The tides of change are swirling all about the office technology space, but don’t pass along any gloom and doom predictions to Fred Habbal. The founder and owner of Vision Office Systems (VOS) of Charlotte, NC, has logged nearly 40 years of experience in the industry, and he’s heard this forecast before. And when it comes to the fate of the independent office technology dealer, Habbal sees nothing but bright skies, especially for his own company.
Vision Office Systems recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and pulled the trigger on its first expansion, adding new branch offices in Greenville, SC, and Albemarle, NC. Its high-impact geography is Charlotte and the surrounding 13 counties, which have helped enable VOS to reach the $7 million plateau in annual sales. The company offers hardware solutions from Canon, Muratec, Samsung and Lexmark and provides services including managed print and document management.
(from left) Fred Habbal and Jason Habbal
Habbal has witnessed a cycle of changes during his career, which includes the founding of Charlotte’s Copy Data, which was later sold to Sharp. Not a week goes by where someone doesn’t call Habbal and offer to buy VOS, but he thinks the future belongs to the independent dealer. Habbal doesn’t pull any punches on his views regarding industry consolidators and manufacturers with direct sales operations, nor does he agree with their tactics. ENX Magazine had the opportunity to learn about the unfiltered and entertaining views of Habbal and his son, Jason (the company’s vice president of sales). If the past is any indication of where our industry might be headed, then perhaps Fred Habbal’s insights should be heeded.
How is business this year?
Fred Habbal: We are getting a lot of new accounts from our competitors. When you look at what’s going on in the industry, you can’t help but see a bright future for the independent dealer. After all is said and done, nobody’s going to be left standing except the independent dealer. Back when IKON came into existence, along with Danka, what they did was threaten dealers to put them out of business if they didn’t sell to them. Then IKON and Danka went away [acquired by OEMs].
We’re a little more aggressive in our approach. We offer better service and personal interaction. Those other dealers, especially the manufacturers, they don’t have any personal interaction with customers. We establish relationships and nine out of 10 companies will do business with people that they know and are comfortable with. If you don’t have a relationship, you don’t have anything.
What does Vision Office Systems pride itself on?
Fred Habbal: Service, integrity, honesty, no crookedness—no lying or cheating, deceiving or ripping the customer off—simple, straight-forward operations. Our industry is full of crooks. Whatever we tell you today, 10 years from now, it’ll still be the same. I’m not saying that we don’t make mistakes, but if we do, we’ll correct it immediately.
You recently announced two new locations in the Carolinas. Why were these cities strategic to your plan?
Fred Habbal: The Greenville/Spartanburg area in South Carolina has been booming since BMW opened a plant there. We have been getting a lot of interest in business. I think in the next three to four months, we’re going to see tons of business coming our way. With Albemarle, NC, we wanted a presence in that area. There’s some big manufacturing companies there and they like to do business locally. We’re located in downtown Albemarle, which is very close to the courthouse and government. We’re in the middle of everything.
Vision Office Systems’ customer technology portal.
Talk about the thought process that led you to open these new facilities.
Fred Habbal: We always had plans to grow to different locations, but what stopped us was the recession/depression of 2007-2009 that put all expansion ideas on hold. There was a lot of uncertainty, banks were going belly-up and no one knew what was going to happen. It was just a disaster. The plans had been in place for a long time, so it was just a matter of picking the right time to do it.
What are some of your newer areas of business? Is it going the way you hoped?
Fred Habbal: We’re trying to get into a couple of things, but we did not want to do IT. That’s not our cup of tea. We are looking into security cameras and monitoring with someone like Canon. We hear from other dealers about doing water coolers, which we’re looking to get into. We’re also in talks to add Epson as a vendor. We’re going to visit their facilities in California and look at their products.
You’ve got to go back to the basics—do a good job, be honest and sincere. You can’t promise the world and not deliver.
Fred Habbal
We got into 3D printing, but I would suggest staying away from that business. When you hear about 3D printing, you start thinking about all the possibilities, but really your mind is playing tricks on you. People talk about how the computing companies, manufacturing companies and architects love 3D printing, but they don’t love it enough to spend $200,000 or $300,000 on a printer. The average company does not have the funds or the budget for it. Unfortunately, we learned our lesson from that. We got into it about a year-and-a-half ago and we sold a couple of printers, but we shouldn’t have touched it.
