中文The call that ends a business
There is a particular kind of phone call in this industry — the one where a director tells a liquidator the company simply cannot pay its way anymore. That call came this week for EPM Print Group, a commercial printer on Australia’s Sunshine Coast, which has been placed into creditors voluntary liquidation. In plain terms, the shareholders recognised the business was insolvent and decided to wind it up.
Owner and director Scott Lenhoff told the liquidator the company’s liabilities meant it could not continue, and that it should be wound up. At the same time, Lenhoff Investments — Lenhoff’s own entity — was also put into creditors voluntary liquidation. When the holding company and the operating company go down together, it is usually a sign the hole was too deep to patch.
A short, hard four years
The timing is the cruel part. EPM emerged from the variously named Express Print & Mail businesses, owned by Wendy Chadwick and her son Matthew Chadwick until about four years ago, when the current owners bought in. And EPM only re-equipped its digital print fleet at the start of this year — a fresh investment that now looks painfully mistimed.
The business offered digital and offset printing, signage, and direct mail services. That is a broad, sensible mix for a regional commercial printer. It should have been a survivor. Instead, it joins a long and growing list of Australian print businesses that could not outrun tightening margins.
The backstory nobody wants
Dig into the history and the warning signs were there. The business known as 128950489 Pty Ltd — formerly Express Print & Mail Pty Ltd — was put into liquidation five years ago carrying $3.18m in debts to unsecured creditors, according to the annual administration return. Before that, Matthew Chadwick sold the Express Print & Mail business to his mother Wendy for $177,000 in May 2020, two months before the company was liquidated. The operation then moved to new 1,400sqm premises in nearby Kunda Park on a five-year lease. Wendy Chadwick had previously owned Express Print & Mail.
None of that history dooms a business by itself. But it does show a pattern: this was a company that had already been through one insolvency cycle, rebranded, and tried again. Second acts in regional print are hard, and this one did not make it.
What it signals
For the wider industry, EPM’s collapse is not an isolated tragedy. It is a data point in a stubborn trend: commercial print margins are being squeezed from every side — energy, labour, materials, and customers who can route standard jobs to the lowest-cost online provider. A regional shop that does a bit of everything is especially exposed, because it competes with specialists on every front.
It is also a reminder that re-equipping a press fleet is not a turnaround strategy by itself. New machines help you produce more efficiently, but they do not fix a weak order book or thin margins. If the work is not there, a shiny new digital press just accelerates the losses.
The human cost
Behind the corporate language are unsecured creditors — often suppliers — who may recover little, and employees whose jobs end abruptly. Regional print communities are small; the loss of a local employer ripples outward. That is the part annual administration returns never capture.
If there is a lesson here, it is brutal but useful: in today’s print market, breadth without a defensible niche is a liability. The shops that last are the ones with a sharp speciality, a loyal local base, or a genuine cost advantage. EPM had the breadth. It needed one of the others.
Source: Print21
