Brad Craft is a people person. It only takes a few minutes of chatting with the president of San Bernardino, CA-based Image Source to learn just how much he values the relationships he’s established during his company’s 30-year history, many of whom have helped the company flourish into one of California’s leading office technology industry providers.
Image Source has particularly blossomed during this decade, growing from a $15 million to $50 million performer, expanding to 14 facilities in the process. The dealership holds the distinction of being Xerox’s largest agent partner in the country, and it has added a myriad of capabilities from managed print and IT to wide-format products and 3D printing. It services virtually every flavor of desktop printer, with plans to move toward servicing high-end production printers.
Brad Craft, president of Image Source
One of the dealer’s most pivotal moves came in 2016, when Craft joined the Visual Edge Technology network of companies. This provided Image Source with significantly more purchasing power, access to Netwise Resources managed IT acumen and the support realized in joining a large chain of office technology providers.
We sat down with Craft to learn more about the people behind the dealership’s success, its strongest plays and even lessons learned along the way.
How was business in 2017?
Craft: We grew 24 percent, from $40 million to just shy of $50 million. Our profit margins increased, as did our sales talent. Overall, we’re in a thriving mode. We grew our warehouse capabilities and distribution processes. We have a strong team of operational leaders. Jeff Silver is our vice president of operations and service, and he’s done a great job of recruiting, hiring and maintaining training levels for our technicians and staff. It’s improved our responsiveness to the customer in terms of first-call effectiveness. In our supply fulfillment, our director of purchasing, Jamella Waller, maintains the proper levels of delivery to ensure customers are getting their supplies accurately and on time. That’s a huge measuring stick for our profitability. Mona Al-Hassan has done really well with our scheduling and distribution. And I can’t say enough good things about Judith Jarvis, our senior vice president of sales. She is a homegrown talent who started her career as a territory sales rep, and excelled at every position as she climbed the ladder. Judith offers real leadership and focuses on personal development; our sales growth validates her style. All of our groups have been dedicated to getting better at their craft, and the organization has thrived under team leadership.
What does Image Source pride itself on?
Craft: We make sure we treat people the way they want to be treated. We try to engage customers as if they were our friends. We want to be honest with them and have an integrity with what we do every day. Our goal is to make sure they get what they pay for and more. Referrals are everything to us. Our customer lists goes back 20, 30 years with many of them. They won’t buy from anyone else because they know our products and services are going to help them win at what they do. We love working together with them in a partnership environment.
What was the driving force behind joining Visual Edge’s strategy in 2016? What value does VET bring to the table, and how would you characterize the first two years under its flag?
Craft: These first two years have been great. Their CEO, Austin Vanchieri, is an old Xerox guy from way back. He’s one of those individuals who has been truthful with his new partners every step along the way. When negotiating with any business, it’s important to document everything. But Austin is truly a man of his word; even if we didn’t have something stipulated on paper, I’m confident in trusting what he says. It’s wonderful to know that the people we’ve chosen to align ourselves with have the same sort of heartbeat in their organization.
Image Source employees bask in the beauty of Bora Bora in the French Polynesia.
Secondly, Visual Edge has taught us a lot about dealership organizational management and the business style they employ. They’ve cooperated with our partners nicely. When we brought our relationships to them and they introduced us to their partners, everybody worked together seamlessly to provide a great transition. It’s nice having the financial stability that a large, well-funded organization provides. It gives us the ability to acquire products at inventory levels that might have been prohibitive in the past, and allows us to keep our costs down for customers. We can maintain our levels of profitability with the right approach and not have to go in debt to bring on inventory.
Visual Edge has been a good resource for technology, including Netwise Resources for managed IT services. That tool gives us the NOC that we need to help customers have 24/7 eyes on their technology. These are things that would have been tough for us to launch on our own. With Visual Edge and Netwise Resources behind us, it gave us the capability to offer customers immediate solutions without learning as we ramped up.
Xerox made waves with its ConnectKey portfolio of AltaLink and VersaLink MFPs and copiers last year. Tell us a little about the rollout from Image Source’s perspective.
Craft: We absolutely love their products. We’ve tested, ran and sold them. The response from the sales force was good and the interaction with the customers was great. The Xerox technology offering meets customers’ needs. After we had the chance to experience them for a few months, we negotiated our largest inventory purchase ever last December. We wanted to have the inventory on hand so that we could deliver it to customers immediately. We feel that strongly about the technology. The App Studio is awesome; customers can buy the copiers today and download apps they see at no charge and make their machines even more proficient for employees. It’s not common in copier technology to be able to add capabilities to a product that was bought last year. We love it.
Image Source offers three different manufacturers of 3D printing systems. How long has your dealership provided this offering, and how has it performed?
Craft: We’ve been offering it for three years, but it is one area where we’re not seeing a bright future. We have trimmed back our relationship with 3D printing, simply because we don’t see the necessary support we had expected from the manufacturers. We’re phasing it out, but keeping it around for customers who require it. We had an odd dynamic with the manufacturer: there were frequent pricing changes, we had many conflicts with our sales force competing with their sales force and there was not a lot of working dynamic—no synergy at all. The products worked fine, but each one of them has a niche market.
A 3D printer has a limited media it can produce. Some can do metal, ceramic, rubber or plastic, and the customer has to spend money on a specific output. If their needs are for different output, the customer can’t afford to buy multiple platforms. We saw a lot of limitations in the market. Many customers were not eager to jump into the technology, even though it’s been out for a while. We found it to be a lot more work for the profitability it was contributing to the organization. Shifting to managed IT services is a smarter, industry-relevant, long-term strategy for us.
