In 1998, Harrison retired and handed over the business to his other son-in-law, Richard Bannister, owner of the Boundary Mill retail chain. With this, the team moved to new facilities at RB House and this is where the well-known bottle green branding came into play – Bannister’s ‘signature colour’. The same year the company launched a 32-bit version of the software and made the move from a proprietary database to the SQL server platform which until this time wasn’t available to the SME market. This is described as a real turning point for Tharstern. Another 15 years passed with many innovations, growth, and success along the way and in 2012 Bannister revealed plans to sell the business. Amidst fears the Tharstern name would be lost if bought by a competitor, the management team secured backing from private equity house Mobeus Equity Partners and made a bid for the company themselves. This saw managing director Keith McMurtrie, technical director Antony Lord, and sales director Lee Ward complete a management buyout of Tharstern. Over the next few years, the management team worked with Mobeus to create a three-year plan for significant growth and 2015 saw a major rebrand for the company’s visual identity and logo. Tharstern ▲ Keith McMurtrie, managing director of Tharstern joined the company in 1991 39 www.printmonthly.co.uk May / June 2023 - Issue 342 ▼ Tharstern’s main product is Tharstern Desktop which is a comprehensive business workflow solution 1984 – Tharstern was founded 1991 – Keith McMurtrie, managing director of Tharstern joined 66 – members of staff 2012 – management buyout 2015 – Re-brand of identity and logo Statistics COMPANY SPOTLIGHT / THARSTERN most of the team working from home and the office is always open should they choose to come in. “It’s crucial that we keep up communication while people work from home so our teams have regular stand-up meetings within their own team and weekly cross-departmental standups,” McMurtrie explains. “We’ve always had field-based staff who visit our customers on-site and while this went 100% virtual during the pandemic, we’re now operating a hybrid approach to this too. Customers mainly want a virtual session because they can just have an hour here or there, instead of the usual half day or full day that used to happen. But sometimes they want us on-site, which is fine too.” Maintaining an engaged company culture whilst working from home is something McMurtrie says has been a big challenge for Thartstern. Prior to the pandemic, the company had a long-standing employee engagement programme which was very successful in creating an engaged culture. In fact, Tharstern actually won an award for this. However, the pandemic and working remotely understandably made this much more difficult. McMurtrie explains how the team tried switching its activities to virtual ones for a while but people were fed up with sitting at their desks staring at their screen all day and didn’t want to continue to do so in the evening. “We tried lots of different ways to solve this, before coming to the conclusion that the most effective approach was to have bi-annual staff conferences where everyone attends, no matter where they’re based, and we have lots of updates from the CEO and the leadership team, along with various social activities too. “In addition to the existing activities such as monthly staff newsletters, culture-driven inductions, and employee engagement survey software, we’ve managed to successfully maintain our engaged culture and I’m proud to say that we have a company full of very happy people.” It’s this company full of happy people that McMurtrie says is his favourite thing about Tharstern. He explains that there is a lot of talk of creating what he calls a ‘Bionic Business’ which centres around three things that create a successful business: Technology, Processes, and People. “Each member of staff needs to be knowledgeable and driven, but also a team player. At Tharstern we’re very lucky to have that. I like to think that we have a very open way of working and communicating so all the Tharstern team feel comfortable bringing ideas forward, offering their also successfully launched its MIS in the US. Almost 40 years since it was founded and Tharstern has grown to a team of 66 and now operates from an 8,000sq ft building however the company is in the process of moving to a 4,000sq ft premises to reflect its move to hybrid working and to reduce its carbon footprint. Engaged Company Culture Describing what the company offers the print industry today, McMurtrie says: “Our main product is Tharstern Desktop which is a comprehensive business workflow solution designed for print professionals who want to make their company run faster, better, and smarter. “It’s for PSPs who want to speed up print jobs so they flow swiftly through each department with little intervention, and free up their team so they can provide the exceptional customer experience and fast delivery times that the modern print buyer demands.” McMurtrie adds: “On top of this we have a team of print technology experts who are always on hand to guide our customers. We have great relationships with all the leading vendors and have many established integrations, as well as a comprehensive API which allows new integrations to be easily developed.” Since the pandemic, the company has had a flexible approach to working with
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