Kurt Snouffer, president of Office Concepts in Fort Wayne, IN has spent 37+ years building his office technology dealership into one of the most successful in the Midwest. He may not have the biggest dealership there, but he’s holding his own, and at the same time, growing in a difficult economic climate and in an industry that’s undergoing some rapid changes. We ran into Snouffer back in May at the Lexmark dealer meeting in Lexington where he shared his success stories with the dealer audience during the General Session. A week and a half later I caught up with Snouffer to delve more deeply into what makes him and his dealership tick.
How’s business?
Snouffer: I’m happy to report our business is very good, we’re up 18 percent in 2012 on the top line and up a good amount—undisclosed—on the bottom line as well.
What portions of your business are growing fastest and why?
Snouffer: MPS is growing the fastest for us. We’re ahead of 2012, and our three-year projection is for year-over-year growth of 12.5 percent.
You’ve taken a vertical approach to your market. Did you do that consciously or did that strategy just evolve over time?
Snouffer: This was by design about 12 years ago. I wanted healthcare to be our number one vertical. Being a Baby Boomer and somewhat of a novice futurist, I study trends a lot and I knew healthcare was going to expand because of the demographics in the United States. We can see it in our own marketplace. Healthcare consumes printed pages and has needs for automated electronic applications and we wanted to get a good share of that. Financial and legal are the number two and three markets for us followed by general business with anywhere from 5 to 1,500 employees, and lastly, not-for-profits.
Who are your primary competitors?
Snouffer: Our number one competitor is ourselves because we put our own limitations on ourselves even though we’re growing rapidly. I think that’s true in any organization. When it gets down to actual competitors our biggest is RBS (Ricoh Business Systems). I’m a Ricoh dealer through the Lanier brand name and having my primary brand manufacturer as my greatest competitor is a little disappointing. They’re followed by Canon/Océ and Konica Minolta. Konica Minolta is independent representation and Ricoh and Canon are direct operations.
Why do customers like doing business with Office Concepts?
Snouffer: Our unparalleled excellence and customer service. That’s a broad statement, but we define it a little deeper in our mission statement. All of my people understand the mission statement and can literally illustrate it in front of a customer on a piece of paper and explain what it means.
Every day, week, month, and year, we look at ways that we can increase our levels of customer service. How can we be a better asset to our customers? We strive for a 40 percent value gap between us and our next closest competitor. We constantly have discussions about that and what areas we can improve on so we can take our customers from beyond satisfied to delighted. We work hard at delighting our customers. That’s why people enjoy doing business with us—we’re better, we’re faster, and we’re easier to do business with.
Your dealership sells Lanier and Lexmark, why are those vendors a good fit for Office Concepts?
Snouffer: Lanier and Lexmark are a good fit because both provide significant support. We don’t need much technical support, but in the sales training area they’ve helped us. They have stellar products and they have a services model and a solutions model that fit our mission statement.
What are some of the biggest changes that have taken place in your dealership during the past five years?
Snouffer: Moving from a hardware model to a services model. Software as a service we all know has taken place in the marketplace and continues to take place, and is now evolving into hardware as a service. Going forward we must continue to change and migrate to what I think is coming, and that is eventually all of this is going to be on a subscription basis. We’ve seen that happen with cost-per-copy and cost-per-page programs and there’s going to be less emphasis on hardware and more on solutions.
Do you welcome these changes?
Snouffer: We thrive on change and find it exciting, but not without some pain.
How did you first get into managed print services?
Snouffer: We started planning our MPS business over seven years ago. We did a lot of studying, made investments up front in the infrastructure, and structured a plan that paid most of the benefits and profits to my MPS champions and to my direct sales force who were the MFP people. We educated all our MFP reps so they understood MPS and allowed them to have direct involvement with accounts with 25 printers or less. We then used specialists or champions for 25 printers or more. We trained our technicians on what MPS is and how it works, but we didn’t give them the sales training. Instead, we gave them all the conceptual training, so our technicians are adept at speaking about MPS with our customers and any prospective customers they might run into as well.
What is the one thing about selling MPS you wish you knew back when you started?
Snouffer: Locally connected devices—there’s a lot more out there than you would think. And that the technology to capture the information in an automated fashion is still not reliable and that you absolutely have to visit the customer and discover where the pages are being printed on a regular basis. If we’d known that up front, there would have been some prints that didn’t fall through the cracks that we could have billed for. But we capture that now. It took us a bit of learning in order to get a system in place that would protect us against that unforeseen threat.
Are you already or are you thinking about getting into managed services/managed network services?
Snouffer: We’re planning for managed networked services now and have been for some time. We’ve put our toe into the water with a couple of pilot projects with some customers where we’ve had some deep relationships. My marketplace isn’t like the East Coast or the West Coast. Rather than being early adopters, my marketplace tends to be Main Street America and after others jump on board then my marketplace jumps on board.
I like to jump on these things early, but have learned that jumping in too early can cost a lot of money and you can sometimes get ahead of your marketplace. Which model we’re going to use for MNS has yet to be determined. We’re supporting it 100 percent ourselves now, but when we roll this out to our customer base full force there’s a decision that has to be made on the infrastructure. There are some good programs out there we’re evaluating and we’re trying to decide if we want to piggyback with somebody or if we want to make those investments in our own infrastructure. We’re going to go there, we just haven’t determined exactly how yet.
What is the biggest challenge facing your dealership in 2013?
Snouffer: It’s become harder and harder to find high-quality people on the sales side. On the technical side we seem to be able to find people. There’s a lot of trading of sales personnel in our industry and we tend to avoid that. I can only think of one time where it worked the few times we’ve done that. The rest of the time you’re just getting somebody else’s problems.
There seems to be a generation gap as well when it comes to this industry.
Snouffer: Young people don’t seem to be attracted to this industry. They tend to look at the industry as a copier industry. We’re trying to move away from that and in a service sense we are. As we continue to evolve with more services, maybe we’ll be able to attract more young people. When you look at increased level of compensation, unless somebody has an advanced degree, this industry is going to pay them as well as or better than other industries, and I know in my own dealership, better.
I’m thinking that I need to look at somebody with an engineering or sales engineering background because it’s no longer going out and selling hardware, it’s going out and flowcharting a customer’s workflow and developing a customized solution.
What do you do to relax when you’re not working?
Snouffer: I’m fortunate to have some good people on staff. It took 37 years to develop them. It allows me to get away to my Florida home that I enjoy a lot. I spend time with the family. I go to the beach, play golf, and look for other ways to decompress, sometimes fishing or boating. In the summer I spend a lot of time at a lake home that is only 45 minutes from my office. I can get away from the hustle and bustle, but even when I’m on vacation I get up each day and spend the first couple of hours connected with my office, checking to make sure everything is running the way it should.
What gets you out of bed in the morning and jazzed about coming to work?
Snouffer: I’ve always loved technology and the speed at which technology moves and changes, call it Moore’s law if you will. That drives me, and solutions. I’m constantly looking for ways to improve productivity in my business and my customer’s businesses. I get energized by that.
