Chip Miceli, President
Chip Miceli, president of DPOE, has been in the office imaging business since 1972. He’s a familiar face at dealer meetings and industry events and is one of those dealers who is always generous with his time and his industry insights, whether it’s speaking to the press, speaking at conferences, or rubbing elbows with his peers at industry functions.
His dealership, based in Elk Grove Village, IL, has been serving the Chicago area for 56 years and has successfully made the transition from a copier dealership to a dealership at the forefront of the services and solutions evolution. This emphasis on services, particularly IT services, has been impressive with that segment of the business alone, growing at a 150 percent clip the past three years. The other thing about Miceli is that he’s not shy about taking on new product categories and was one of the first dealers in the country to embrace Sharp’s presentation technology, another area of his business that is also expanding rapidly.Bn February I had the opportunity to talk to Miceli about the industry; his dealership; his participation in industry events, something not as any of his peers tend to do; his strategy for finding new sales people; and the challenges of working with family.
How has the last 12 months been for DPOE?
Miceli: Pretty good, we increased our revenue, and we grew our network services business quite a bit. Hopefully, this year it’s going to take off and fly even higher.
What are you folks doing right?
Miceli: We hired more sales people, younger sales people who seem to gravitate more towards the technology. Because of that it was easier to train them and get them to go out and find the opportunities.
Was it difficult to convince yourself to hire younger sales people?
Miceli: Not me.
When you say younger, what age bracket and what kind of backgrounds do they have and where did you find them?
Miceli: They’re under 30 years old and fresh out of college. It’s different types of majors, some in journalism and a lot in communication. Nobody ever goes to school to become a sales person so we didn’t hire anybody with that background. We just hit the colleges pretty heavy, job fairs, and created a lot of interest [in working for DPOE]. We talked to them about technology, and they said, ‘this is something we might be able to do’. And they’re doing a good job.
What other segments of your business besides MNS are doing particularly well right now?
Miceli: The service side on MPS is flat and we’re not growing any clicks there. Every time we get a new account with clicks, we have another account that lowers its clicks. But the hardware side has grown about 4 percent, which has surprised me. With the price of hardware coming down and us consolidating, we sold more hardware than we ever had before.
Why are those MPS clicks going down?
Miceli: Some of the programs we put together for these people has helped them print less. When we use our archiving software or our workflow software and software like PaperCut, that helps them print less. Because that’s what we do for them, that creates more opportunities.
What segments of your business do you see room for improvement?
Miceli: I’d like to see us double our revenue in managed network services this year. I believe we put together a great workflow package and we’re pushing that hard because I believe that there’s a lot of opportunity in that arena.
What’s the biggest challenge facing DPOE this year?
Miceli: I don’t see any challenges or anything hard for us to overcome. I’d like to buy a couple of more companies; I’d like to buy an IT company. That’s probably my biggest challenge, trying to find one that’s for sale let alone one that would fit our MO here.
You’re someone who seems to be out there learning, attending conferences and events outside of your manufacturer dealer meetings, is that something you’ve always done?
Miceli: I started a peer group 10 years ago and have been learning from them ever since. And by attending other industry events I found I could come back with more information that was beneficial for our organization. That’s why I ended up going to them. I’m going to be cutting back on some of them because I think some have become a waste of time. In fact I’m talking to people now about consolidating some of these events so there’s only one, like years ago in the NOMDA days.
What are some of the things you’ve learned over the years by attending these events, and you can speak generally?
Miceli: I always make sure I come home with at least two things I can use in the business. So every event is different. I attend the seminars where there are panels of dealers because I learn more from dealers than I do from vendors. If there’s a dealer panel those are the ones anybody in our industry can learn from. I also participate in panels because I like giving back to the community. It’s been good to me and I like helping other dealers become involved in print management or managed network services.
You’re also president of Select Dealer Group until May of this year, how has participation in that organization been helpful for DPOE?
Miceli: That organization is over 10 years old and we have a steady 40 dealers. I’m finding dealers are becoming more involved. The meetings have been interesting and they learn a lot. There’s at least 25 dealers who attend every meeting and we have at least three a year.
They all walk away with something and that’s what it’s all about. There’s also the fact it gets you out of your office, you can sit down, or at cocktail hour pick other people’s brains about the things you need to do better in your business. That’s good for dealers to do that and helps them understand different ways [of approaching the business] more so than listening to a speaker or someone talking about best practices because then you can hone in on that, not just talking about your best practice, but how you really do this.
DPOE is a family business and your brother, your three sons and your daughter are all in the business. Are you able to leave the business back in the office when socializing with family and friends outside of the office or does business somehow find a way to enter into the conversation?
Miceli: I live and breathe this stuff so it’s hard for it not to come into your social life. And the group of people I hang with always want to know, what’s the new technology you’re pushing today? They bring it up more than I do.
Working with your children in the business, how does that work, is it challenging at times?
Miceli: It can be. That’s why they don’t report to me.
What are some of the things you’re doing at DPOE that have you excited about 2014?
Miceli: A year and a half ago we built a network operations center with four seats. Now we have to figure out how to expand it because we need to add at least two more right now and at least another two the end of this year or next year. One of the things on my agenda is how to expand it and where do I put it? Right now it’s in our showroom. We’re trying to work that out now.
We’ve also gotten into the video wall business and that’s an area that we’re hoping grows a little faster than it did last year.
You’ve been in this business for a long time, how much longer would you like to keep doing this?
Miceli: Until I die. It’s fun, I enjoy going to the peer groups I belong to and the conferences. There’s so much I’m involved in and I have too much fun learning new stuff and changing the way we do things for me to sit back and retire. I don’t know, I don’t mind working three days or four days a week and having a long weekend, but I take those now. My wife said to me once, “I hope you don’t retire because I don’t think we can live together.” That would probably be true.
