Milton Bartley
President & CEO
ImageQuest
ImageQuest is a Nashville-based Managed Services Provider that offers a full suite of services, including Managed IT, Managed Print, and Managed Communications. These services are supported by a team that encompasses Service Desk, NOC, Tier 1, 2 and 3 technicians and engineers, and account and project managers. Recently I spoke with founder Milton Bartley to get a better idea of what it is they do, how they do it so well, the challenge of offering a services-led approach, and the trends impacting his business.
Bartley started out as a color specialist in 1995 during the early days of color, working for a Louisville, Kentucky copier dealer. He remained there for nine years before joining Lanier as director of operations where he traveled around the country working closely with dealer reps and dealer principals. After several years with Lanier he bought a struggling Sharp dealership in 2007, which became ImageQuest.
What was the inspiration for buying a dealership and becoming a dealer?
Bartley: Visiting dealers I found I had a real passion for what the dealer owners were doing and I realized a lot of these people were larger than life figures to me, but as I got to know them on a different level, I realized they are larger than life in some respects, but they’re not smarter than me. They’re in different situations and if I put myself in that same situation I could be as successful as they are. That got me thinking that I wanted to own a dealership. I began talking to investors, and we decided if we could find the right market and the right dealership, we would purchase a small dealership. My vision was to create a hybrid dealership.
How’s business?
Bartley: Fantastic. We’ve had three consecutive years of 40+ percent growth. We grew 42½ percent last year, 48 percent the year before that, and 63 percent the year before that.
What areas of the business are growing the fastest?
Bartley: Our business is broken into three categories—Managed Print, Managed IT, and Managed Communications (phone systems). All three are growing, but Managed IT is by far the fastest growing and the largest revenue and profit generator for our company.
What are you doing right?
Bartley: I think we’re doing a lot of things right, but first and foremost being a smaller dealership than a lot of these megadealers, we’re more nimble. And I, as the owner, am much closer to the customer. There aren’t three or four layers between the customer and the ownership. I’m very close to what we’re doing with each client and I’m very close to what my reps and operations and support staff teams are doing on a daily basis. That’s made us very successful and helped us grow that business. I have a keen understanding of what it takes to be successful in the Managed IT space and I’m able to translate that directly to customers and personnel in my company on a daily basis. It’s not filtered through two, three or four layers of management.
How did you make that transition from a copier dealership to your vision of a hybrid dealer?
Bartley: When we bought the company in 2007, it was a 10-year old company, and by the time we were done cleaning house we started almost from scratch. When we started we were a copier dealership. The first two years we weren’t selling IT or phone systems, we were just doing copier sales and service. The people we hired were copier reps, the techs we hired were copier techs, and we hired a copier dispatcher and we were set up just like a large [copier] dealer. In 2010 when we decided to move into the Managed IT space we hired one specific technical person. For the first nine months he and I were IT. We grew from a zero to a one million dollar Managed IT Services business in a year. I was the sales engine and he was the support engine.
How long did it take before you felt comfortable that ImageQuest was heading in the right direction after you acquired it?
Bartley: It was early 2010 when I realized we knew what we were doing and were on the right track. I knew from the get go we didn’t want to be a copier dealership, and I also knew we weren’t going to do the things I wanted to do, become a hybrid dealership—they didn’t call it that then—and become a Managed Services provider until we could understand the basic blocking and tackling of being a solid copier dealer.
We had to have a base of customers and a base of recurring revenue that came from that print management business and we had to have a base of employees who understood how to deliver a good service on a consistent basis regardless of whether they were servicing copiers or servicing IT. In June of 2010 I was at GreatAmerica Financial Services, GreatAmerica Leasing at the time, for their dealer council meeting. We had a guest speaker there and that’s when it hit me that not only do we know what we’re doing but we’re ahead of the crowd. We’re smaller than these other dealers, but we understand it better than some of these bigger dealers. They’re struggling to figure out what their next move is. “Do we hire somebody? How do we get into this?”
We had already figured out how to get into IT and how to sell it. That was a watershed moment for me.
Does the Nashville market get your Managed Services approach, I’ll assume the answer is yes based on your growth?
Bartley: They do. Our largest competitor came out in January of 2014 with an absolute blitz to the market on radio, TV and print advertising Managed IT Services. That’s done nothing but solidify our position that we’ve had for 3½ years that this is the way we’re going to be. It’s everything I’ve been telling customers for 3½ years and now my biggest competitor is out there backing me up by reinforcing our message to our clients. We love it!
