KEY POINTS:
It's an offer many small New Zealand businesses can only dream of.
When UK-based print and media company Pindar bought digital typesetting company Egan Reid, they asked founders Mary Egan and Gerard Reid, "how big can you grow?"
"What they said to us was `if we give you unlimited resources, what can you do with it?'," Egan says.
Now newly rebranded as Pindar NZ and moved into spacious new offices on Great North Road, the 18-strong firm is gearing up to triple in size by the end of next year. It expects annual turnover to increase from the current $1 million to $7 million in two years.
Egan Reid had developed a speciality in creating software solutions for complex publishing projects. One of the recent jewels in its crown is the first Australasian edition of Mosby's Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing and Health Professions, a mammoth 2500-page, full-colour encyclopedia it produced for international science and health publisher Elsevier.
While Mary Egan was teaching herself digital typesetting from her spare room in the late 1980s, on the other side of the world Pindar was developing software to handle complex catalogue work.
When it came looking for a partner in 2006, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise put it in touch with Egan Reid.
Gerard Reid says now Pindar NZ is working on projects such as converting the UK parent company's software package Agility into a book publishing industry tool.
"It will be the first time ever that anybody has had a comprehensive content management tool for the book industry, anywhere in the world."
The availability of cheap labour has turned India into the current world typesetting Mecca, but Pindar NZ says it's now giving the Indians a run for their money on price because its systems are so efficient.
Reid says Pindar itself has 650 staff in India, producing work such as advertisements for the Yellow Pages UK and US. But he says the Indian companies can only handle "plain vanilla" jobs.
Reid said the original Mosby's was published 32 years ago and predated digital typesetting. As it was updated every four years the publishers had migrated data out of old technology into new software, and "created a monster".
"When we were sent the files from America, they were in such chaos that we weren't surprised they had 64 people working on it full time."
It took Egan Reid the equivalent of 40 people working for a year to complete the project, but it had been taking the Americans 240 person years, Reid says.
Elsevier has been so impressed with the firm's work that it has asked it to meet its validation standard. Only four firms out of 90 Elsevier has worked with in Europe have met the standard so it's a challenge, but Pindar NZ hopes to achieve it by Christmas.
One obstacle the company came up against locally was access to a fibre optic internet connection.
"We're absolutely dependent on it because the files [we send] are huge," Egan says, but it took a three-month battle with Telecom and lobbying by the Telecommunications Users' Association before it got the connection to its Grey Lynn offices.
Mary Egan says the firm had always thought globally, but could never get enough capital to grow. Just 2000 books are published each year in New Zealand in total, whereas just one of Pindar NZ's current UK clients publishes 5000 books annually. So the firm sees unlimited opportunities for growth.
Reid likes to quote Ernest Rutherford, who reportedly said when asked why New Zealanders had been able to split the atom: "We didn't have any money so we had to think."
"We think we are the prime example of the way New Zealand should go," Reid says.
GROWTH ROCKET
* Pindar NZ is a digital typesetting company, recently purchased by UK-based print and media company Pindar.
* It specialises in creating software solutions for complex publishing projects.
* With the backing of its UK parent it aims to triple in size in 18 months, taking on publishing work from around the world.
