It’s been nearly 30 years since Access Control Devices Inc. (ACDI) debuted as a purveyor of coin-op controllers, card readers and value-add stations, which is quite a niche segment to serve. But as the years have ticked off, ACDI is gradually migrating from tools that serve some to solutions that, conceivably, serve all.
The distributor is connected to PaperCut print management solutions much in the same way as people once associated Adam West with Batman. But while ACDI isn’t prepared to discard its PaperCut cape so quickly, its new suit (so to speak) is emblazoned with the letters EV. Yes, electric vehicle chargers exploded into the office technology dealer universe in earnest during 2023. And ACDI Energy Services (formerly Terra Energy) has positioned itself as the first dedicated industry source for dealers to sell EV chargers. While not every reseller is on board with the idea of EV solutions becoming the industry’s next big thing, ACDI President and CEO Josh Lane has pushed all his chips into the pot.
This month, we’re debuting a new feature called Getting to Know You, a Q&A that takes a deeper dive into players from the various industry sectors (distributors, suppliers, software companies, non-MFP manufacturers) to provide readers with a more comprehensive view of their role in business. Participating in this Q&A are ACDI’s Lane and Mark Hart, vice president of business development.
What makes ACDI tick? Walk us through your history and how the company has evolved over the years.
Lane: In June, we’re going to celebrate 30 years in the industry, a huge milestone. Yet every day feels like the first day, and it’s that level of enthusiasm that’s going to help us tackle the 31st year. It’s a positivity felt throughout our organization and comes across when team members talk to a longtime partner or even a new one. They feed off that enthusiasm and excitement; we try to inject fun into our business.
ACDI cut its teeth on hardware, primarily coin-op controllers. That, along with stored-value card readers, was our initial business. Soon after, we offered add-value stations, and those three products served as our main business for about the first 10 years. We were working directly with independent resellers, and at the time, our only OEM partnership was Pitney Bowes. During the process, we gained an understanding of where print and copy was going. We saw the opportunity to not only bring on software, but to resell it and allow software providers to resell our hardware. Through those partnerships, and having the mindset of being self-sufficient, our team onboarded a couple different print management software titles that led us to PaperCut in 2010. That proved to be a game-changer for ACDI as well as for PaperCut, not to mention our reseller partners. Its web-based dashboard was fairly new at the time and was a market differentiator. That led to more and more conversations about the unmet needs of customers and partners, which opened the door to fleet management, capture, analytics, proximity card readers—it was all intended to fill a void.
Over the past 30 years, we’ve gone from a 100% hardware company to 90% software. When it comes to making the digital transformation, we were right there with most of the copier dealers and the OEMs, and we continue that mission today. Just like going from paper to digital, most of our business has migrated from hardware to software, and we provide complementary hardware components. We put ourselves in the shoes of our partners and take the perspective of what’s going to inject value in their territories, communities and businesses. We’ve got the best-of-breed products to help people make it a reality. Plus, we’re fortunate to have Mark and his product team, who have a tremendous record of success.
ACDI is synonymous with PaperCut. What other products do you carry?
Hart: PaperCut is our flagship product, but we still carry our own ACDI products, including the coin-ops and card readers. We’re partners with Elatec and rf IDEAS, and that represents a big part of our business as well. More recently, we brought on Scanshare for capture and workflow, and we’ve been partnering with them for three years. We scoured the globe looking at a bunch of different capture products and found that Scanshare fit the best for ACDI and would be ideal for our industry. We have ACDI Energy Services with EV charging, along with a host of analytics dashboards through our partner, Intuitive. So whether we’re creating dashboards to go along with PaperCut, Scanshare, or our fleet management tool KPAX, we can use the Intuitive BI analytics tool to create either standard or customized dashboards for partners. It’s really agnostic, so there are connectors for DocuWare and other products as well.
Talk about the path that led ACDI to EV charger technology.
Lane: When you think about an emerging technology, it’s not just the impact it’s going to have on a global basis, but also here in our back yard. If the percentage of EV sales in 2030 really reaches 50%, where are we going to charge them? There’s a huge initiative from the federal government to fund not only the major corridors, but the overburdened and underprivileged communities as well. When we read that in the NEVI (National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program), we couldn’t think of anyone better to serve the community with hardware and software than the printing industry and our reseller partners. They have the networks to support and provide service, they care and have the will and the “want to.” It’s definitely our channel.
