A promptly returned phone call and a self-deprecating sense of humour (“Okay, but no photographs, you haven’t seen what I look like”!) formed the basis of my expectations of Philip Warner. I was intrigued, reports Harjit Gammon

In reality Philip Warner is courteous, forthcoming and not un-photogenic! Belonging to ‘The Jam’ generation, his contemporaries are the likes of David Cameron, David Miliband and Nick Clegg and like them he is at the top of his field. I meet him at the company’s head office and 10 acre site in Bourne. Set slightly back from the street, it

could easily be missed (I have to admit I have never noticed it) in spite of its very significant role in the livelihood of the town and surrounding region. But this lack of intrusiveness appeals to Philip Warner. Happy to defend the town, he has no wish to be seen dominating it.

It was, of course, in Bourne that his grandfather, Lorenzo Warner, (a teetotal, non-smoking, devout Methodist) founded the business some 80 years ago in 1927. The site of his second newsagent’s shop in West Street, just a short distance from the current premises is now a pet shop, but the original Warner’s name is still to be found engraved on the tiled floor entrance to the shop. At a later date a printing shop was attached to the back of these premises, as was often customary at the time, to meet the needs of local businesses, for leaflets and so forth to promote their wares.

From these humble beginnings (there was a further newsagent’s in Abbey Street, the first, and one in All Saints’ Street in Stamford) has grown a multi-million pound business encompassing both printing and publishing with an annual turnover of £52 million. The company remains the exclusive preserve of the family. His elder brother runs the publishing business and another (the youngest of the three) has his own antiques concern in the town.

But Philip was not groomed (or coerced) to enter the firm. He came to it via a slightly circuitous route, having nurtured a desire to join the Navy. Three days on a submarine however soon led him to conclude that “it wasn’t for me”. Having acquired an education at Exeter (he read Politics) and met his wife-to-be, he embarked upon a training for taking up the mantle of the family business at Lancaster. He gained a Masters in business and marketing. His conversation is still peppered with the language of a classically trained marketer - “the qualities that make you successful destroy you”, “the longer a business is in business, the more likely it is to go out of business”. But there is little chance of this happening under his stewardship. Printing may be evolving as a result of the internet and the way we live now, but as he points out radio didn’t destroy newspapers, or TV radio. So although printing will change, the customer service driven/client responsive mind set of the company under his leadership should ensure not merely its survival but its growth for generations to come.

His early hands-on experience in the business – he worked there at weekends and during school holidays (from Stamford School) from the age of 16 to earn pocket money (“we had to earn it, we weren’t just given it”), as his own son does now – meant he was familiar with printing and knew he liked it and the people involved in it. Indeed the man he worked for then is still with the company now, he tells me with quiet pride. But he is not a sentimental man. On the contrary, he is a sharp, hard-headed business man, who takes his tenure at the head of the firm very seriously.

His personal objective is to ensure the business is left in better shape than he found it. Goal achieved I think, since the business has had the best performance of its history in the past five years (it is eleven years since he took on the mantle from his father). He muses that he is probably more like his grandfather, (a strong, determined man and former Mayor of Bourne) than his father in this respect. His father, by contrast, was widely known for his charming, friendly personality whereas he, self-admittedly, is a somewhat Teutonic, revenue/results driven man. He ponders momentarily about the cyclical nature of these things and the people friendliness of his own sons, who frequently drop by and talk to people they know at the company, rather like their grandfather.

And in the words of the motto of the “New York Times”, that my friends, is “all the news that’s fit to print”.

• A Community book has been launched to commemorate the firm’s 80 year history