Hello, this is another session of Over The Skype, and today I’m delighted to invite Denis Ochanine, President of AGG Print, and Marie Paya, who is Marketing Manager of AGG Print. I will start with Marie. Hello Marie!

Hello !

We know each other a little bit because I had the chance to visit you and do some work with you a few years ago. Marie, can you tell us a few words about you?

I am responsible for marketing and communication at AGG Print. I am in charge of communication, sales support materials, public relations for the company, the digital side of the business… that’s quite extensive. There are two of us in the marketing department and we manage all the communication and marketing aspects.

Thank you Marie. Denis, on your side, a few words about you…

Hello Yves. I am the CEO of AGG Print, which I took over a little over two years ago – since it was October 1, 2018. I come from a completely different sector and therefore came with a completely new eye to the graphic arts industry, since I was previously in the beverage industry. I spent many years at Pernod Ricard and I was a user of this type of service and very attached to the quality of the rendering of printed documents. So when the question of taking over a company arose, I was very, very interested in AGG Print, which I fell in love with at a trade show.

Tell us about this “coup de coeur”, Denis.

It was in October 2017, there was a trade show, the Salon de l’entreprise de Villefranche-sur-Saône, where I went just to see the Chamber of Commerce and Industry a little bit. Then I wandered through the aisles and I came across a stand that caught my eye, because there were a lot of nice products, a lot of things that seemed quite innovative and a bunch of people around, and I thought it was nice. I was taken in charge by a salesman whose approach I liked, whereas at the time, I didn’t have much to buy from him. So there you go, I looked at this company and I approached the former managers and suggested that they take them over.

So that’s very interesting, because the topic of our session today will be on business models, the business model of AGG Print. It’s a series that I’m going to be undertaking for several weeks to help companies in the graphic industry, printers, and even other creative companies to get inspired. You’ll see that AGG Print has a rather interesting model. Just before we start, Denis, a few words about AGG Print…

AGG Print has been in existence since 1948. At that time it was not called AGG Print – I will tell you why in a moment. We have four locations. The head office and the main plant are in Villeurbanne, and we have an agency in Lyon, an agency in Villefranche-sur-Saône and, since yesterday, an agency in Mâcon – that’s the hot topic of the day. Our historic profession is reprography, and today we print on all formats and all media. In other words, we have a fairly significant diversification, especially in the last 12 years. Today, we are able to provide our customers with an extremely varied range of services – I think we’ll have the opportunity to come back to this in the course of this discussion. So why is it called AGG Print? AGG is Alain Gilles Group, which is the name of our company and dates back to Mr. Alain Gilles, who was a well-known and acknowledged basketball player at the time, in the 70s, and who, after his sporting career, took over the company and renamed it “Alain Gilles Reprographie”, which later became Alain Gilles Group and AGG Print as a trademark.

Thank you very much. To help us understand AGG Print’s business model, we have prepared a slide show that I will share with you right away. Can you see this slide show Denis and Marie? Let’s start with AGG Print’s unique business model, you’ll understand why. To help us understand all the elements that make up AGG Print’s business model, we were inspired by the business model canvas of two very famous authors, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, which describes a business model in 9 blocks that we will describe in detail with Denis and Marie as far as AGG Print is concerned. We’ll start with the first block right away and understand, with you Denis, who your most important customers are and for whom AGG Print creates value.

