Lucy Harrier's mum was reading the Courier one day and spotted a small ad. Prepress Projects, a copy editing and publishing company in Perth, was looking for a publishing assistant.
Lucy had a PhD in plant molecular biology and had spent nearly a decade as a lecturer. She wasn't looking for a job in publishing. But she took a step back, took the entry-level role, enrolled in an MSc in publishing at the same time, and decided she'd learn the industry properly from the inside.
Twenty-plus years later, she's the managing director. And Prepress Projects — which started in the early 1990s as a husband and wife business — is now employee-owned.
In this episode of Scale HER Up, she talks about the business she's helped build, the geopolitical forces that have tried to knock it sideways, and what it actually takes to lead through all of it.
What Prepress Projects does
Prepress Projects provides copy editing, proofreading, and publishing services to organisations — primarily, now, in the public sector and internationally. Their client portfolio includes UNICEF, UN Women, the UN Population Fund, and the Publications Office of the European Union. They have worked with over 53 UNICEF country offices across the world.
The business competes on quality, not price. Their biggest competitors are large organisations based in Asia, India, China, the Philippines, and increasingly Latin America — companies whose cost base means they can offer English language editing at a price Prepress cannot match and will not try to match.
"We target ourselves at a different end of the market. Everything's about quality in our communications. All our editors have to be native English speakers."
Fourteen of the sixteen staff are women. Publishing, Lucy notes, suits women well — particularly in terms of returning from maternity leave and flexible working. The operational board and the trust board are both predominantly female.
Employee ownership
In 2022, Prepress Projects transitioned to an employee ownership trust. It was a succession option that worked for the company's particular circumstances — keeping the business in Perth, keeping the jobs in Perth, and keeping the focus on the values that have driven it since the beginning.
In an employee-owned business, the shares are held in trust rather than by individuals. There are two boards: an operational board and a trust board. Lucy sits on both.
She describes it as a model that the Scottish Government is actively promoting — with a target of over 400 employee-owned businesses by 2030. It's not the right route for every business, but for Prepress it was the natural next step.
Brexit, geopolitics, and the Luxembourg solution
Before Brexit, Prepress Projects held contracts with around 15 EU devolved agencies: the European Drugs Agency, the European Banking Authority, and others. These weren't just good clients — they were part of the strategic diversification the company had built through the early 2000s.
When the Brexit agreement was signed, those agencies were forbidden from awarding contracts to British companies. Every contract ran to its end date. And then they were gone.
"That was a big thing for us."
The obvious solutions — opening an office in the Netherlands or Ireland — didn't add up for a small business. So Lucy and the team looked for another way. They found a Luxembourg-based company, Lexilux, which held similar contracts in German, French, and Romanian and whose values aligned with Prepress's own. When the Publications Office of the EU issued a major tender covering 24 languages including English, Prepress couldn't bid directly. But Lexilux could — and Prepress became a subcontractor, doing the English language editing work through the Luxembourg contract.
"It took a lot of digging about to find the right solution, and actually to find a company that aligned with our values."
The alignment mattered. Shared clients meant shared standards. When you know both parties have had to earn the same demanding client's trust, you know the quality bar is in the same place.
Trump, the UN, and what comes next
Having diversified their EU portfolio through Brexit, Prepress had also been diversifying their UN work — long-term agreements with UNICEF, UN Women, the UN Population Fund. A deliberate hedge against the EU uncertainty.
Then came the Trump administration's funding cuts to UN organisations. Work from the UNICEF New York office was curtailed. Contacts told Lucy that significant amounts of their funding from America had been reduced or removed.
"Although we're in Perth, we're getting affected by a lot of the geopolitical stuff."
Her response is the same as it's been throughout: not putting all the eggs in one basket, monitoring tenders across a wide portfolio of potential clients, staying active in the networks — including as a WEP signatory (Women's Empowerment Principles) through UN Women and as a member of the UK UN Global Compact — that give Prepress visibility with the kinds of organisations they serve.
It's a constant process. And it's the kind of strategic vigilance that a risk-averse managing director is, she says, actually quite good at.
The Institute of Directors
When Lucy became a director of Prepress Projects in 2013 — the first non-family director in the company's history — she knew she needed to understand what the role actually meant.
She joined the Institute of Directors. Over three to four years, she worked through their training programme and became a Chartered Director. It's the single best professional development decision she's made.
"It provided me with the high-level learning that I needed in finance, governance, strategy — key things that are essential to do a director's job well."
The legal dimension alone she found invaluable. The Companies Act, director responsibilities, risk, governance — none of it was knowledge she came in with, and none of it, she points out, is something people tend to get automatically when they step into a directorship.
She still participates in IoD quarterly financial updates. She attends events — a recent one at Abertay University on people and performance, a Moot Court session in Aberdeen that walked directors through their legal responsibilities in an actual training courtroom. She goes to the IoD London event roughly once a year, often timed with a client visit.
As a Chartered Director she's required to complete 30 hours of CPD per year. For someone who describes lifelong learning as a guiding principle, that's not a burden. It's a feature.
Resilience, and what it actually costs
In 2022 alone, Prepress Projects dealt with the transition to employee ownership, the end of their EU contracts, and the loss of a major UK contract they'd held since 2008 — which went to an Indian company.
Lucy also lost her father that year, after a long illness. And more recently, her mother.
"I've learned that I'm unbelievably resilient."
She's careful about the word. There's a difference between a business being resilient and a person being resilient, she says. You come to work. You conduct yourself professionally. You don't let the managing director's personal difficulties spill into the day unless it's unavoidable. You deal with your mother's estate in the evening and you run the business in the day.
"You come out the other side a different person."
Her guiding principle has stayed consistent throughout: treat people how you want to be treated yourself. She says manners cost nothing — saying good morning, having a chat before the day starts, making people feel seen. She publishes a Monday Motivation to the team every week: something about the weekend, a photo she's taken, a thought. It's been a fixture since she became MD.
On women in business, in 2026
A few weeks before this recording, Lucy went to a meeting in Perth with a male colleague. The person they were meeting spoke to her colleague. Directed their attention to him. Looked past her.
"I just went, yeah, things haven't changed."
That business never got the contract.
She's matter-of-fact about it. She's not angry, she says — she's resolved. Speak to people as equals regardless of race, ethnicity, gender. People should know better. And when they don't, they lose the business.
She had good female role models — a PhD supervisor who went on to become a university chancellor; her own mother. Women who were before their time, she says. She feels the responsibility to pass it forward.
About Lucy Harrier
Lucy Harrier is the managing director of Prepress Projects Limited, an employee-owned copy editing, proofreading, and publishing services company based in Perth, Scotland. She holds a PhD in plant molecular biology and an MSc in publishing, and is a Chartered Director of the Institute of Directors. Prepress Projects has been operating since the early 1990s and serves clients including UNICEF, UN Women, and the Publications Office of the European Union.
