah. I mean, I was looking look at your website and I was looking at some of the, you know, examples. And it looked a lot like what I've seen in that.

Lewis Cook (00:02:30) - So that's, that's what you see the framing out there thing called a Linus label. So one of only, two, printers in the US that can produce and manufacture them labels, which is a, it's a line less it's actually better for the environment. It looks better on pack. So. Yeah. we do a lot with Alden. I've worked with Aldi over a long period of time in our previous business as well. We've always worked closely with Aldi.

Lee Murray (00:02:53) - Yeah. That's awesome. And I'll say too, just from a consumer standpoint, you know, seeing that in the rack is, it's more beautiful, right? Like I'm looking at a piece of fish and I'm judging on the quality of that piece of fish.

Lee Murray (00:03:09) - I'm not looking at packaging, really. It's like the packaging sort of goes to the background and then a small detail. But these are the kind that make or break, you know, experiences is that when I get it home and I'm ready to cook it, I pull it out. It's so easy to open. Like I literally just take a paring knife and just slice one side of it and I'm in.

Lewis Cook (00:03:30) - Yeah, yeah, that's the thing with that label, it, it doesn't apply glue across the whole back of the label. It just in that area. So yeah, it's what we always say. We always everybody in our industry jokes that you can never shop a supermarket. The same loved ones hate going around the supermarkets with anybody that comes from our industry. For the rest of you, we walk around the supermarket looking at food. You know, it's in labels and yeah, yeah, look at the whole supermarket in a different way. It takes a lot longer to get around the supermarket.

Lee Murray (00:03:58) - I bet it's like an art gallery.

Lewis Cook (00:04:03) - If you pull kids trundling around with you, the, like, dad, can we go now? Yeah. You stood staring at the beverage section for ten minutes extra looking at labels.

Lee Murray (00:04:12) - They're going to grow up with a whole, whole different experience that you had grown up as a kid. Yeah. You know, telling their friends. Yeah, you should have grown up with my dad. We spent three hours in the grocery store. So you talked to me earlier about growing your company over the last six years to 55 million. And now, right before the podcast, you said you're on track for 6 million. Yeah, that's that's very impressive over six years and in. Congrats. By the way, what is the key to that type of consistent high growth.

Lewis Cook (00:04:44) - Well, I think, all of that gross organic as well, which is rare in our industry. So, a lot of, a lot of acquisitions usually, sort of fund the growth for, for us, it's we have grown organically to, 60 million.

Lewis Cook (00:04:58) - The key for us is a couple of things. Obviously. My, my father, my dad comes from a comes from a print background. So he worked his way up from a shop floor in a printers all the way to. I've seen now where we're at with, with ourselves. So. But what he was, was a salesman. He, he loves the he loves the customer, and he loves building the product. So I think one of the most fundamental things that's special about catapult is that we're customer first, always. So and we came to market trying to deliver a better product for customer and revolutionize how we deliver our product to them and change the industry in the US. So that's a big reason for our growth. I think the ability we decided to do a start up, we did look at buying businesses, but when we looked at purchasing, we looked at businesses that we went, what are we buying here? We're buying everything that we don't want to be. Yeah. So we we took the mad decision, I would say, in our industry of doing a startup because it's very costly and, manufacturing to do a greenfield startup in America.

Lewis Cook (00:06:01) - and but what that allowed us to do in the long run is build it, build the model that we truly believed in to deliver a better product to customers. So I think the biggest thing for us is two things is being customer focused, but actually delivering a product that makes it easy to sell. My dad is always massive on he's a salesman at heart. He he loves, he loves customer, he loves selling product. And he wants businesses to make it easy for salesman to sell. So the infrastructure is built behind a salesman so you can go out there and offer everything a customer wants.

Lee Murray (00:06:32) - Yeah, it sounds like his approach is let's just make it make sense so that when we're having the conversation, they can't say no.

Lewis Cook (00:06:40) - But yeah, we want to be we want our sales team to have a Swiss Army knife in their pocket. So, our four things we build every business around and especially this business that revolutionizes obviously price is massive. The reality is and people are fearful in this in our industry and other industries that they think, oh, you can't sell on price.