We are fortunate to be exposed to many sectors of activity, which is a bit of our backbone and an element of strength for us – of resilience, in any case, in stormy times like today, since not all sectors are in crisis simultaneously, generally speaking. So this is not only an opportunity, but also a development choice for us, it is a real will. Moreover, we will perhaps talk about it a little later, that’s how we are organized to precisely approach the market in this way. I’ll just give you a few examples of some of the sectors we work with. We work a lot, especially with print buying agencies. We’re interested because they are clients who can make us work on large volumes of activity, because they are very anchored in the national market. So we go beyond the purely regional framework and that allows us to reach much wider geographical areas. And beyond the price, what these customers expect is indeed reactivity and above all reliability. Thanks to the various resources we have, both material and human, we have the responsiveness and reliability that these customers appreciate.This is an example. Secondly, we have a strong presence – and this is our historical clientele – in industry and construction. We have historical expertise with this type of client and we provide them with an absolutely unbeatable service because we are able to print very quick and precise plans. They need plans, DOEs, etc. within 24 hours and we are equipped with the equipment, especially our sites, to meet the needs of this type of clientele. But the interest, what these customers today expect from us and what we want to offer them as a service is to be their single point of contact for all their graphic arts needs. Today, beyond the plan, they are people who make shows, who need to decorate their interiors, their offices… So we need to provide them with signs and decorating services. Some even order 3D plans from us. In fact, the value we can bring them lies in this diversity. We also work with public markets-and I’ll mention one of them, the City of Lyon, since we hold the signage market for the City of Lyon. So we work in museums, at the Célestins Theater, in municipal libraries and so on. It’s a type of clientele that is certainly attracted, in a way, by the cost of the services, but above all, what I feel is that they are waiting for advice. Especially on the subjects that can be recommended to them to enhance their communication. At the moment, it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice, there’s a green wave in Lyon, as in other metropolises, and it’s true that these are the requests we have today from this type of client. That’s good, we are structured for, we have the certifications that reassure customers on these points. So we are well positioned in this type of market. Otherwise, I can also say that we are resolutely entering the museography and interior design sector, which are very demanding sectors in terms of quality. These are sectors that require attention to detail, and there, the consultant approach that we like makes a lot of sense. Then I would say, to conclude on this point, that we are also an industrial printer. We have large group clients who ask us for prints to incorporate them into their products, and we can do this in very large volumes. We have worked and are still working on industrial printing projects. So, to sum up, we’re really very diverse and in a way that gives us resilience.

That is very interesting, because the sectors you mention are sectors that are emerging, such as decoration or industrial printing, which are new and are taking on a nice dimension, especially thanks to companies like yours that provide solutions. Marie, I’d like to take this opportunity to mention your value propositions – Denis has started to address them. What combination of products and services does AGG Print offer its various customers? What value does AGG Print bring to its customers, and what problems do you help solve on your customers’ sites?

I would say, indeed, that our value proposition in addressing this very diverse set of customers is to offer them a very broad range of products and services. We are a printing company that claims to be almost 100% integrated, we have both a small format workshop, so we do all the paper publishing and paper finishing; we have a large format department on which we work both on flatbed tables and machines that work on roll-to-roll. We also have a 3D workshop. In fact, the possibility of generating synergies between these three workshops allows us to offer a very wide range of products. So we’re going to work both on reprography – that’s our historical profession, on small-format communication, and then, since the company’s big turning point some fifteen years ago, we’ve offered large-format printing – we do signage, branding, POS, vehicle covering… fairly classic things in large format. And it’s true that we’ve been moving more and more towards high value-added products, in markets like interior design, 3D printing to enhance the value of a product or service for our customers; we’re also going to do industrial printing, as Denis said… So, in the end, our number 1 value proposition is to say that we have a machine park and key skills in-house and that we meet a very broad need. Then, it’s not enough just to know how to produce this need, but you have to know how to adapt it and offer it to the right person at the right time. And that’s why we really position ourselves as an advisor to our customers by doing almost project management. We’re not going to be just a basic printer: “I’ll take your file, press print and send it to you”. We’re going to work upstream with our customers to find solutions. So, our customer who comes to us asking for something we’ve never done before, a five-legged sheep, that we’re super used to… We are going to work on finding solutions with the different brains of the company. We have people from all backgrounds – that’s also a strength with us – and we’re going to look for the solution that best suits the client’s problem, whether it’s in terms of deadlines, durability, practicality… We take charge of all aspects of the request and we’re going to work on it like a real project. Sometimes we even get involved at an early stage, i.e. AGG Print’s credo is to try to anticipate what we call “customer insight”. It’s a need that a customer will feel in relation to a particular era, in relation to a transformation of its market, in relation to new needs, for example, digitalization, digitalization of content, etc. We’ll work on it as a real project. And so we work upstream, even before our customers ask us the question. We try to find solutions that we will be able to bring them. I have a very exact example today. Three years ago, we presented one of our customers, who has around 50 sites in France, Europe and Canada, with a virtual library solution for digitization. That was three years ago. We talked to him about it and, on the spot, he told us, “It’s very interesting, but today, I don’t really see what I’m going to do with it. It’s great, but it’s not what I need.” He called us back this week, three years later, to tell us, “I’m here and I need you. “We had an appointment this morning which went very well. And so we manage, maybe three years earlier, to present solutions to our clients in advance, knowing that the day they need us, they will think of us and they will call us back on these subjects. So we’re a bit of an advisor. We’re going to do a bit of market intelligence for them too. We sometimes make appointments that are not sales appointments at all, but simply appointments for discussion, exchange and consulting. We really intervene on the entire supply chain – this is the last important point of our value proposition. We are involved from the market watch, upstream of the order, in anticipating technical constraints, etc., in creating the file if necessary, in printing, shipping, installation, and even after-sales service. So we really intervene at all levels of the value chain and we have complete control over the customer’s project.