We started looking into the software and hardware aspects and what would be required. We felt there was a path to connect the dots between the copier industry and the EV industry. The dealers are experts when it comes to implementation, post-sale support, refreshing software and hardware, the lease agreements and the financial models that can be structured around it. We saw a lot of similarities with EV chargers. I learned long ago that if anyone can fulfill a service contract, it’s the print industry. And that’s what’s required with the technology we brought on board.
Hart: We have open conversations with our dealers, and they’re always challenging us to find the next big thing in the market. They want to know how they can further diversify their product line. It was one of our own team members, a big car enthusiast, who suggested it could be a great fit, so we put a team together to look into it. The basics of selling EV chargers and copiers were the same; it’s a piece of hardware that requires an annual maintenance and support contract, topped off by software. EV chargers have an annual annuity of charging for the cost per kilowatt. Dealers have copier contracts selling at a cost per page. We looked at the projections for EV charging capacity needs in the future, and the fact that it’s not just interstate exits that will require charging stations, but homes and businesses as well. We saw it as a great opportunity for ACDI and our partners. Dealers have sent us pictures of their 2024 sales kickoffs with EV chargers at the center of them. EVcharging is playing a big role in the sales plans of dealers. We’re excited to have entered this market.
As for the technology partners you’ve chosen to date, talk a little about the vetting process.
Hart: We currently have three partners in our portfolio right now. The first, SemaConnect (now Blink), is one of only two tier one EV charging vendors in the United States, meaning they made their own devices and provided their own software. We didn’t want to come out of the gate with a fly-by-night company entering this market, so we went with someone who was safe when it comes to emerging and new technologies. Another company we partnered with is Autel Energy, a longtime leading manufacturer of diagnostic equipment in the automotive industry. This was a company also looking to diversify and leverage their expertise in the auto industry. We met them at CES in Las Vegas and signed a partnership with them late last year.
Another partner we’re excited about is Lincoln Electric, which has been around since the 1890s. They’re the world’s largest welding company, and like Autel, they were looking to diversify. All the components that were needed to make EV chargers were already embedded in their welding technology, except for the software. I’d read a blog about their entry into EV chargers, and I was very familiar with them. So we went to their grand opening ribbon-cutting in Cleveland last November and signed on with them. They’re going to be the first 100% American company to produce DC fast level chargers.
Talk about the marketing strategy you’ve employed to grow your presence in EV chargers.
Lane: The idea of an early adopter program sounded good for us, and we sought to design a network of partners in the printing industry that weren’t constantly competing against the guy across the street. We had two conditions for dealer partners. First, they had to be bullish on the EV charging technology and the growing EV space in general. We wanted to find early adopters that were passionate about the opportunity to diversify within their business, communities and regions where they operate.
Second, they had to like the layout of the strategy for us to not only streamline the supply—which is probably the biggest component we bring—but we can also take a product portfolio of EV charging stations and make sure that if an order comes through, they’ll get the parts and the components they need in a way that they can efficiently deploy them. We found working with a few other manufacturers that it can be challenging at times. We cut out that loop and made sure the business is streamlined and that we can hold inventory or make sure that the inventory is readily available for our partners.
In 2021, at the tail end of COVID, there were many dealers and reseller partners looking to diversify. They all wanted to know, “What are we going to do?” We heard about 100 different options for dealers to add to their business or to bring a new product on board. That was a good time for us to say EV charging is the answer. For one, no one in our industry is going to compete against our EV charging stations initially. Secondly, to be honest, if we had brought in another core product that fits within the family, we might not have gotten as much publicity. I don’t think many of our early EV adopters would have even looked twice at us if we’d brought in new document management software. The idea of a growing market can sometimes produce a lot of uncertainty, but the industry view is that there’s a lot of upside. We wanted to make sure we can equip dealers with quality product and service models. We’re going to offer a solid product, support the software and train them on it. We’ve built out the training modules, sales modules, talk tracks, support manuals and quoting systems to make business easy. Based on the limited number of resellers that we’re looking to onboard, we’re going to equip them to win business in their region and, potentially, new regions.
We’re going to be the first ones to say that EV chargers aren’t for all dealers. Our team isn’t soliciting everyone to sell EV charging stations. But we’re available to consult with you on the benefits, risks and upside while adding perspective on where the industry may be going based on all the information that’s being published. That’s the consultative approach we’d like to take.
