Regardless of what magazine or analyst report you read, webinar you log into, or manufacturer conference you attend, they all have reached the same conclusion when it comes to growth opportunities for the office dealer space. That common denominator is diversification.
In other words, is your core product not selling well, or starting to decline? Simply sell something else. Yet we never include the fine print: the investments in people and infrastructure, training, identifying a technology partner for said product or service, etc. Subject-matter experts aren’t cheap. And there’s no guarantee that within a year (or even two) you will be making a profit. This is not a problem for a $50 million dealer. But this may be a different story for a $10 million dealer.
What all dealers need is to have the president and CEO of their manufacturer drop in and give it to them straight. The chief execs do a good job of meeting with their reseller partners. However, Larry White elevated diversification messaging to an art form at the Executive Connection Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, back in January. White, of course, is the leader at Toshiba America Business Solutions (Toshiba), but he knows how to use a bipartisan tone. In about 15 minutes (well, 12 if you whittle out his entertaining brand of self-deprecating zingers) White zipped through his diversification pitch with examples of how Toshiba and its direct branches have been able to spur growth.
Here are a few of the growth pillars White cited.
Receipt and label printers: This is an area where Toshiba has grown by 166% since 2017. Thermal barcode labels have exploded in the ecommerce era. White didn’t hide the fact that Toshiba struggled with it (“We failed sideways too many times”) and the company didn’t have the track record of Zebra, perhaps the best-known manufacturer of label printers. The OEM was confident thermal printers would align with their business model, but when that didn’t work, White pivoted.
“We changed our concept,” White noted. “We have a really good enterprise sales group. So, we had those reps call some of the big accounts, and we had success with it.”
Toshiba attacked the business verticals that have the greatest need for barcode printers—namely, delivery services and retail environments—and emerged with some of the biggest names in retail, shipping and logistics across the United States.. The thermal barcode label space is fragmented with many providers, lending itself to transactional relationships. There was a huge need for fleet management, and Toshiba capitalized on it. Instead of employing the rip-and-replace strategy, Toshiba managed the incumbent hardware and gradually replaced those units.
Managed print as a service (MPaaS): If print volume is dropping 3% per year, as many have suggested, then White sees Toshiba’s MPaaS growth of 24 ½% as outpacing the print loss by nine percentage points annually. But the beauty of the Encompass MPaaS is how Toshiba has leveraged its patented “eTAG” system to mitigate one of the most time-intensive elements of managed print—inputting all of a client’s fleet into its database—to increase efficiency.
“We don’t have to send anybody out when we take over a fleet,” he added. “Imagine the amount of efficiency that creates and the cost it takes out of MPS. It’s been very good for us, very profitable.”
Solutions business: For Toshiba, this is the header for its digital signage, software services and professional services business, an area that has grown 74% for Toshiba. With the migration of on-premises software hosting to the cloud, the manufacturer enjoys deferred revenue growth of 22.5%.
When it comes to software and digital signage, White notes that Toshiba doesn’t “try to be all things to all people. We’re very specific in the partners we choose and how we sell the product.”