Thank you very much, Marie. We’re going to continue to talk about these value propositions, but rather through a few inspirations that are on your site, all your realizations – and we can see that it’s very broad, whether it’s posters, signs, brochures, decoration, also public or commercial space – it’s very impressive. Let’s take advantage of this to look at the channels: which channels do your customer segments prefer? Are the channels integrated in your company? Which ones give the best results? Which are the most profitable? How do you integrate them into your customers’ routines? Denis, regarding channels, can you tell us a few words about them?

Yes, so the channels, in terms of customer contact, I would say that the first, most important one is our sales team. It’s our team of sales representatives who are not specialized. So that’s a question I asked myself a lot when I took over AGG Print two years ago, since I come from a world where, on the contrary, the effectiveness of the sales force lies in their specialization, either geographic, sector or product range. So naturally, I asked myself this question when I arrived, since at AGG Print, historically, there was no specialization. The account managers had customers that they had been developing for years, they were developing in all sectors all over the place. And finally, quite quickly, I realized that this was probably the winning formula at AGG Print, for several reasons. Firstly, from a human resources point of view, it makes the work much more varied, much more interesting for the account managers. And for me, as a manager, these are subjects that interest me. People have to like their work. Then, from a company point of view, finally, it’s totally aligned with our business model. As we said, we’re very diversified. The men and women behind all this also need to have diverse skills. In fact, they are a little bit of a showcase for the role that AGG Print has as a “one stock shop”, if I may say so, for customers. And the benefit of this for us is that the account managers know their customers very well and play their full role in advising and anticipating customer needs – and that’s a great advantage for us – since they know the customers. So that’s the first point. The second channel for approaching clients, I would say, is the agencies. We had two agencies. Since yesterday, we have a third one in Mâcon. This is what is absolutely essential for us if we think of the sector as one of proximity. There is a logic of proximity in this agency development strategy and the ability of agencies to attract customers to other services that AGG Print can offer, beyond those specifically produced by the agency. In general, the agencies are mainly involved in plan and small format, but finally, they are also a showcase that allows them to attract customers to large format, to 3D and to all the other services that they can offer. Then, there’s something that’s quite nice with us, it’s the showroom logic. We have several showrooms. The main one is “La Source”, in our headquarters in Villeurbanne, where we exhibit our know-how according to a logic of field of application. We have a store space, a company space, a café, hotel, restaurant – no, it’s not at all related to my past – and we have a street space, since we also do – Marie mentioned it – vehicle covering, we make construction site signs, etc. We have a store, a company space, a café, hotel, restaurant – no, it’s not related to my past at all – and we have a street space, since we also do – Marie mentioned it – vehicle covering, we make construction site signs, etc. These are showrooms that we have developed in a commercial logic. That is to say that we are in a sector of services that can be seen and even touched, and therefore giving the possibility to customers and prospects to see the products in real situation and to be able to touch the materials, in the end, it is efficient; there is nothing better to project oneself. Otherwise, we have a tool for placing orders, for standard orders, which is called Opendoc. It’s totally fluid, and some of our customers who have regular orders use this tool, which practically goes through the sales representatives; it goes straight to the workshop. Then we have also – historically, and we continue to do so – developed professional networks. We have sports partnerships – Marie will talk about this later – and we belong to other networks such as CPME, FTPE, etc., which are interesting and which also allow us to develop our customer base.