Hart: When we launched this into the channel two years ago, we knew it wouldn’t be for everybody. There were a lot of naysayers—EVs aren’t really big yet, you can’t make money, how are you going to do this? And that’s fine. Early on, our marketing was very limited. We were at Executive Connection Summit, which led to dealers wanting to know more. We’ve said no to a few dealers. Some of them come to us and say, “prove this, prove that, show me all your numbers.” That’s just not where we’re at right now. Those who’ve joined us have been great about learning. There’s news coming out about the technology seemingly every day, and it’s been interesting to see where it’s going.
Our marketing team is approaching new spaces, such as the lighting industry, where customers are looking to purchase EV chargers. We’re bringing leads back to our dealers, and we’re showing them who they need to engage within a customer. There’s a big EV charging trade show coming up this month, and we’re taking a group of our dealers to it. We’ll be meeting with some of our technology partners such as Autel and Lincoln Electric. We’re going to share knowledge to help each other and figure out how to market more effectively from a North American standpoint. There’s lots and lots of collaboration involved.
What do you see as the path to growth for your company and its resellers?
Lane: We’re definitely bullish on our industry. Our mantra is that we meet our customers where they are. As we build a portfolio, we don’t do it for one or two partners. Ideally, the products in our portfolio can benefit and add value for all our reseller partners. We think there’s huge upside potential with PaperCut in the migration to the cloud. And as we fine-tune that migration, all our products go along with it. Currently, we’re playing in the cloud with PaperCut Hive, Scanshare and analytics. There’s a huge benefit to that because it leads to the subscription-based pricing model customers are seeking. And it fits our model of creating customers for life. We’ve built a customer success strategy around all our solutions, implemented it into our reseller channel, and that affects the end-customers. They’re happy, they’ll use the software for a long time and they’re going to buy more solutions from us. That’s what we want to see happen.
Another benefit to the EV chargers centers on sustainability. Organizations large and small are looking to take responsibility for their green initiatives. EV charging stations check all the boxes, and we can support them with greener energy. We’re also seeing tremendous growth with KPAX, a dealer fleet management tool that competes in a crowded market. ACDI understands time is money and you need to have a product that’s going to be up 99% of the time. KPAX fits that description.
Hart: The path to growth for ACDI is the partners in our portfolio today as well as the products.
We get calls on a weekly basis, asking us to bring new products into our portfolio. We’re very selective, and our dealers recognize this as well. They know that when we do say yes to a new product, we put the entire company, including support and sales, behind it. We have a lot of technologies, but what works best is when our reps sit down with our dealers to determine what’s right for them. Our reps are great at devising a tailored plan and portfolio that will lead to success. Our dealers mean everything to us.
What are your company’s goals for the next 12 months?
Hart: The industry is still trying to figure out cloud and subscriptions. And we want to play a big part in that; we feel it pertains to PaperCut Hive and putting it in the cloud, or even PaperCut MF. When a customer says, “I want cloud,” that doesn’t mean the same thing to every customer. Our goal is to really help our partners and their customers understand the cloud when it comes to workflow, print security and print enablement. Obviously, EV charging is a large goal for us, and we want the ACDI Energy Services team to be successful. We’re going to do that by locking arms with them, being in the field and helping them learn as we go.
Lane: Ideally, we want to build and create more friends. We’ve been successful in tying in the professional with the personal aspect of the way we operate our business. We’d like our dealer partners to be champions of not only our products but also our people. And we want to be champions of the products our partners carry and their people. Our business has been built on fairly high-touch products and strategies in regard to being in front of our partners. In order to do that, you have to be invited. I take it as a compliment when our teams are invited to a lot of different offices. That allows us to present what we’re doing, where we’re going and potentially how we can help our dealers get from point A to B. We love to be able to look at a dealer’s business, understand their wants and needs, and be able to fill them—whether that’s with an integration between two different products, or through PaperCut, capture or analytics. We have nearly 20,000 active PaperCut licenses, and we’ve had an active role in 70% of the installations. But we also have experience in all different arenas, environments and infrastructures. We can leverage that knowledge base to work through many difficult and complex scenarios that maybe others can’t. We’re blessed to be able to do that. Plus, we’re investing in our people, growth, systems and processes. We’re excited to be a part of our dealers’ long-term success, and we’re doing everything we can to make that success a reality.