Lewis Cook (00:07:01) - We absolutely believe you can. If you can deliver a product cheaper and you can use that to your advantage, and you can be more efficient in the way you create and develop a product, then absolutely, you should be utilizing price to to do that. So price is one of the big components. Lead times is critical to us and we deliver our products on average in 2 to 5 days. The rest of our marketplace is in 20 plus days. So we are much faster. We're cheaper, we're faster. Quality is not hindered because quality is one of the biggest things. We actually deliver a higher quality. We have unique, unique tools in our business that allow us to deliver higher quality product than anyone. And service goes without saying. We're sales driven or customer driven organizations or service, but our big ethos and belief was always that there should be no sacrifice to customer. So when our sales reps or our salespeople or anyone's engage with a customer, there's not like, well, we're we're good on this, but we're not good at this or we need a certain customer profile.

Lewis Cook (00:07:59) - We try to build a business that allowed a salesman and for customer to deliver on all the things and not sacrifice anything for a customer, which I think it enables us to win. But the other thing that when you think about high growth, everyone thinks about the new business coming in. But, in terms of our existing business, over the six years, our customer retention rate is 98%. We don't lose as well because of that, which also makes it easier to grow. And the things coming out at the bottom. Yeah, it makes the hell a lot easier to grow. So for us, we truly deliver on all them things and create an environment for a customer where there's no sacrifice. It's making it easier for them. Yeah. So I think that's a big reason why we're able to gain gain market share.

Lee Murray (00:08:40) - Yeah. If I would have if you didn't have the numbers to back up the success, meaning if you didn't have the $55 million run rate over six years and the 98% client retention, I have to say that most people would hear that pitch and say, we don't believe you, because, you know, there's the whole, example of the triangle of you can have it good fast or, yeah.

Lewis Cook (00:09:04) - Yeah, they teach in colleges, right? And it's always you got you can't have it all. You can.

Lee Murray (00:09:08) - Only have two of the three type of.

Lewis Cook (00:09:10) - Thing. Yeah.

Lee Murray (00:09:11) - And you're and you're basically looking at that triangle and say, well no, we're going to do all three. In fact, we're going to add customer service to it as well. And I think most investors who are worth anything would look at that and say, yeah, right. Like, how are you going to do that? So so that's you know, I guess the first question though, before we get into how did you do that? Is are you making any money? Right. Because that would be my next question is, are you making any profit. Because yes, you you could maybe do those things for a short period of time, but maybe there's not much profit coming at the end.

Lewis Cook (00:09:43) - Know, we, in our industry where we know from benchmarking that we actually make more profit than our competitors. Our margin levels are higher, but we can sell a product cheaper.

Lewis Cook (00:09:53) - And that all comes from the infrastructure that we built, the way we maneuver a product. we can we can maneuver it more cost effectively and quicker than our competition. So. And our biggest challenge, to be honest with you, is that everybody promises the world. Right? Every company out there promises that. What company doesn't sell on price, service quality, lead time, right. In our industry, every single person, every salesman that's picking up the, the phone or visiting a customer or whatever they're doing to attract sales, I promise. In the world. Yeah. The customer, we have two challenges. Biggest one is making customers believe and trust that we can actually do it because they've been burnt so many times. Yeah, yeah, I even maneuver in working, giving the trust into someone and they let them down. So that's a big challenge for us. So and if you look at our our website, you look at every touchpoint of our business. That's why it's so critical. We look and feel and are different.

Lewis Cook (00:10:49) - So if you come to our site, it looks different to any manufacturing print business you will ever walk into.

Lee Murray (00:10:54) - It was very different.

Lewis Cook (00:10:55) - Yeah, yeah. The facility you've gone to website, you won't see another. We don't talk the same word differently because we are truly different. So we need. And our people are different to what you would generally see as well in the print industry. And so it's really important to us that every touchpoint we reaffirm to anybody that's engaged with our business, we don't just say we're different, we are different. And there is a little bit of validation. It still has to be proven and it's still over. It's still a lot more hard work than this. But it's that's why our branding and all the things are so critical to us to give that customer a feeling of, will they look different? They're saying the different. There might be something here to investigate further.

Lee Murray (00:11:33) - Okay, so then that begs the question of how do you how do you convince them? How do you convince them to go to the very next step where they in their mind are probably thinking, this is just going to be another one of the, you know, they're saying they can do this, but they can't.