Vision is celebrating its 20th year in business. What lessons learned will enable the company to be successful in its next 20 years?
Fred Habbal: You’ve got to go back to the basics—do a good job, be honest and sincere. You can’t promise the world and not deliver. When you sell them a piece of equipment, if you don’t fulfill all of your promises, they’re going to come and bite you. We don’t do that. Whatever we tell you, you can take it to the bank.
Your company has traditionally been a hardware-centric company. Can you tell us about how the process of selling software and solutions has been progressing for your sales staff?
Fred Habbal: Selling and servicing the equipment is still our core business. We can do software, but it’s nothing to brag or write home about. We knew it would be a slow go, because there’s a lot of things involved in software. You’ve got the installation and the support, and each software company has its own requirements. MPS is doing OK, it’s a good business, but the thing about it is you cannot get enough [deals].
Jason Habbal: We don’t bombard the sales people with 15 different software products. We try to pick a company that we can be good at or are good at. Things that they can successfully go out and talk to. Obviously, the ultimate goal is to get deeper and wider into accounts.
What do you look for in your employees? How do you recruit and retain good ones?
Fred Habbal: I learned a long time ago that you always need to be recruiting. Especially in the sales department. We don’t have issues with staffing our service department, there always seems to be good candidates available. Our problem has been the sales people. To cure that, you always have to be particular, always talking to people. If you’re at a restaurant and see a young waiter, that kid has probably graduated or is about to graduate from college. Talk to him. He might be your best salesman.
Who do you see as your biggest competition, and how do you differentiate your company from them?
Fred Habbal: My biggest competitor is no one, because none of them do what I do. If you want to compare us with manufacturer branches, those people don’t even come close. They want to go out and win business by giving it away; that’s not selling. The other dealers in the area, they just don’t measure up to what we do with the product we sell, how we do business or our reputation. One company just came to Charlotte, and what I’m hearing from customers is that these people are unethical, pushy and [customers] don’t want to do business with them. We were shocked when we went on [this company’s] Facebook page. The negative comments from people about them were unbelievable.
What are your goals for this year?
Fred Habbal: Win more accounts from anybody that we can. We’re focusing on the new location in Greenville and establishing ourselves as a major player in that market. We are very happy, especially with the reception and results that we’re getting down there. When you get a call from a customer who says they’ve heard that we joined the Chamber of Commerce and they ask us to send them a salesman to talk about copiers, that’s exciting. By the end of the year, this branch will be producing very well for us.
I believe wholeheartedly that one-on-one interactions are the heart of selling. Knock on doors and convert those people from customers to friends. We don’t advertise, we just go out and try to reach people, tell them the story about who we are.
Jason Habbal: We’ve also upped a lot of our social media presence within Facebook and Instagram as much as we can to get the word out to the masses. Obviously, those avenues reach so many more people in such a quick time, so we’ve tried to do a lot more of that recently.
How do you view the industry changing in the future and what are you doing to adapt?
Fred Habbal: With some of these larger companies, they treat their customers like numbers. They don’t give a damn if you’re happy or upset or if they lose your business or not: they’ve got plenty of money and other accounts. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, everything was revolving around the independent dealer, and I think this is going to come back. When the manufacturers were opening their own branches, I reminded everybody that they all had branches in the 1980s and they all closed them down, because they don’t know how to do it. So what gives the manufacturers the idea that they’re going to succeed this time? And here we go…Ricoh just closed their branches. This is going to continue. No company can sustain the losses that these companies are taking with the direct operations. You can lose money for a year or two, but eventually someone at that company is going to say “Enough is enough.”
I hope a lot of dealers will stick it out and tell the people trying to acquire them to go away. If the future is so bad and the industry is so bad, why are these people acquiring companies? I get a phone call here almost every week from someone who wants to buy Vision Office Systems. Once the manufacturers wake up to see what the hell they did and are doing, the whole thing will change.
What is your most favorite and least favorite thing about your job?
Fred Habbal: The worst thing is when I have to fire somebody. It’s something I don’t like to do because it’s too much of a burden when you start thinking about kids, families, mortgages, car payments and colleges. It’s just overwhelming. What I really like is that every day is new and different, not like the previous one. To me, it’s so exciting, even if it’s just a $2,000 order. This business has been very good to me and I’ll never trade it for anything else.