That’s interesting. Often, I talk about this approach that I really find… not necessarily unique but… In our profession, we don’t often see this type of channel like the showroom, which is a very good example and which, I think, is very much in line with the markets that you’re attacking, especially in decoration, where being able to reproduce on other media than paper is extremely important and, including for paper, being able to touch it. It’s really a great innovation and that’s one of the reasons why AGG Print’s business model is unique and a source of inspiration for many. I will now move on to customer relations. Marie, a few words… I’m showing a small picture, just a photo I discovered of your showroom.

Yes, it makes the transition from the customer relationship to the showroom. We have a very close relationship with our customers. As we said earlier, our sales people are a reference point for our customers, they have a real one-to-one relationship with the customer. As a result, we know them very well and we also try to be very present in the field on the marketing side. And this showroom idea came about precisely because we maintain this customer relationship. I’ve been with AGG Print for two years – I come from the agency and the advertiser. I was a print buyer, and I can say that I didn’t see any showrooms like that with my suppliers at the time. And indeed, our clients missed it and I was often told about it during appointments that I had with sales representatives, etc. I was also a buyer of print and I can attest to the fact that I didn’t see showrooms like that with my suppliers at the time. The idea that we could see a reapplication of the product… Usually a printer tends to say, “I do Dibond, Forex, Plexiglas, Magnet… I’ll give you a sample and when you need it, you call me.” We tell them, “I’ll show you what these materials are for. I’m going to show you, in your world, how you can use mirror Plexiglas, what kind of printing you can do on it, what difference in rendering you can have if you just do a four-color print or if you’re going to add a backing white, etc., or add a varnish…” and that really makes a difference. That’s it, it was to conclude a little bit on the showroom and make the transition with the customer relationship. Because it’s when we listened to our customers that we were able to create spaces that suited them. And it is also through the sales representatives who send us feedback from meetings and exchanges with their customers that we improve this showroom on a daily basis, that we add products and that we have the ideas to move forward. In terms of customer relations, our great strength is the availability of our sales force and, as I said earlier, our position as a consultant. We are a partner in their technological and trend watch, we’ll say. We have clients for whom this is the job – I’m thinking, for example, of communication agencies, where we actually have people who are paid to study trends and to be ahead of the game, but on the other hand, we also have clients – and this is the majority of our clientele – who are in communication with the advertiser, sometimes on issues of internal communication, HR communication, etc., and who are perhaps less aware of what can happen on the market, the evolution of materials, the evolution of colors, consumer desires, etc. We are a partner of their technology watch and trend watch, we’ll say.

So we also intervene on this part by acting as a consultant. We do a lot of coaching and consulting with our clients. That is to say that if our client orders us, for example… I take the example of a customer who has very eco-responsible values and who, tomorrow, places an order for signage on a medium, a substrate that he used to use, but that doesn’t seem very eco-responsible to us, and we’ve just received a product that’s completely equivalent, we’ll tend to call him to propose this medium instead of the other, so that it corresponds to his values, instead of simply taking the order, sending it and sticking to it. So we really have this advice and support. Afterwards, we also maintain a lot of our relationship with our clients through social networks, especially with Linkedin. We have a Pinterest and an Instagram, because we do a job in graphic arts and Instagram is one of the most beautiful showcases to show beautiful printed things.

Excuse me, Marie, do you have a community manager at AGG Print?

Yes, earlier we were talking about it and I said that there were two of us in the marketing department. I work with Valentin, who is in charge of digital communication for us and who is really in charge of all the digital aspect, the management of the website, our blog, the web editorial to integrate all that is SEO, therefore natural SEO, on the writing of our articles, and the management of posts on our social networks, the answers to questions that can be asked on our digital messaging… He also works on other aspects because, finally, in communication, we are often at 360. It’s quite transversal, so we exchange a lot on the subjects. I think it’s good for any company, and even for printers who will inevitably defend physical communication, to have people who really take care of this aspect.

