Take a good look at the head-and-shoulders picture of Jim Loparich. If he looks quite familiar, then there’s a strong likelihood you are currently doing business with Pinnacle Sales.
The Westlake, OH-based master distributor of OEM and compatible imaging parts and supplies may not have enough employees for a company softball team, but it boasts a true home run hitter in its founder, a 40-year veteran of B2B sales in the office equipment space. He’s worked at dealers and manufacturers alike, understanding the entire supply chain end-to-end. If Loparich’s experience has taught him anything, it’s that this is a people business and the best way to cultivate a potential client is to meet every new dealer prospect and visit them regularly when they become a customer.
Jim Loparich, Pinnacle Sales
“Much of the competition sells over the phone or their sales reps don’t do in-person sales calls…maybe their business model doesn’t call for travel,” Loparich notes. “It’s extremely important to meet your customer face to face. That’s what sales is all about.
“It gives me the opportunity to tell my personal and professional story and build relationships. People buy from people they like. They first like you, then they trust you, then they buy from you.”
Founded in late 2009, Pinnacle maximizes a staff of four in processing nearly 9,000 orders per month. The distributor counts more than 40 supplier relationships—manufacturers, importers and distributors—that allows them to ship product from 60 locations in 18 states. Pinnacle Sales blankets the country via one or two-day ground shipping.
Plethora of Choices
Pinnacle prides itself on supplying any and every product that a dealer requires—be it OEM, remanufactured or compatible—and enjoys numerous exclusive manufacturing relationships that yield the goods much larger distributors do not have access to. The company distributes parts and supplies for all major brands, including Brother, Canon, DEC/Digital, Dell, Epson, Gestetner, HP, IBM, Konica Minolta, KYOCERA, Lanier, Lexmark, Muratec, NEC, Océ, OKI, Panasonic, Primera, Ricoh, RISO, Samsung, Savin, Sharp, Source Technologies, Tally-Genicom, Toshiba, Troy, Unisys-Burroughs, Xante and Xerox.
“Since Pinnacle’s inception, our business model has been and still remains 100 percent drop-shipping of all products, whether to dealers or their end-user customers,” Loparich explained. “We truly are experts and an industry leader at this process. This enables Pinnacle to afford dealers the leading edge on price, quality, fulfillment and delivery, which we back up with the best service and customer support in the industry.
“We are a source of products as a fulfillment company, whether they’re already built or we develop them ourselves. Quite simply, we’ve collapsed the supply distribution chain to its most basic and fundamental principle: Getting products where they need to be, on time, every time, at the lowest cost possible.”
Outpacing the Competition
Despite its comparatively small size among distributors, Pinnacle has caught the attention of its larger competitors, who have recently began offering products that Pinnacle previously had exclusively developed and remanufactured. Loparich keeps one step ahead of his contemporaries by working with dealers to develop the next big product. As a “sell through” company, Pinnacle helps dealers address pain points and challenges to jointly develop products that reduce expenses and enable dealers to be more competitive while increasing their bottom line.
Shown from left, the Pinnacle Sales team of Liz Ventura, Jim Loparich, Vickie Dickson and Patty Charielle
Some of Pinnacle’s primary targets include MFP drum units, unique MFP toners, off-brand printer cartridges and various parts. Loparich’s team huddles with dealers to determine which high monthly usage items are on their wish list for procurement, then Pinnacle determines whether it can remanufacture them. More often than not, Pinnacle can round up the OEM empties, rebuild them and ship back to customers at 30 to 65 percent off the OEM price.
“We design, build and test 100 percent in the U.S.A. on our own equipment, so the product loop is completely closed from end to end, guaranteeing product quality control,” he said. “The competitors who are attempting to take this business from us are utilizing offshore remanufacturers at a lower price. The product and quality control is inconsistent, which eventually helps us in the end. We just have to deal with pricing differential issues until the dealer realizes the poorer quality.”
Fundamental Business
Pinnacle sets itself apart from the competition by tending to the basic fundamentals of sound business: price, quality, fulfillment, delivery, service and support. Loparich works closely with the engineering and technical staffs of his manufacturers and suppliers and selects the best class of product from each one, which eliminates the guesswork on the part of a dealer’s purchasing department. As a result, Pinnacle’s product return rate is less than 1 percent, which Loparich believes is unmatched in the industry.
Customer service is another area in which Loparich feels his team is without peer. Dealers with annual sales ranging from $50,000 to $200 million constantly rave about the response level of the Pinnacle Team, and the fact that email queries are often answered in less than 10 minutes.
It’s extremely important to meet your customer face to face. That’s what sales is all about.
To help ease the burden on customer purchasing departments, Pinnacle has developed POPA (Pinnacle Order Processing Automation), its own software integration to dealer ERP systems. POPA automates the entire order processing cycle, from capturing the purchase order to closing out the invoice. “We own it and provide it to the dealers at no charge,” he adds.
“Pinnacle’s integration is a huge benefit to dealers and their end-user customers, streamlining capabilities and adding efficiencies far beyond other distributors in the industry,” Loparich noted.
“We also include Supply Intelligence from Gwentaa at no charge, which is a powerful front-end software that ties together onto one screen all the components of eAutomate, FM Audit, Print Fleet, Print Audit, OMD, tracking and inventory, with a single equipment number entry. We’ll soon complete our integration pipeline to MWAi Forza, a rising contender in the dealer ERP space.”
Customer-Branded Online Ordering
Pinnacle is also in the process of completing direct order entry integration into eAutomate from its dealer ecommerce websites and will be launching a large university ordering site for a client. The site is expected to generate 3,500 orders per month and anticipated annual retail sales for the dealer is projected to reach $2.9 million. The distributor and dealer intervention is opaque, as end users will only see university branding on the site, with Pinnacle providing all fulfillment on the back end.
“It’s as easy as buying from Staples or Office Depot,” Loparich noted. “Again, it is provided to the dealers for free.”
Pinnacle has enjoyed considerable progress in its marketing efforts. They continue to increase new products, dealers and distributors, with a goal of 20 percent growth per year in each category. In the past four years alone, Pinnacle has grown all three by 126 percent.
On the topic of revenue, anything less than 20 percent organic growth during the next five years would be deemed unacceptable to Loparich. “By organic growth I mean down in the trenches adding new business product by product, dealer by dealer, and distributor by distributor,” he said. “So basically, one at a time.”
M&A Approach to Growth
Perhaps the quickest vehicle to growth lies in Pinnacle’s quest to acquire a competitor in the $20 million revenue range. Loparich is in the process of exploring manufacturer and distributor candidates and hopes to close a deal in 2018. Following a 12-month integration process, Loparich plans to embark on obtaining another similar-sized (or larger) company.
Loparich is definitely looking to make M&A an integral part of Pinnacle’s long-term strategy moving forward.
“If we can acquire and integrate three companies inside of five years, I would be extremely happy,” he concluded. “While this seems like a very aggressive game plan, it is attainable and would drive Pinnacle Sales’ revenue beyond $100 million, thereby making us a major contender in the dealer parts and supply space by 2022. Besides, it will be lots of fun getting there, so I’m ready to get rocking and rolling in 2018.”
