Go West: Publisher services operation looks to UK market to fuel growth

It is fitting to meet the Westchester Publishing Services braintrust at its busy stand at this year's London Book Fair to discuss expanding into the British market, as it was at the last edition of the fair that Westchester decided to go all-in with a UK presence.

The Danbury, Connecticut-headquartered pre-press specialist (broadly meaning it covers most processes from editorial project management right up to going to print) has had a footprint in Britain for some time, with clients including Bloomsbury and University College London Press. The US-based chief revenue officer, Tyler Carey, had been overseeing the UK side, but as that business grew, the company wanted to ramp it up further. Enter UK industry veteran Tim Davies (pictured), who was brought in early in 2018 on an interim basis to investigate those opportunities.

LBF 2018 was a smash, with a number of successful meetings. Davies says: "It was very positive, the amount of business was all pleasantly surprising. And, with typical American decisiveness, shortly after the fair Tyler and Dennis [Pistone, Westchester chairman] decided to set up a permanent office here, and said they wanted me to run it, which was exciting and very flattering." Carey interjects: "We actually decided when we were walking out of Olympia on the last day."

Keen take-up

So far, so good: the Westchester UK business was formally set up in June 2018 and in that relatively short time Davies has inked 15 publisher clients, including Lion Hudson and Pluto Press. The idea, Davies says, is to lean on the scale and complexity of the US parent, "but run the British side with a start-up mentality". Although Davies is certainly not as green as your typical start-up employee: his previous roles include heading sales at Faber and Oxford University Press, working in various publisher services capacities for the likes of Authoright and Compass; and managing director of The History Press.

Westchester celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, having launched in 1969 as a more old-fashioned type of start-up, operating out of IBM typewriter salesman Joe Foley's garage, and handling typesetting for Manhattan-based publishers. While the original Westchester worked with trade publishers, Pistone's nearby Pistone-Rainsford Type did similar work for the academic market. In 1983, Pistone bought Westchester from Foley and merged the two companies (Foley's son Bill still works at the firm as a key accounts manager).

The 1990s and 2000s were times of great change in publishing services, with a lot of Westchester's US typesetting competitors being hoovered up by off-shore firms. Westchester resisted and began actively looking to establish its own overseas facility. Pistone says the firm "looked far and wide: Ireland, Barbados, St Lucia—all the best holiday places" before in 2008 acquiring Antares Private Ltd in Chennai, India.

Carey explains: "The decision to buy outright offshore was really about owning the means of production, rather than risking partnering with a company that might not be there two years later. We tested [Antares] and we grew it, we learned a lot from it and it picked up processes we were using in Danbury. It's a collaboration. Over time we started rolling out the option to work directly with the operation in India."

Arguably Westchester's biggest corporate culture change was in 2014, when it became 100% owned by staffers with an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. Pistone explains: "We were looking for ways to get the business to the next level. I had the opportunity to sell, but I had people that had been working for me for 20 to 30 years, and if I [sold up] they might not be kept on. So, with the stock plan these people are still employed and the company as a whole benefits as all the employees are incentivised, because the stock is only really worth something if we continue to grow the company."

Looking ahead

Today, Westchester has some 150 publisher clients worldwide, about a third of which are in the university press space; around 20 are in the education arena; and the rest are a mixture of trade and academic lists. 

The education sector is set to grow, driven by the Education/K-12 arm, based in Dayton, Ohio, which launched in 2017. The division, Carey explains, is "not straight typesetting work, but also high-end content development and design, something in which you need educators who are familiar with various states' curriculum". A surprise for Davies were the number of firms on this side of the pond eyeing that K-12 market. He says: "A lot of British publishers are looking to get into the US schools sector and repurpose their content so that it jibes with specific states' requirements.

The number of students in America, and the constant adoption process in each individual state, is very attractive to UK businesses."

Technology, as one might imagine, is a key component for Westchester's current and future growth. Outside the UK launch, 2018's major focus was the huge expansion in the capabilities of its client portal--the tool customers use to access and work with their editorial projects. Carey says: "Tech is a big investment, but there has been an interesting pivot on that as we don't have to invest in lots of server rooms anymore, as we're able to work with partners like Dropbox and Amazon Web Services. It's the old 'build versus buy' question. We decided to build the client portal but buy the backbone from those platforms, so we weren't having to take a company of our size and pretend that we're Google."

It is that tech, combined with an employee-led structure, which Davies says publishers in the UK are responding to.

He adds: "It might sound a bit soft and touchy-feely, when talking about the employee ownership, but the industry at this time is talking about fairness, and I think people like that we have this ethos. But what's great is that runs in parallel with our amazing staff, technical expertise, the ability to flex our model and be able to work with publishers from the very biggest to the very smallest."