A dynamic businessman has pledged to champion the use of the Welsh language after joining a Fast Growth 50 copy firm.
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Arwel Griffiths has been snapped up by Wrexham Industrial Estate-based Rawson Digital after he sold his own successful copy firm – Kon-X Wales Ltd – which he started with two partners from a garage in 2005 and turned into a £2m turnover business.
Now he has come on board for the senior management team at Rawson Digital which also has an office at Dinorwic Marina in Y Felinheli, Gwynedd, not far from Arwel’s beloved home village of Trefor.
The father-of-three, 44, was one of six children raised in the community and he is now living back there with his wife Nicky and two of his children, Robin, seven, and Ana, four.
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He’s a school governor at his children’s primary school –,Ysgol Yr Eifl, and treasurer of his village’s cycling club, Clwb Beicio’r Eifl (CBE).
Passionate about his roots, the Welsh language and its culture, he has been asked by Rawson Digital MD Vaughn Rawson to look at ways in which the company, which has just reached its fifth birthday, now employs 15 people and is turning over £2.4m, can improve its bilingual credentials.
Arwel, who has worked in the copy industry for 17 years, said:
“Vaughn is very proud of his Wrexham roots and pleased to have built such a successful business in North Wales from scratch and he has been keen for some time to make the company more bilingual.
“I am more than happy to be leading this for Vaughn because first and foremost I am a proud Welshman who speaks Welsh and I am passionate about the language and preserving its future and we can’t rest on our laurels where this is concerned.
“The firm has recently taken on more Welsh speaking staff, including a Welsh speaking engineer.
“I will be looking at making the website bilingual, making sure much of our information and marketing literature is in both languages and developing strategic partnerships within the Welsh speaking community to prove Rawson Digital’s commitment to the region and the Welsh language.”
Rawson Digital’s long-term commitment to the Welsh language was not the only thing to attract Arwel to the firm.
He’s also a huge fan of the way Vaughn and his team operate by putting their customers and the after care service they receive at the heart of everything they do.
Arwel, who started his career in retail and found himself a supermarket store manager at the tender age of 20, going on to earn himself a reputation as a trouble shooter for under-performing stores, said: “I started my own business with two former colleagues of mine, Aled Williams and Ian Marshall, from the first copy firm I worked for called Konica Peter Llewellyn.
“That was my first job in the copy industry after starting my working career at Kwik Save supermarket, where I started on the tills at the weekend aged 16 and took a job there as a supervisor aged 18 when I left Ysgol Glan y Môr in Pwllheli after my A-levels.
“When I started working for Konica Peter Llewellyn, which at the time was a franchise of Konica, the focus was very much all about customer service. The after service care department was probably one of the best in the industry at the time.
“I got a fantastic education in how a customer-focused business was run and I very much liked doing business in that way.”
The company was later absorbed in to the wider Konica UK group and then merged with industry giant Minolta.
Arwel said: “Myself, Aled and Ian felt we could do it ourselves and in 2005, that’s what we did.
“None of us had the experience of running a business but we had a good, varied skills set. Ian was extremely methodical and ended up taking over a lot of the admin side of things whereas Aled and I excelled in sales.”
The company was very successful and in 2016, the trio sold their business to Apogee. Arwel and Aled stayed on for a while as the firm made its transition but Arwel had decided the time had come to move on.
He said: “So when I got the phone call from Vaughn and the chance came along to contribute to the success of Rawson Digital – the timing was absolutely right.
“The company has that family run feel to it. It’s been built on striving to always do the best for the customer and I like this style of working.
“When I gain a new customer, I know I can look after them to the best of my ability and this is the approach which has made Vaughn’s business so successful.
“Something he also does is that he really values his staff. Looking after his team is very important and it’s not just in terms of financial reward but also by treating them to trips to Chester races or a night at the pub. He includes their families as well.
“All of this is integral to the guiding principle of the business which puts the customer at the heart of what we do.”
