Scott Woolfolk
Scott Woolfolk, president of DOCUmation of San Antonio, a dealership formed by the merger of two San Antonio companies in 1997, has spent the last 28 years in the office imaging industry. He considers himself fortunate to be part of such a vibrant industry and successful organization.
Since 1997, DOCUmation has expanded into Austin, Bryan/College Station, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco, Kerrville and Harlingen, Texas. Woolfolk credits president and CEO Him Sheffield, who with his team fueled the growth in those markets outside of San Antonio. “He probably grew these markets without acquisition faster than anyone else in the history of the business,” states Woolfolk. “He started with zero and in nine years grew his side [of the business to] over $50 million.”
DOCUmation’s San Antonio location is doing $24-$26 million in business a year and still growing while all the locations combined generate more than $74 million in business yearly. The company has also grown thanks in large part to John Barbieri who heads up all back office operations and brought aboard what Woolfolk describes as “unbelievable talent” from IKON to stabilize the substantial growth over the years. Barbieri served as marketplace president for IKON for years and joined the DOCUmation team in 2007.
Even though DOCUmation sells Ricoh, Konica Minolta, and Kyocera products, the focus is more on solutions and services. It’s also on a mission to provide the best possible customer experience, from initial business assessment to service and support after the installation. To support this goal, DOCUmation has assembled a team of business professionals whose responsibility is analyzing customer needs and integrating technology into their organizations.
Recently, I spent 20 minutes talking to Woolfolk about DOCUmation’s business model, where he’s seeing success in the San Antonio market, and where he sees the business growing going forward.
How’s business?
Woolfolk: It’s going extremely well; we’ve had double-digit growth every year since we started.
What segments of the business are doing particularly well for you?
Woolfolk: Our mid segment just continues to be strong. Segment 3 and Segment 4 tend to be good areas for us to compete in.
Are there any solutions or services areas doing better than others?
Woolfolk: We’re definitely a solutions company. That continues to be a focal point of our company and continues to grow year in and year out.
What segments of the business would you like to see do better?
Woolfolk: Our biggest growth area is going to come with the graphical production printing. That’s going to be a big focus for us moving forward. We can do a better job with that.
You sell both Ricoh and Konica Minolta, so you’re well positioned in production, aren’t you?
Woolfolk: Our primary vendor in production is Ricoh. We use Konica Minolta more for graphical color. We pick and choose what we’re going to carry from the Konica Minolta line and feel their products are outstanding for some applications.
If you can generalize, who are your customers?
Woolfolk: That’s a part of what makes our channel so unique because we can service very small customers. At one time we considered ourselves to be a mid-major company because we were going after fleets. We define mid-major as a company that has not grown to the size where they have a dedicated purchasing agent on staff. That was a robust area for us because they could almost outsource to us and we could provide fleet management for them. Over the years we’ve grown into where we’re now taking on the very large customers and major accounts, including some nationwide accounts. That’s been a sweet spot for us.
Why do you think those big customers choose you versus a competitor?
Woolfolk: You’d think they’d want to deal directly with the manufacturer, but we’ve found quite the contrary. We just do such a better job and provide them with that one throat to choke. They can pick up the phone and talk to our senior representative and have a down line of support people available to them.
There’s no one better to take care of an account than an independent dealer. We just do a better job of being more responsive. There’s no finger pointing, or I need permission, or I need to run this up the ladder. Our people are empowered to make a decision. We make it clear to Corporate America that they’re in good hands with us because we say what we’re going to do when we’re going to do it.
Our priorities are based on three different criteria. Number one is what’s best for the customer. Two is what’s best for our employees and three is profits. If we feel we take care of number one and number two, number three takes care of itself.
DOCUmation focuses on the assessment and the solution and less on the hardware. How did you sell this message internally, particularly to sales reps that grew up selling boxes?
Woolfolk: That was a complete culture change for us. We had to function as a team as opposed to individuals. Our staff quickly realized that we could do a better job for our customer and they could be doing better for themselves if they functioned in a team environment. It took a little while to build this culture where everything is shared, so to speak, and everything is a team attack, but we don’t have anybody that is bucking the system at this point in time. Everyone falls in line and recognizes the value of the team and everyone holds everyone else accountable. It was a complete culture change that we had to dictate.
Was it a culture change for you as well?
Woolfolk: Yes. One of the first meetings I had was with our management staff and sales managers. I explained we have to be a wall together. We have to understand that whatever our vision is none of us can break that, it has to be in unison. We have to make sure there’s not going to be any deviation from it in the organization. And they bought into it. They held true to whatever standards we put in place.
We’re not going to recommend something based on what a customer has, but we’re going to recommend based on what a customer needs. We don’t know what they need unless we get in there and look at what they need. Why would a customer want our services if we were just going to propose to them the same thing as everyone else? We had to make sure we took a study based approached to everything we do.
