What’s Hot & What’s Not?

This week we speak with Greg Gondek, president of Advanced Copy Technologies in Cromwell, CT. Advanced sells Kyocera, Lanier, and Riso equipment and also offers asset management, document management, and electronic workflow solutions.

What’s hot?

Gondek: Asset management and 3D printers. Our asset management of approaching clients is extremely hot to a point where we bat 1,000. Personally, I’ve had to stop doing the presentation because every presentation ends with “Let’s do it”. What we do is very detailed and takes a lot of work. We’re doing one right now for a company that has 300 devices in 20 some-odd locations. It’s 100+ hours of work for us to do it right and the end result is we’re going to sign them up, but the amount of work involved in means that we can only work on so many at any given time. It’s extremely hot, but lukewarm compared to how we’re doing with 3D printers right now.

What’s not?

Gondek: Software—document management services. There’s so many people out there that have been burned by bad software. I’m one of them. Over the years we’ve bought over 40 different software packages. We’d bring it in here, test it, then test their support structure. Our IT people would call them about glitches and things. Some of them were partners with manufacturers, but I think they’re running out of a garage and there’s no backroom support. We work on a lot of document management presentations that are very large and the sales cycle is too long. We worked on one that was an $800,000 transaction. For a dealer of our size that’s wonderful and we could do everything they needed, but during the course of nine months the customer had to CFO changes and an IT change so everything got pushed back. We’ve now put that into the proper perspective. There’s a pecking order for getting to document management. We now look at building the foundation with the account, taking them through asset management, managed print services, and then the next step is document management. So document management software and services is taking a back seat.