Prosperity has visited San Antonio-based DOCUmation in a big way. At a time when many dealers across the nation are only now reaching or exceeding their pre-pandemic revenue and profit levels, this multi-line dealership—quarterbacked by brothers (and co-presidents) Preston and Hunter Woolfolk—is fresh off a 2022 campaign that saw it reap 30% year-over-year growth. More impressively, if the first quarter of 2023 is any indication, DOCUmation will post an even higher growth rate when all the receipts have been counted at year’s end.
At $50 million in revenue, DOCUmation is the largest privately owned dealership in the state of Texas, which boasts more than its share of high-powered performers. Truth be known, however, the company—founded by Lou Scantland in 1990—teetered on the brink of collapse in 2017. This left the Woolfolk brothers (Hunter was 30, Preston 29) unwittingly in charge of the fortunes of 112 or so employees and the business of clients who had been with the organization for decades.
It was a confluence of events that left DOCUmation in peril. Scantland and his partner split the company, with the partner selling his interests to a private equity firm. Around the same time, the 79-year-old Scantland suffered a fall that caused a brain injury, and he was in a coma for several months. Many of the managers at DOCUmation left to join the other company or retired—the latter was the case with then-president Scott Woolfolk—creating a leadership void. At that point, Preston led the company’s managed IT division and Hunter was in charge of sales, but they quickly decided to share duties as co-presidents in an effort to keep DOCUmation afloat.
“We walked into the office one day, and everything had changed,” Hunter Woolfolk said. “We were thinking about our next jobs and what we were going to do.”
“We had about 112 employees, and we thought about their families, kids, livelihoods…you either sink or swim,” Preston Woolfolk added. “We thought about how to take care of these people, keep the business going and provide for them. We had to figure it out.”
Scantland returned to the office, fully recovered, about seven months later. It was then that he realized his grandsons knew how to swim.
“We’re very purpose-driven,” Hunter noted. “We feel blessed to have had these opportunities at such a young age. We carry a strong burden of being purpose-driven, to bless these families and our communities. We’ve been able to grow together. It creates a culture that’s mission-focused, and there’s a bigger picture than just doing our jobs and getting paid.”
Deep Roots
Scantland’s industry journey dates back to 1950s Detroit, when he and a partner opened one of the nation’s first copier dealerships with a cost-per-copy model. He later moved to Arizona and started a new company, Unicopy, that was later sold to IKON Office Solutions. Scantland then pivoted to open a new dealership in 1990, which was rechristened DOCUmation in 1997.
DOCUmation has thrived in the state’s top markets—San Antonio, Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston and West Texas—maintaining much of the Unicopy clientele. The state and its population of about 30 million is the sole business focus of the dealer, which carries the Ricoh, Kyocera, Konica Minolta, Lexmark and Canon lines. But it isn’t MFPs alone driving the dealer’s plans to open new branches in the near term; it provides a litany of products and services, from managed print and IT to production print/wide-format, facilities management, process automation, unified communications, document management and various other software solutions.
With other technology solutions on tap to join the roster of 13 non-MFP categories, a primary challenge will be withstanding the demands that accompany prolific growth. “That 30% growth represented the biggest in company history,” Hunter noted. “Administratively and operationally, we’re making sure we can keep up with this growth internally to support the entirety of the company.”
Prior to the pandemic, typical year-over-year growth ranged from 12% to 15%. In all, DOCUmation has grown 37% over its pre-pandemic performance. The reason behind the 2022 outlier was the damage COVID had inflicted on DOCUmation’s competitors. Layoffs and furloughs hit other dealers’ customer and technical service realms particularly hard, according to Preston. Dissatisfied end-users turned to DOCUmation as a result.
“We didn’t make any cuts; the goal during COVID was to maintain full service quality to our customers,” he said. “When 2021 and 2022 rolled around, all that disruption within our competitors cost them their business; their knowledge and product quality control started impacting their client relationships pretty significantly. It’s difficult to operate when a company is running too lean.”
Market Excellence
DOCUmation has grown across the board, reeling in down-the-street business, mid-markets and major accounts. Having critical subject-matter experts in the fields of production print and facilities management, to name two, has led to high growth in those disciplines. The Woolfolks have onboarded a strong core of new sales reps to help expand their base.
“We have core reps who are specialists in health care, legal and automotive, and they scale around the state,” Hunter noted. “For example, our legal experts have quite a client base; they understand the inner workings and the vocabulary of how legal works. They travel around the state and help all the branches close deals in their marketplaces. It’s great to have all the branches working as one.”
Having such a diverse product and service offering was vital to growing throughout the height of the supply chain shortage, but there was a bit of serendipity at work. The primary MFP lines, Ricoh and Kyocera, never synched when it came to product shortages. Even when A4 faced severe limitations, DOCUmation was able to pivot between the OEMs and their respective stocks (which the dealer adeptly kept on hand). The A4 situation stabilized by Q4 2022, and good communication with the providers enabled DOCUmation to set client expectations in advance.