Lewis Cook (00:11:49) - Yeah, I think that's again, I say that is the hardest thing to do, I think. I think we have a unique and very honest style as a business. So I think we do generate opportunity by being very transparent and honest with customers, and we do work hard to prove ourselves. So, a lot of other businesses are very, they go in there and sell in a way that it's on their terms. And if you want to trial, you're going to pay for it. And we're very sales orientated, so we're willing to invest in customers to be able to prove ourselves. We're not going into customers saying we need this amount of work, we just want all we ask for, for most customers is one opportunity because we'll we, we know we can deliver on what we're promising. That's right. We just need the opportunity. And so I think what enables us to do it is, get more opportunities. They were willing to prove ourselves and give us an opportunity and we'll deliver for you.

Lewis Cook (00:12:47) - And then that's happened in most places and most of our customers now we have their that were sole suppliers for even customers that always had strategies in place where there needs to be dual suppliers, just because we deliver such a better product than our, our competition. So for us it is just being authentic and really working with that customer to build trust. Right from the initial conversation all the way through, through the trials we do from the engagement. And like I say, every touchpoint they're seeing a difference to how how they felt with different people, the teams we have in place as well, we don't just have a salesman that just works there. We have a commercial team, we have an account management team, we have an infrastructure that gets involved and works with the customer to make sure they're delivered for on every aspect. So I think even in them, early conversations were given a feeling because it's the truth that, okay, it feels different. It's not just someone saying the same thing. They look the same.

Lewis Cook (00:13:41) - They're asking the same what? Why should I believe this? I think customers very early on start to feel know something does feel different here. And obviously our growth and the amount of customers that we win all the time over big clients. I think that also plays a part in building trust. It's like anything, I always find things like the Celsius brand interesting. It's been around 18 years. it's been around a long time. but now it's everywhere. but it's interesting is that when, when other people are doing it and you're getting a lot of traction and growth, there is an element of human nature that goes, well, there must be something there, because if all these customers are going there, if all that you see or the on trainers or the old trainers or the Celsius brands, consumers start to go, well, it must be good because I'm seeing it everywhere. So I think that also helps as well with our growth story. Now when it wasn't in the early days, but where we are now, it's definitely helps that they're seeing this momentum and this growth, and a company doing something that nobody else has done in our industry, I think ever organically and not this quickly.

Lewis Cook (00:14:49) - so I think that also plays a part that they start to build trust to go. And, well, that's happening with all these other people, then it can't just be smoke and mirrors.

Lee Murray (00:14:57) - Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, I, I don't know anything about your industry, but I just know looking at it, the fundamentals of it, don't work with I think traditionally with the things that you're, you're accomplishing, you know, they just don't. So having a player that can come in and, and really, you know, hate to throw the word around but disrupt that industry, that is going to play in your favour.

Lewis Cook (00:15:21) - What disruptive is the most commonly used word we're here to disrupt. It's, we're here we we call it redefining print. We came to change the market. We didn't just come. And I think it's important to us was every month, every year we're trying to further disrupt. We're trying to find new ways to take ourselves further away from the competition. And, for me, my dad always believed in and always taught us.

Lewis Cook (00:15:45) - And in previous industries and business we've been in, I think so many people think you have to find a niche market or like we've always felt the opposite. You go into a crowded marketplace, but if you if you create a better product that's easy to sell, you can grow basically. So I think a lot of people try and find this niche or this nook and are scared of these big, crowded markets. We actually like the big crowded markets because if you can deliver a product better, you can get a lot of traction.

Lee Murray (00:16:13) - So we have a lot of SEOs listening to this podcast, and I think that they would get a lot of value from hearing another CEO at this stage of growth, talking about how you're doing these things. Right. So we could just pick one of them if it's price. Right. If you're in a noisy market. That is largely based on price. How do you compete on price but also have these other things? Yeah.

Lewis Cook (00:16:40) - Well, I think it's the model. I think all of them, for things that I talked about, do come back to our model that we build that is unique.

Lewis Cook (00:16:48) - The way we maneuver a product is different to anyone else. We are heavily automation plays a massive part. Systems and data play incredible amounts of part of our business, enabling us to do that. And that allows us to maneuver a product now. It's really hard to give contextual examples in such a different industry, right? But if you think about versus our competition, it will take them multiple days to maneuver a product and often through manual paperwork, moving around their infrastructure, their business. And for us, it takes some days to move it to their manufacturing facility or their part of their business for us. it can be there within an hour. It is. Automation takes over and can maneuver a product for our business, very streamlined, very efficiently to our, our our process, our print manufacturing part of our business. The other thing we do, as well as systems and automation is we've invested heavily in commercial department. We have a lot of analytical analysts that are looking at every order and figuring out the most effective way to produce that order.