I invite the audience to look at your posts, which are so many sources of inspiration, and, once they’ve looked at your posts, to go directly to your showroom to get a close look. Thank you Marie. Denis, can you tell us a few words about AGG Print’s key activities?

I would say that these activities are totally aligned with our value propositions, since we are involved in the entire chain, from creation, if the customer so requests, to downstream logistics, installation and after-sales service. And in the middle, of course, the heart of everything is large format, small format and 3D printing.

Are all the workshops in the same location?

Villeurbanne is our main workshop, where we have most of our large-format equipment and a fairly extensive fleet of small-format equipment: laser printing machines and an inkjet printing machine. Then in the agencies, we mainly have small-format equipment and plan plotters, and we have an HP Latex roll-to-roll in Villefranche-sur-Saône.

Now, as far as key resources are concerned, you’ve highlighted the importance of your sales force, this notion of project manager… which are one of the values and a key success factor for your company.

That’s it. Then our activity is a little bit everything we said, i.e. accompaniment, advice. It’s something absolutely essential, knowing that we strive to reason and to bring our clients to reason in terms of complete cost, and not just in terms of the printing page or the square meter of printing. The idea is to get a client who outsources the entire chain to us to say that they are willing to pay more if they can get rid of any headaches in the entire graphic department, from design to delivery and installation. On the other hand, we do have solutions – Marie mentioned them: printing on demand?

See per unit…

Exactly. The idea is to bring the customer to a reasoning that is finally quite simple, for ecological reasons, for marketing reasons, since the message changes all the time. It’s to say that there’s no point in printing 10,000 annual reports or 20,000 flyers… print just a few. Of course, it will be more expensive, but in the end you will have saved money, since you will have printed just your useful documents, that is to say the ones you need or the ones your customers need. We actually have a platform that allows you to do that and it works very well with some clients.

With current updates and customization… I’m very impressed.

It’s an extremely fluid tool that works extremely well, so I invite most of our clients, especially those who have franchises or agencies around the world, to use it. It’s absolutely beautiful.

We will discuss it with key partners… Marie?

I’ll just complete by saying that this is part of the real expectations of our customers today, which we anticipated a while ago, that’s what we said. We’re really dealing with problems, for everyone, of decentralization of orders. We have companies that are more and more spread out in geographical terms, that have more and more this desire to print the right quantity and the right print, to free themselves from document obsolescence, to stop stocks of documents that are obsolete after two or three months or that will not be sold out, that we will either throw away or continue to distribute when the information is no longer accurate, to stop transforming communication services into logistics services… Communication needs us to decentralize all these purchases, to take charge of these issues so that they can continue to create content. We are really putting… each person’s activities back into their own hands. We take care of the logistics, the printing, and the marketing-communication department of the company can refocus on creating content and creating value for these companies.

As you mentioned, Marie, you integrate a lot of things internally and you rely on a few strategic players. Can you tell us a few words about these strategic actors?