Tell us about the strength and evolution of your PrintCare managed print services.
Craft: We service and support about a dozen brands, including Lexmark, Dell, Brother, Ricoh and Xerox. We will support any desktop device; we have about 25,000 desktop printers in all industries under contract. It’s taken us about 10 years of hard work to perfect what we do in that capacity. What we hear from customers is we have a pretty unique offering that delivers solid results. We’re very concerned about end-user satisfaction. We initially focused on hospitals, medical facilities and school districts, and that’s where we picked up most of our momentum. Since then, we’ve moved into the legal market and basically any vertical that has a lot of desktops. Our team can offer a care-free environment for the customer.
How are your document management solutions performing?
Craft: The market changed dramatically. Initially, it was a unique offering that required a high level of expertise, and it commanded a lot of revenue. Now, there are so many places to manage documents that it’s pretty simple to manage. It was the ‘secret sauce’ for a while, but it’s becoming more mainstream. We see it as a common way to help our customers. I see it maintaining its position and remaining important to customers, but it’s not the unique element we had five years ago.
President Brad Craft (second from right) encourages Special Olympics participants
Is there a product or solution that you are looking to add in the near future?
Craft: We’re going to expand our services offering to high-end devices. We’re going up market to the heavier-production devices that we’ll be servicing, in cooperation with Xerox. Right now, we service up to about 136 pages per minute. We have a mutual, beneficial arrangement with Xerox to move our technical staff into a higher level of production device over time, including inkjet. We’ll target the graphics community, print-for-pay businesses, in-plant print centers—basically, anybody using production today. We’ve sold the production devices during our 30-year history and we’re Xerox’s largest production sales engine. As we move forward, we’ll take on more of that service to give customers more of a local response.
What was your dealership’s biggest win last year?
Craft: It was our ability to move production print inkjet devices into the graphics and in-plant print centers. Xerox sold six inkjet print engines in the agency channel, and we accounted for five of them. We had a lot of success in the K-12 education space. We made a lot of inroads into the northern California market; our new San Francisco office has become a good producer for us.
What do you look for in your employees? How do you recruit and retain good ones?
Craft: We look for people who can learn and are willing to follow direction. There are times we’ll engage people who have industry experience, but aren’t willing to bend to our way of doing things. So we look for people who are malleable, energetic, positive and trustworthy. When we put somebody out on the street with our business card, it’s important that our customers can trust them in the same way that they trust us. We want to maintain our reputation in the community.
From the left, Image Source President Brad Craft poses with “Top Performers” John Nguyen, Jamie Yang, Jordan Craft and Judith Jarvis
What was your biggest challenge in the past year?
Craft: When you’re growing rapidly, securing quality leaders and employees is tough because they’re difficult to find. California is a wonderful market for talent; they’re educated, motivated and professional-looking—they have all the right tools. The problem is, it’s a very competitive hiring market, too, and everybody’s after the same quality individuals.
Who do you see as your biggest competition, and how do you differentiate your company from them?
Craft: Because we cover so many large cities, everybody’s our competition. Every pocket has its stronger competitor; some have a strong presence from Konica Minolta, others have Canon or Ricoh. How we differentiate ourselves is to provide people with the best pricing we can get from Xerox and our suppliers, and the best pricing we can realize through partnerships we create with our clients’ companies. The technology that Xerox offers is unique. If we can take that technology and explain it well to the customer—help them understand how they’ll benefit from it—then we have to do our part as Image Source to be the most professional, courteous and responsible organization possible.
What are your goals for 2018?
Craft: We’ll continue the growth path that we’re on and make sure we have enough representation in each market. In Q1, we have six percent year-over-year growth, so we’re on pace to maintain our growth from last year and keep driving forward. Things are looking good.
How do you view the industry changing in the future, and what are you doing to adapt?
Craft: We see publishing becoming more important than printing, where customers want to not only have their document printed, but also produced, finished and ready for the marketplace. We see that becoming a focus for us; we want to offer our customers not only the marks on the paper, but the end-to-end solution as well.
The IT strategy is becoming more important to our customers. We don’t want to interfere with anyone’s IT infrastructure. We just want to take on the things they would normally outsource, and allow them to focus on critical things like servers and cloud-based solutions and software—areas that are more thoughtful and visionary. We want to be an extension of their support team.
What do you enjoy most about your job? What are your least favorite aspects of it?
Craft: I definitely enjoy the people. Anytime you make somebody happy, help a business thrive and grow, you form a bond. It’s wonderful to have been in the industry long enough to have a number of customers who have grown with me and become successful. It’s nice to see them on a weekend, or have somebody you’ve known for 20 years say “thank you for the time together and the contribution your team has made to our business.” Those are the motivating things that keep me coming back. But I also love seeing the growth in our employees. It’s awesome to see people who we hired at the reception desk go on to manage a team of people and have personal success. It’s nice to see the maturity and development of people who started at our company fresh out of college and transformed into true professionals—family men and women who are contributing back to the community. I enjoy what I do, enjoy being a part of this company, Xerox, Visual Edge and our customers. I’m very blessed to have all those options.
As for my least favorite, there’s always going to be errors or problems to fix. But if you can deal with them quickly and responsively—get them off your desk—you can move on to the good stuff.
Outside of work, what do you do for fun?
Craft: I play a little bit of golf, go fishing some and like to hike. I’m not very much of a golfer; I won’t score well, but golf courses are pretty places to visit. But I do like to get out, do some hiking and travel.