Lewis Cook (00:17:53) - these things are lots of little touchpoints are happening very fast within the first 12 hours. And order comes in between the analytical team and the data, the automation systems and the way that products being maneuvered to, to the production facility. We also have invested a hell of a lot into the latest technology in every component of our business. Our we always talk about our particular industry, and it sort of got left at the tech boom, if I'm honest with you. Like, if you go to a lot of other plants and facilities, there are only 30, 40 year old machines running them into the ground. And it's the opposite of what we are. We have invested heavily in the latest and greatest technology. and we've developed ways like our print plus model that we slightly create a product slightly differently. So what our commercial team do with our production. I usually print one skew one item at a time. So if you're, for instance, for orange juice you print, there's vitamin C. As an added vitamin C, there's calcium free.

Lewis Cook (00:18:51) - There's like multiple versions of the same orange juice. Most traditional printers will print one skew at a time, which is. But then when you finish that, it takes a lot to prep a press to run the next job in manufacturing. In our type of manufacturing, what we can do with our commercial teams and the way we've set up our business and the technology we have in place, we can produce all their SKUs at once across the web. So we can we can basically operational leverage and produce far more, far quicker than any of our competition because just in make ready alone, they would be just making ready all day in the amount of jobs that we run, sometimes in one shift. So we're we can produce much more in an operation, leverage our business. And we've looked at acquisitions and we've looked at businesses. And every time we look at acquisition, we looked at one recently. It's another $50 million printer in our world. And they had double the amount of equipment machines, and they had double the amount of people in their infrastructure.

Lewis Cook (00:19:49) - And the reason we can make more money is because of that streamlined process and, technology, we basically can operation leverage for our customers more so we can produce more of less than anybody else in the market. And it's it's really as simple as that.

Lee Murray (00:20:05) - That's amazing. Yeah. It sounds like you, you came into an analog business, made it digital, and then compressed everything so that it was hyper efficient.

Lewis Cook (00:20:15) - That's it. Yeah. Well we couldn't I mean, the UK, I always say about the US market, it's it's greatest asset. It's its biggest flaw as well. So the size, the vastness, what that creates is an abundance of opportunity which but it also on the flip side of that, it creates, very much an ability to be lazy in some ways to go to not need to innovate or develop a product. Yes. More efficient because there's in our last world, we worked with retailers in the UK. There's food retailers already being one. There's five main food retailers in the UK there's Aldi.

Lewis Cook (00:20:50) - Does Tesco disaster. There's no I mean there's five. Yeah America there's a lot more than five. There's a.

Lee Murray (00:20:56) - Lot more.

Lewis Cook (00:20:57) - We was a design business that had two of the five. Now we had to work damn hard every year because if we lost one of them, there wasn't a hundred other to go. Go. Well, we'll just take another. So we was pushed. We had to push ourselves and be more neurotic as a business to go. Yeah. We need to make sure that we're delivering the best product. If we do, we need to drive costs to anything we can do to make sure we're ahead of it. We could be interesting. Interesting. I think we came to the US market and still have it in us with this neurotic mentality, because you used to have in, not an abundance of opportunity. There isn't millions of customers out there to choose between. So when you've got one, you've got to look after it and you've got to find a way to keep it.

Lewis Cook (00:21:40) - So yeah, that's interesting. Like automation, you had to do automation because you couldn't keep your customer because somebody else would be knocking on their door. That's done it. So we've sort of brought that same mentality and approach to the US market, where a lot of our competition are that lazy. We always thought, yeah, with some of the things we did, we thought we had like a year's advantage of going like, people will start doing it and it's crazy the traction we've had. Not one person, not one of a company, should I say, has seemed to do anything to sort of try and combat what we're doing in the market. Share were gaining. And I think I say it's the vastness creates this sort of we this is the way we do it and not an ability to change. And we're changing all the time our business.

Lee Murray (00:22:25) - So when you started in the UK, did you know that? I mean, did you have that perspective back then? Because now it's it seems very clear that was that was the Crucible, that was the testing ground.

Lee Murray (00:22:36) - And now you can come here and really, you know, push the pedal down and go, yeah. and you've been, you know, the feedback is you can keep going. But when you were there, starting out, did you, did you know that, hey, if we can make it here, we really can make it in the US.