Like a growing number of dealers, you offer Managed Network Services, how did you get into that business?
Woolfolk: We created it ourselves with a partnership with Collabrance. One of our great financial partners is GreatAmerica and they provide an avenue where you can get into Managed Network Services without investing in our own internal NOC. While we did have a NOC, our NOC wasn’t prepared to handle Managed Network Services. It made sense for us to partner with Collabrance. That’s been a wonderful partnership. They’ve done a tremendous job of taking good care of our customers.
How’s that portion of the business doing?
Woolfolk: It’s growing every month. It’s a natural extension of our business model. Because we are an assessment-based company, it’s natural to look at the next step—network assessments. A customer truly wants a company that’s not only responsible for the input and output devices that reside on their network, but they also want somebody to manage that network. It goes back to the concept of one throat to choke and dealing with one company for all their needs on the network.
Another DOCUmation focus is Electronic Document Management. What types of customers are you focusing on with that and what have you done to grow that area of your business?
Woolfolk: It’s enterprise all the way down to what we would consider to be EDM and structured scanning. Technology is an evolving space for us and no doubt EDM is extremely challenging from a customer workflow perspective, so it’s also a great area to help with our mission to provide customers with efficiencies and workflow optimization. It’s important we continue being a good partner in the EDM world with our customers because it does go hand in hand with our mission to make that customer more efficient. It’s something we’re learning and getting better at with each and every day.
Another focus is production print. Are you targeting different customers on the production side of the business than who you’ve historically targeted in the past?
Woolfolk: We’ve always dealt with those customers before, but the thing we’ve been guilty of is walking past those Data Centers and not taking time to probe and do as much due diligence as we should. Now, we’re taking a hard look at those Data Centers. There are so many we’re servicing successfully and we view that as a tremendous growth area.
Many dealers have made the move into MPS and some are obviously more successful than others, and depending on whom you’re speaking with, each has a slightly different definition of MPS. What’s your approach to MPS?
Woolfolk: We pride ourselves in that our whole strategy is based upon being a fleet provider. Whether you call it Managed Print Services or [take a] traditional approach, which we would consider a company that takes over all the HPs or legacy printers on a network, we have a totally different mindset. We want to displace a current printer fleet when it makes sense for the customer to do so and provide an all encompassing solution where it doesn’t matter whether it’s an MFP or a print-only solution. We want to provide one simple bill for the customer, encompassing all devices in the fleet.
Do you have specialists for MPS or can any of your sales reps sell it?
Woolfolk: Again, we try to drive everything to the customer in one single point of contact with a team pyramid, for lack of a better word, underneath with an outline of support people working hand in hand with them.
Figuring that there’s always room for improvement, how might you improve on your MPS and other solutions and services offerings going forward?
Woolfolk: Just because you’ve had success in the past doesn’t dictate you’re going to have success tomorrow. We’re always looking at ways to enhance what we consider to be a red carpet, white glove approach to the customer. We’re continually working on our processes. The more efficient we become and the more efficient we are for our customers, the more confidence they have in us. We’re never satisfied. We’re always looking at ways of improving our offerings. So many companies are competing in that area of nothing but price and that’s not our mission. We never said we want to be the biggest; we want to be the best.
Let’s talk a little bit about you. After 28 years, what is it about this industry that you most enjoy?
Woolfolk: What I like most about this industry is that we’re one of the few organizations that build some type of relationship with the customer, where as long as we keep that relationship intact and stay abreast of changes in technology, there will always be items or services that we provide to that customer. We’re one of the few companies out there that still values prospecting. We value getting in front of customers and developing relationships. As long as technology continues to advance, we’ll be able to move with it and be able to offer something that’s meaningful to that customer.
Is there any one thing you know now about this business that you wish you knew when you first started?
Woolfolk: That price and value are often confused. What we perceive as value to the customer is not what the customer perceives as value so we’re continually looking at different ways of providing more value to our customer. They don’t always want the cheapest price; they want the best possible service they can get and a business that’s easy to do business with. Again, it’s just dealing with someone who does something when they say they’re going to do it. That’s absolutely huge.
If you weren’t doing this, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
Woolfolk: I haven’t had any thoughts of doing anything other than what I’m doing. If you’re doing this, you might as well do it to the best of your ability—period.
When you’re not working, what do you do for fun?
Woolfolk: I enjoy the outdoors—ranching, fishing—anything outdoors and spending time with my family.
With this year almost over, what’s got you excited going into the next year?
Woolfolk: Managed Network Services is one of the greatest growth areas we have collectively in our industry. That excites me looking at the future because whatever we’re doing now, this is going to be so much bigger when we have a new viable annuity stream coming from the customer by adding all these services. It’s a great space for the BTA channel to be in.
