Richard Van Dyke
Here’s a simple recipe for creating Ricoh’s largest customer in southern California: Take three separate independent dealerships, combine them together, and voila, a very large independent Ricoh dealership in the region.
Actually, that’s the origins of newly named Advanced Office, a Santa Ana, California-based dealership that serves five southern California counties: Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, San Bernardino, and Riverside.
The three co-owners of Advanced Office, Tim Wickers, Mike Dixon, and Richard Van Dyke, possess more than 100 years of industry experience between them with Van Dyke with the shortest tenure—just about 30 years in the business.
Van Dyke got his start in the early 1980’s as the founder of a medical imaging company that also specialized in color computer graphics. This was good experience for someone who would eventually enter the copier business, especially when one considers what the industry looks like today. Van Dyke started his copier dealership after realizing that the office space offered more opportunities than the medical market and that it would be easier to compete against other office technology dealers than the larger players he was going up against in the medical imaging market.
Meanwhile, Van Dyke’s partners took more direct routes into the copier industry with Wickers, a previous manufacturer’s representative for copiers and faxes, initially starting a fax dealership, Amerifax Imaging, while Dixon, the founder of Advanced Office Services, originally sold and serviced typewriters and then fax machines and copiers.
“We all had something in common,” recalls Van Dyke. “We were all obsessed with the customer in southern California, and all had offices in many of the same cities and markets, and we carried many of the same product lines. It made sense to pull ourselves together and optimize ourselves in these markets. That made a huge difference.”
Combining the three dealerships not only created one of the largest independent Ricoh dealerships in the region, but offered a substantial footprint for all of southern California with a significant ability to service customers over geography only available previously to direct operations.
Now that we’ve established the back story for Advanced Office, let’s pick things up today by talking with owner/partner Van Dyke who updates us on the current status of the dealership along with some of the reasons for its continued success.
What kind of year has 2015 been for Advanced Office?
Van Dyke: We had a very good year. In addition to nice growth, we made a number of internal improvements to ensure even better service delivery and metrics above what the industry has considered good. We’ve also gotten far more involved in solutions and have upped our game in MPS.
What segments of your business are doing particularly well for you besides MPS and solutions?
Van Dyke: Mid-range office color is booming. We continue to see the transition from black & white to color-enabled devices and it’s made a huge difference in terms of our aftermarket. If not for color and production, our aftermarket would be flat or down.
What segments would you like to see improve?
Van Dyke: While production has seen improvement, we would like to see production do even better and for us to be able to compete in more markets. Our key market is the in-plant/CRD space first and foremost. We’re very selective with the markets we target for production print.
Why do customers choose Advanced Office?
Van Dyke: Everybody talks about how great their service is. Two of the three partners came from the service side and one of us from the sales side, with a very heavy emphasis on service. We’ve all been attuned to the customer from day one and doing the right thing. We have metrics on the service side that blow away all the directs. Of the five California counties, we have an average response time of 2.6 hours. Service for production equipment is even better than that. That’s from the time we get contacted to the time we walk in their door, and that’s over a huge geography.
That, coupled with fixing it right the first time by having the right parts and having trained tenured technicians, enables us to have very high first-call effectiveness in all we do. We bring high touch to the customer and we treat them like family to a level that none of the direct branches can. In addition,we offer money-back guarantees if we miss our response time or uptime guarantees. We’ve only had to give money back once in five years.
Service is clearly our differentiator and we focus outside of our box and more on what’s going on inside the customer’s box for challenges today and into their future. Assisting customers improve what they do is our focus. And lastly, treating employees like family, not just because it keeps our turnover extraordinary low, but because it is the right thing to do.
Who do you view as your main competition in your market?
Van Dyke: In most cases it’s the direct manufacturers. It’s a race to the bottom with little profit with many of the directs in certain markets, so we’re very careful when we compete with them. This market is strange in terms of who has market share. The direct branches view this as such a beachhead, so competing with them is definitely a challenge. While we lose to them on occasion, far more often than not we are able to convince customers to switch.
You carry Ricoh and Lexmark. Why are those two brands a good fit for you?
Van Dyke: We’ve had long-term experience with Ricoh products and their people. Given the depth of their product line, their excellent products, and their great support, they have products that cover every major segment. Quite frankly, our customers and technicians love their products. It’s best of breed.
On the Lexmark side, their A4 products are very competitively priced. Their hardware acquisition price is very low and this provides great value to the customer, and we’re able to make good margins on their products.