Lewis Cook (00:22:51) - Yes. We never this particular business, whether that was our previous business or prior. Oh gotcha. Okay. Design, business design or the packaging. So that was out the UK. But why we was in that design business that we owned was out the UK and us. so we was, we was engaging with all the print base in the US and we couldn't believe that's what sort of led us here because it was like, I see right what we're seeing the lead times and the quality. Like that's all what drew us here. I think it's always just it's in our nature as well, though. We have a first. I think we're passionate about the product, and I think.

Lewis Cook (00:23:28) - I think so few businesses, we see it as a product that we're trying to deliver, like we have systems in place, for instance, like, our customers have live visibility of their orders at all times. They can see they can click on a button right now on their app and see exactly where every order is in our business live, and they can see if it's shipped to them. They can see if it's in manufacturing, they can see exactly where it is. Nobody else is doing that. But every touchpoint in this product, we're trying to create a uniqueness, and we have this drive and thirst to disrupt and do things differently and improve. So even a lot of the tools that we have now, or some of the things we do, we didn't come to market with, we didn't have a year ago. But our mentality is definitely driven around a desire to constantly want to improve, get better, disrupt. And it's all driven from sales. If I'm honest with you though, it's all about market share.

Lewis Cook (00:24:20) - How can we create a better product to win more customers, to grow this business? It's, that's what it's all stems from.

Lee Murray (00:24:28) - It's a super solid business model. I mean, on the outset, not knowing all of this, I would say. Yeah, right. I don't believe you, you know? But now now that you get into describing how it all works, the business model is the most sound. Because if you can accomplish those things fast, you know, cheap and good, then. Yeah, then you've won, right? because that's really what the customer wants no matter what industry you're in. So it's, you know, if you can. And then I'm looking at it from a marketing standpoint, the marketing has less of less work to do because all they have to do is really support these conversations that you're having. Because once the conversation starts and it becomes organic and good and it's accepted, and assuming a trial is kind of like that kickoff point. Yeah. then it's there.

Lee Murray (00:25:17) - It's there for you to perform and to prove, and it should make sense pretty quickly out of the gate for the client to sign up.

Lewis Cook (00:25:24) - Oh, absolutely. Our marketing is there to just try and create awareness of who you are, make, make people aware. We don't at the minute we talk about push to pull, but at the minute it's very much push. So we're absolutely because yes, we've grown from a startup to, room rate of 60 million this year. But and that will continue that level of growth. We have plans to be at 100,000,000in next couple of years at the minimum. So but we're still not one of the market leaders. Like the biggest in our industry is 6 billion. So we're a long way. We're still a we're there were a fly that now annoys the lion. and we're definitely noticing this injury and treated very uniquely in this industry. But there's still a lot of, runway to sort of grow in this industry. So yeah, I think I think, yeah, it's exciting.

Lee Murray (00:26:14) - So, so far you've you've grown incrementally for the most part and done it really solidly. You have a good foundation and it's a solid, you know, track record and you've got momentum. Now. Do you foresee turning that incremental growth into more exponential growth through acquisition or through even being acquired?

Lewis Cook (00:26:36) - Definitely not be acquired. we do have, So we. Three and a half, four years. And we did, bring on a private equity partner. So we have private equity funded as well. so and that was just about accelerating the growth and hard or investing even heavier between us. And we've got a great partner in place that we work, work really well with. so for us, you know, we are open. We will explore, acquisitions. Our biggest issue we have when we think about acquisitions is we are very unique as a business. The way everything I just described on you, any any plan that we purchase, we're going to we're going to be selling a lie. Then if we go sell to their customers without changing their total infrastructure.

Lewis Cook (00:27:19) - Yeah.

Lee Murray (00:27:19) - So who could you buy that you wouldn't change everything. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Lewis Cook (00:27:23) - That doesn't mean if you think about the minute we are mainly in labels is where our growth has come. I think we've got a lot of runway there at the minute. And I think, one of the big things we did in design and we believe here is we love very focused approaches. So, we don't want to be everything to everyone. So something to someone to start with. So for us, we have got a lot of runway still in labels. And we know we're very good at that. And we're big on disrupting industries. we got we get asked by customers all the time to go into different product sets, shrink packaging, for instance. flexibles different when you go around that grocery store than labels. And we could go win loads of business straight away there in the current customer base. But for us, we only we want to do things very focused and very disruptive. So I think when we start to think about acquisitions in the future, I think right now we're very young as well as a business.