“Our people did a good job of pivoting, too,” Hunter said. “What makes us successful, as business climates change, is having those 13 different services and technologies, so it’s not all printers and copiers that affect us.
“I think the challenge that the industry’s had is many dealers didn’t go all in on these other services when they rolled them out,” he added. “They’re really a copier company that kind of has IT or kind of does phones. It’s brutal. It’s a kick in the tail to have to learn an entire new industry and become exceptional at it. We’ve given it all we have, and we’ve truly changed that DNA to being a technology company.”
While the brothers wouldn’t rule out growth by acquisition, it’s not a focal point. The last deal DOCUmation made was more than four years ago when it obtained documentWORKS. If the company was struggling with organic growth, Preston notes that acquisitions might be a greater consideration. DOCUmation evaluates between five and ten businesses per year, but hasn’t found one that has compelled it to go down the M&A path.
It can be tough to find a prospect whose market strategy aligns with DOCUmation, and Preston sees a danger in taking on a client base that doesn’t mesh. This is particularly true when it comes to managed IT.
“Our vision is to provide exceptional service to customers who value it, and we use that as our North Star as to whether we would make an acquisition,” Preston said. “If those clients don’t value exceptional service, that means they align with low-cost providers. Those are really not our clients. If you acquire that low-cost client base and it expects X, Y and Z, but their technology stack isn’t in a place where we need it to be, they can hurt your service delivery for everybody else. If we found [a managed IT company] that had a good client base that matched our technology stack, it could be an option for us. But those are few and far between.”
Great Expectations
Even with 13 non-MFP products and services in the company arsenal, the Woolfolk brothers aren’t ruling out future additions such as security systems and electric vehicle (EV) chargers. It would need to be a competence that DOCUmation can deliver on completely in order to meet or exceed the standards of other catalog elements. Preston believes that robotics could be an ideal fit in the long term; he continues to study and monitor its progress and knows that the service component would be the key to having success in this realm.
It’s difficult to raise the bar when one’s company is fresh off a 30% revenue surge over the previous year. Hunter believes that has set the tone for the future of DOCUmation; if it’s capable of doing it once, then an encore isn’t out of the question.
“Too much growth is challenging, but it’s coming, and we seem to not be able to slow it down,” he said. “It’s like a snowball getting bigger, which is really cool. I’d love to keep providing exceptional service delivery and take over the state of Texas, every county, every bit of it. So there’s a lot of room to grow.”
Preston isn’t too worried about the out-of-state competition—which continues to grow—knocking on Texas’ (and DOCUmation’s) door. “There are a lot of outsiders trying to play in our state, and we welcome it,” he said. “The thing about Texans, they like to say, ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’ It’s a pride thing. So they can try to play in our state if they like, but we’ll see how that works out for them in the long run.”
Clean(ing) Start Set Woolfolk Brothers on Success Path
Generational ownership of a business conjures the image of a golden baton being passed from the old guard to the young turks. However, being groomed for greatness isn’t always as advertised, and silver spoons are often really broom or mop handles.
Take the case of Hunter and Preston Woolfolk, co-presidents of DOCUmation in San Antonio. Their foray into the business world wasn’t quite glamorous, and certainly not suit-and-tie material. Their father, Scott, owned a business in New Mexico called Alternative Business Systems. Every summer, starting at the age of 12, the brothers would trudge into the warehouse after church on Sunday, armed with mops, and clean the floors and toilets. Since the family business was a small one and couldn’t afford to hire a third-party cleaner, the Woolfolk boys were the unofficial janitorial service.
Eventually, they traded in their mops for more advanced duties. “We loved it; we worked every summer from that point on in the warehouse and logistics,” Hunter related. “By the time we reached college, our father had joined DOCUmation and we were doing sales internships.”
After weeks of knocking on doors and cold-calling businesses during Texas’ summer swelter—all while wearing a full suit and tie—the Woolfolks may have wished they were still manning the mops. “Thank god for the millennials. They convinced us to dress more casually,” Hunter added.
Hunter came aboard as a rep just as the Great Recession hit, and Preston joined him in 2010. Preston gravitated toward managed IT and Hunter found his calling as the head of the sales department. Little did they know the challenges that awaited them during the next 10 years. And they couldn’t have guessed they would end up promoting themselves to co-presidents after their grandfather, Lou Scantland, suffered a serious fall in the aftermath of an ownership split.
Toss in a pandemic/supply chain saga and it’s your run-of-the-mill business chaos. At this point, Preston is ready to embrace the uneventful.
“I think 2023 seems to be the first normal year, knock on wood,” he said. “Can we just have a nice, simple, normal year?”