You offer Managed Print Services and Document Management, are you doing anything different in marketing those segments?
Van Dyke: On the MPS side, it’s just part of our regular offerings. We’re attempting to take away any pain in regard to printing. MPS is just a natural for us to offer, but we’re not doing anything special [or different] with MPS; we’re just handling more of the customer’s output management needs.
Document management has always been important to us. We’ve had a number of document management vendors over the years, but most recently we started offering Square 9. Our big push is towards workflow and business process improvement and most of our document management proposals now have some workflow component to them.
The industry is moving in that direction and that was discussed over and over again at Square 9’s [recent] conference. Small companies can now gain productivity improvements that were far more common for the enterprise accounts in the past.
How did you settle on Square 9?
Van Dyke: We’re a member of Select Dealer Group and Square 9 was a sponsor. One of our dealer members has been in document management for a long time and is very knowledgeable. He did a comparison of Square 9 with other [document management programs]. We then checked them out and checked references. More than anything I was surprised at their willingness to invest in the best people in our market. They’ve hired quite a few people who are there to support us.
The truth is we’re not going it alone. They are there to do as much of the transaction on the sales side as we need them to, but more importantly, they’ll take on as much of the professional services as we would like and we can take on as much as we like. We can cherry pick which accounts we’ll do professional services versus the ones we totally hand over to Square 9. We feel confident in their ability to do that.
While we have sold document management for years, our pipeline has grown significantly with their support. We have a lot going on with them and we’ve never seen anything like this in terms of support. I’m very impressed with their people.
There’s always something new going on in this business with new technologies, services, and solutions emerging. Is there anything new that you’re looking at that has you excited, like 3D printing?
Van Dyke: Coming from the early days of color computer graphics and medical imaging, I took on a lot of new stuff over the years. How do you tell the pioneers? They’re the ones with the arrows in their backs. My partners and I don’t want to offer the latest and greatest such as 3D printing or MNS. We choose to partner with others that are experienced in those areas vs. building it ourselves. We’d rather focus on our core competencies. By doing that, we feel we can focus on the customer in a much higher way. Quite frankly, there are a lot of opportunities for growth and profits in our core industry, but one has to focus on the right customers to have profitable growth and that’s important to us.
What do you like best about doing what you do?
Van Dyke: We can help most businesses of any size in any industry. I get to know so many business owners and managers in different industries, and I enjoy finding out what they do and how they do it and seeing how we may assist them in their improvement. It’s great to have products and services that everybody needs.
Since you’ve been doing this, what change or changes in the industry have had the biggest impact on you in a positive way?
Van Dyke: The most positive effect was when the vendors were able to connect their products to networks. Initially, it was to get color off that color screen. Over time, one in 10 [devices] was color, two in 10 were color, five in ten were color, etc., so color was the main reason to interface with the network. Then scanning became the killer app. The products we sell in general have become high productivity network appliances that people can’t do without and are critical to their day to day productivity. It never used to be that way and wasn’t such an integral part of all they do.
If you could change anything about this industry, what would that be?
Van Dyke: Well, there are just too many manufacturers chasing too little business. It would be great if a couple of manufacturers exited the business. When you’re in a declining market and have so much manufacturing capacity off shore and everybody has gotten so good at manufacturing, there’s this big push to just blow out numbers.
Everybody is fighting for the same diminishing market share and reducing the number of manufacturers would assist us in not being on top of each other. Clearly, this is not what the manufacturers are thinking, they have too much to protect, so it is clearly an “if” scenario.
What do you do for fun when you’re not working?
Van Dyke: I love traveling with my wife, road cycling, skiing, photography, and riding our Harley.
What’s your most memorable trip?
Van Dyke: Outside the US, it would be a safari in South Africa. That’s one of the sweet spots of being a dealer, having that opportunity. Inside the US, it was riding our Harley cross-country on Route 66. What a great country we live in.
If you could do anything else other than what you are doing now and be just as successful, what other career might you pursue?
Van Dyke: Helicopter ski guide! I’ve gone helicopter and Snow Cat skiing numerous times with a bunch of buddies. If I could be a helicopter ski guide, make money, and be able to retire comfortably, I would have thrown in the copier hat a long time ago.
What’s in store for Advanced Office for the rest of 2016?
Van Dyke: An increased focus on production products, services and solutions, and business process improvement with those solutions.