Lee Murray (00:28:17) - Sure. Yeah. Six years. Yeah.

Lewis Cook (00:28:19) - We're growing very fast organically. So we've got to make sure we control that growth to not to not fail and not let our current customers down. Those affect the current growth. And but I think in the future there is opportunities to investigate maybe different sectors, different categories like Flexibles, for instance, and then investigate and work about how then do we tweak it to our model to disrupt another industry like we disrupted labels.

Lee Murray (00:28:44) - So you mentioned Eco Plus, I believe is a product. Is that a tech product or is that a service?

Lewis Cook (00:28:51) - Eco plus is more about our sustainability approach okay. So yeah, that's about it. Again, being a.

Lee Murray (00:28:58) - Or maybe I was thinking of print plus.

Lewis Cook (00:28:59) - Print plus. Yes. Print plus that that is a yeah it's a it's a product that adds value to the customer. So it's a little bit around our model and how we print differently. Very simplistically. Print plus is it's effectively digitalized in print. So if you think about your digital printers at home you click a button, don't unit prints.

Lewis Cook (00:29:18) - You don't have to set up a printer with all the different colors to make it print. So our our sort of print plus model is around about flat. In our world. Digital presses make ready very fast but run really slow. So if you run in a long order, the very slow the world we're in is called flex. So what that does is run really fast, but it takes ages to set the machine up. So what we've done is sort of with print plus is digitalize that process so we can make ready and prepare our presses very fast close to equivalent to digital, but then run at flex speed to print. Plus is all the mechanisms and things we've put in place to be able to almost digitalize our flex presses. Yeah.

Lee Murray (00:29:59) - That's amazing. Do you have any products in mind? and maybe it's not products. That you would sell your in customer. But maybe tech that you're you're developing that then would be licensed to other competitive competing companies. I could see this in the future where.

Lewis Cook (00:30:22) - even even our customers come in.

Lewis Cook (00:30:25) - so if you came into our factory, we've even if you think operation is a business, we've also created the ability to have live data at all times. So every single, every component, every press, every part of our business, we can understand how it's performing within a minute, an hour a week, any time frame and see live. And we we compare it to like running watches. Like back in the day, you went out for a run, you'd get home and you try and figure out, how did I do? And I think lots of businesses still operate like that. They they have their production month or their week or whatever. It's like a lagging result. Yeah. Wait for these Excel spreadsheets to come out. How did we do our our model? Our systems are all about in time, whether that be data internally or whether that be data externally to our customers. so even our suppliers, our customers come in and they ask us, ask us for our system a lot of the time, the components, because they're manufacturing businesses as well, I think the, the potentially could absolutely be.

Lewis Cook (00:31:22) - But like I said earlier, we're very focused business and we're very we know we've got a lot of runway in our sector that we're doing right now. so for us at this moment in time, it's very much around. You could see that absolutely in the future. and it's probably something that we should be investing. But at the same time, we're a young we're a young business that's scaling very fast already. If we diversify our energy into that world, it we do run a risk of failing somewhere and going backwards. So on paper, it sounds like the right thing to do as even go into different categories like shrink or different sectors with a current customer base at once. But we're just with the growth at levels we're already having in our current business. I think we're just being cautious to make sure we add the right components and diversify self at the right time, and allow our management team and our infrastructure to get a bit more mature and a bit more, further on the journey before we diversify and spread ourselves too thin.

Lee Murray (00:32:17) - Yeah, it sounds like you're doing all the right things, and these are all the at this stage now, you've done all the hard work to get here. These are the hard things to continue to do, because it's not as sexy as going after another category or an acquisition or something that you know is more sexy. Yeah. and speaking of that, of course, the next question is going to be about AI, because that's what everyone wants to talk about these days. Have you have you looked at implementing AI in some of those systems and processes yet, or is it something that's on the horizon?

Lewis Cook (00:32:48) - Yeah, we've we've started to investigate. I say our systems, people want to let it mature a little bit in some of the areas before they physically put our business, but it's that it's definitely forefront of mind if you think about our industry as well, our business, I would say about ours, it's it looks different. All the different labels we're printing, but in reality it's all the same.