We have a very strong relationship with our machine builders. We have chosen to have a very specific fleet of machines, with a very close relationship. I’m thinking, for example, of swissQprint for large format, with whom we have developed a strong relationship that also allows us – when we talk about industrial printing, where we need to go a little further than what our machines do in a fairly classic way, to be able to work in partnership, hand in hand, to succeed in meeting the customer’s needs. So we’re going to go a little further in the machine, we’re going to put our hands a little further in the machine, we’re going to be able to test adjustments, etc. We’re going to be able to work in partnership, hand in hand, to meet the customer’s needs. In the same way, with Konica, in the small-format area, where we have been – I don’t know if we are still – one of the largest machine fleets in France, Konica Minolta. Therefore, these types of partnerships with our suppliers and machine manufacturers give us a lot of strength to respond to our customers’ problems. We also have our material suppliers with whom we try to have the strongest possible relationship, and to whom we are quite loyal. Of course, we are attentive to the market and the competition of our material suppliers, but we are quite loyal because, once again, in complicated periods such as we experienced with the coronavirus, where there were certain materials that were very quickly out of stock or that were difficult to obtain, we know that when we have a strong relationship with our material suppliers, we are warned in advance of this type of problem and we manage to get out of it thanks to them. We also have a very strong relationship with our subcontractors; that’s what we explain to our customers. As I was saying earlier, we have a workshop that is almost 100% integrated, we have some parts that we don’t do, obviously, that are not our business, such as sublimation, event objects, event structures, etc. We also have a few parts that we don’t do, obviously, that are not our business. Structures are not our business. Offset too, with our partners, we have selected some. Because they are reliable and because we are not afraid of them when we place an order and ask ourselves if the deadline will be respected and if the quality will be there. We know it. So, if we commit ourselves to our client, we commit ourselves with people with whom we already have a long term relationship and on whom we can count. With our subcontractors, we have a strong relationship on products such as the virtual library – we talked about it earlier; it’s co-construction with our partner Bee Buzziness located in Grenoble, which really manages the digital part, and we worked with them on the construction of the “print on demand” part. We really work together, hand in hand. We’re also part of a group called Docuworld, which is a group of digital printers and is a group for buying and sharing good practices and advice. We meet about once a month, right now in live video – we’re spread out all over France anyway, so it’s often live – and we have two conventions a year. The idea is to go together to negotiate contracts, but it’s not necessarily about purchases related to digital printing. It can be about fire extinguishers, for our clothes… and especially about walking together. For example, this year we brought in finishing with JETvarnish at AGG Print. These are equipments that our friends in the network don’t necessarily have, and therefore, instead of working with an external partner, they will rather go to us for this type of request, and in the same way, we will go to them for labels because we don’t make them, not having a specific machine … It also allows us to have a reliable relationship. Finally, the last partner is in sports and sponsorship, especially women’s sports for us. As Denis said, we are historically linked to basketball by Alain Gilles. We are sponsors of the women’s ASVEL, which was Lyon Basket at the time and which became ASVEL after Tony Parker’s takeover. It is first of all a partner and, at the heart of this women’s ASVEL, we have a network of all the ASVEL partners with whom we maintain a very close relationship. These are all our partners.

Precisely, I am going to talk with Denis, to carry out all these strategies… What’s already interesting is that you’re pointing out that, today, the isolated printing company has had its day. As you can see, AGG Print is really part of an ecosystem and is well placed in this ecosystem by reflecting on its partnerships or the synergies it can bring both to its customers and its partners… Denis, precisely to implement and respond to these different strategies and productions… Just a few words on the cost structure…

I’m not going to reveal our cost structure in detail, but I will say two things. Globally, we are trying to get out of the commercial discourse and the notion of cost by talking about value, so service, advice? That’s the first thing. Then, I would say that even on standard products, we have resolutely started thinking about automating a certain number of processes that will enable us to optimize costs by limiting human effort on sterile tasks as much as possible.

AGG Print has entered Industry 4.0 at full speed, we could talk about it together, with all this automation and identification of what adds value, trying to eliminate everything that is non-value added. Finally, a few words about your revenue stream, so that we can wrap up and have a global view of AGG Print’s business model?

It’s quite simple. It is obviously, at the heart of everything, the printing of the products and what goes with it, i.e. the search for solutions, which includes the DTP or consulting that we sell to our customers. So we’re trying to align our revenue structure with our strategy, which is diversification, consulting, bringing value to customers…

Thank you very much, Denis and Marie, for sharing so many points that are so interesting and inspiring. I already remember that this is an ethical company – that’s the first thing that transpires from AGG Print, the importance of sustainability, of being in tune with your customers’ demands for more eco-responsibility? This is extremely important. Then your whole approach to partnerships, which you also have in sports…

Women’s sport.

It’s really something I like very much. Then the importance of having a company connected at all levels, including the showroom, which is the most relevant channel – and for that, bravo. I often use it as an example when I go to see customers. I often refer to your showroom and tell them to go and see it, and to the audience that has listened to our video, I tell them to go and take a close look at it. Bravo and thank you very much, Denis and Marie… and see you soon! This video on AGG Print’s unique business model will be on the Inkish platform and subtitled in different languages. My partners will be delighted to be able to share your experience through their different networks, both in Europe and in the different continents. And don’t hesitate, when the video will be online, to comment on it. I’m sure there will be many questions and comments. See you soon!

See you soon! Thank you Yves!