The word flat generally isn’t in Mark Miller’s vocabulary. But it was an appropriate description for the financial performance of Eakes Office Solutions in 2021. The Grand Island, Nebraska-based dealer certainly gets a mulligan due to the pandemic, as do all dealers. And frankly, Read More

This month’s State of the Industry report provides a reprieve from some tiresome topics that have dominated the industry press, namely A3/A4, supply chain sagas, chip shortages, rising interest rates and inflation. Plus, it won’t be long until economists start sounding the Read More

While this month’s State of the Industry report focuses on in-house leasing and financing, it has an underlying supply chain subtopic that, three years ago, probably would not have existed. Certainly, shipping/installation delays are hardly strangers to the office business, but Read More

Small changes, in the eyes of Mason Smith, can produce significant impacts over time. As the president and CEO of MTS Office Systems in Anderson, South Carolina, this can range from customer service tweaks to employee benefits enhancements and alterations that enhance internal Read More

The REIMAGINE dealer conference hosted by Kyocera June 1-3 represented the largest dealer-hosted event since the onset of the pandemic, with approximately 850 attendees representing 225 partner organizations at the JW Marriott San Antonio. Many dealers echoed a common sentiment Read More

This month’s focus on dealers who offer in-house leasing brings us to one of the most popular conundrums among our panelists: in mitigating supply chain issues, how do you prioritize where equipment goes between net-new placements and existing client upgrades? The backorder woes Read More

Perhaps in another life, Jodie Grice would’ve found a calling as a bomb squad tech in charge of disarming devices before they have a chance to detonate. While such a profession is both noble and brave—and likely carries with it a handsome compensation plan—it doesn’t leave much Read More

San Antonio — Following the passing of his mother, Oscar Sanchez traveled back to his home country of Spain in order to spend some much-needed time with his father—10 days, in fact. Sanchez, the president and CEO of Kyocera Document Solutions America (KDSA), used some of that Read More

You may not be familiar with American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, but his Serenity Prayer has been repeated, co-opted, modified and used for decades in both religious and secular contexts (it was actually coined Serenity Prayer by Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1950s). Written Read More

As we open this month’s State of the Industry report on in-house leasing, one of the most popular talking points among our panel of dealers was the need to provide those end-users who were hardest hit by the pandemic—read: the most cash-strapped—with options to navigate their Read More

Suffice to say, Sharp Business Systems is quite fond of the effort Melani Patterson puts forth on a daily basis, as evidenced by the six promotions she has received since 2010. But this associate vice president of sales strategy and an industry veteran of nearly 25 years can Read More

In conjunction with this month’s State of the Industry focus on leasing, we’ve assembled an august group of standalone financing companies and industry manufacturer leasing arms to provide some behind-the-scenes perspective. They’ll shed insight into the modifications that have Read More

One could say Joseph Contreras is living a charmed business life. From an Xs and Os standpoint, one could call it 75% coordination and 25% execution. The luck variable isn’t factored in here; while Contreras may modestly confess to good fortune, nothing has been left to fate. Read More

It’s never easy being the leader of a $50-plus million office technology dealership, and many executives have pondered how much more productive they would be if they could clone themselves to divide and conquer the day-to-day tasks. Systel Business Equipment may have many Read More

Competitive advantage is at the heart of every viable office technology dealership. In a landscape where resellers are touting much of the same equipment and many of the same services as the dealer down the street, developing a point of differentiation—no matter how perceptibly Read More