Lewis Cook (00:33:10) - Yeah. So we have a lot of very repeatable tasks in our business, a lot of very repeatable information. So I think I can play a massive part like automation has done. I think it can take it on. Yes. Automation is doing our business, so it's definitely front of mind. I think it can make a big impact. And if you think about our business, our business is very much about operational leverage. Do more quicker with less with the highest quality. And that's where I fits does fit perfectly in that. so I think as it sort of branches out and as it, gets a bit more evolved, especially for businesses and some of the components and how you can utilize it properly, I think it will definitely be something we'll be investigating or we are investigating utilizing.

Lee Murray (00:33:50) - Yeah, I can only imagine the the head start it would have. It will give you on top of the headway you're already creating. I mean you in a sort of an analog industry, you are digitizing, automating and systematizing everything.

Lee Murray (00:34:04) - And then if you add an AI on top of that, you can't be caught.

Lewis Cook (00:34:08) - Yes, that's exactly it. You gotta be. And that and it's so important as a disruptor. It's so important to be ahead of the curve all the time on anything is it's critical to us. So I think the the biggest danger is I think lots of businesses do so. And you see lots of businesses do it. There's lots of businesses that burst onto the scene. And then I look at them now and 30 years later, they're still doing the same thing that burst them onto the scene. And, I think it's critical for catapult that we don't ever rest on our laurels and believe that we're better than we are. there's always another mountain to climb. So for us, it's very much around. We call it day one thinking as well. So something that Amazon used, but it's big for us. It's like that same spirit and desire that we started the business with, and that desire to change and develop and evolve and disrupt an industry.

Lewis Cook (00:34:54) - We ensure that's in our feeling every day. So whether it's AI, whatever, it's anything, we're working hard every day to figure out how we can maneuver this product better, more cost effectively to take market share.

Lee Murray (00:35:05) - That's such great wisdom. Because I know I've seen it and I see it in my business too. Being able to stay focused on what you're doing and not be pulled on all the other things, that's shiny objects. It's the hardest thing, I think, for true entrepreneurs, people who, like you said, day one, you get after this idea. it's hard to not get after another idea that just shows up.

Lewis Cook (00:35:26) - Yeah, no, it definitely is. You have to pull yourself, and we have to pull ourselves back all the time and remind ourselves. And I think that's where vision and strategy and roadmaps for our business play a big part. We're very big on, having our strategy laid out, and we have roadmaps of our plan and the steps we want to take. I think that allows us to stay on course and on track and not get distracted and start to deviate, because we're working towards a bigger picture all the time.

Lewis Cook (00:35:52) - Of what when we're taking steps to it. Think if we didn't have that anchoring of where we're heading and what our goals are and our strategy to get there, then I think we would sort of be coming off course all the time. So I think, we're very strategic as a business. We've always been. So I think that helps us. And these are all shiny things that we will go, but we know the timing will still be there. We know. Yeah, we've got I don't want to say time in that way, but I know we've got we've got time to, we've got a lot of runway still to still have time to disrupt what we're doing, deliver on what we're doing, and then branch out at the right times and go disrupt other industries or other categories in our industry, for sure.

Lee Murray (00:36:31) - And you are giving yourself the margin to do that. You know, just investigating AI is a good example, though, where you're giving your yourself, your team, the months and years of and actually capital to sit and and investigate these things more thoroughly where you're not doing them last minute to compete.

Lewis Cook (00:36:48) - No. And and I think we're also. Was still shaping our model, our product. So it's like we're still developing that. We're still enhancing that, like you say, I. And so that model is shaping out because it sort of becomes like a franchise, not a true franchise model, but our model is sort of franchise. The way we maneuver a product, the automation of systems, it's very repeatable. So I think for us, we're not there with shaping our perfect model yet in the sector we're in. I think that getting that right first before we launch into other platforms will only help us be stronger when we do launch into another platform to go attack, because we'll be even, we'll have our foundations underneath was even better at that point. Yeah.

Lee Murray (00:37:29) - So smart. Hey, this. That conversation has been amazing as I knew it would. And congrats on all the success. I can only see it just, you know, continue to burn, you know, as you're going, if people want to find you or catapult, where should we send them?

Lewis Cook (00:37:46) - well.

Lewis Cook (00:37:47) - LinkedIn, email. We can send them anywhere, anywhere we want through. They can obviously check out the website. they can reach out to me directly as well. if they want to, ask any questions, we can share that information. So, either LinkedIn through my profile, or we can give you contact information to reach out.

Lee Murray (00:38:06) - It's perfect. thanks again for being on the show. loved the conversation and congrats again. All the success.

Lewis Cook (00:38:11) - Appreciate it. Thank you so much.