For years, the trade press, consultants, manufacturers and industry think tanks have preached to the office technology dealership masses. The message of their sermon? The need to offer the most-comprehensive menu of products and services to end users, extending beyond the MFP box with managed services and ancillary offerings that transform dealers into those single-source providers. The idea is to enhance customer stickiness and discourage end users from looking elsewhere for any needs that fall within the dealer realm.
So it comes as no surprise that those people who are dishing out this advice are also taking their own medicine. A prime example is the merger between BEI Services, a long-recognized leader in business intelligence data and benchmarking tools, and Business Systems Consulting, which offers dealer guidance in fields ranging from sales and finance to human resources and admin. With a wealth of growing services, including M&A consulting/preparation and no-meter billing through one of the industry’s first imaging device as a service (iDaaS) platforms, the newly-christened NEXERA speaks to all-in-one dealer support.
BEI Services was founded in 1993 by Wes McArtor and Greg Moseley. The company’s strong suit was service benchmarking, backed by the industry’s largest database of comparative performance metrics; evaluating both machine and technician performance to bolster profitability and enhance the customer experience.
Dick Elixman started Business Systems Consulting in 2007 after spending more than 25 years in the industry with companies including Litton Business Systems and Imagistics International. Business Systems Consulting’s aim was to guide organizations in creating their strategic vision, including strategic financial planning, productivity analysis and employee mentoring.
The two organizations had bumped into each other frequently on the industry circuit, and about a year ago, McArtor and Elixman began exploring the possibility of a union. Like the oft-parodied melding of chocolate and peanut butter, bringing the two forces together was essentially a no-brainer.
After working through the logistics and the plan of attack moving forward, the merger and rebrand was announced in tandem with ITEX 2019 this past spring. Moseley remains CEO, with McArtor as president and Elixman the CFO.
Blended Synergies
“We’ve worked together in a variety of endeavors over the years, so we’ve had history,” McArtor noted. “As we saw more and more of our customers individually using both of our services, we realized that virtually every one of these customers had opportunities for us to assist them. So now when we see issues in any particular area of the company, we can also understand how that’s impacting the other areas.”Given the intertwined nature of dealer challenges, the combined competencies enable NEXERA (with the tagline “Helping dealers thrive in the next era of imaging”) to take a more-holistic approach. It addresses processes and people, stepping beyond the identification of problems to provide customers with roadmaps toward gaining efficiencies across the full spectrum of their businesses. Having the analytics and the benchmarks provides for a great launching pad to enable dealer clients to do better, but absent an actionable game plan, dealers may be more likely to spin their wheels.
“So many times, owners leave a dealer group meeting, or hire consultants, that give them great ideas. But many times those ideas never see implementation because the dealer’s people haven’t been involved enough to understand the whys and hows,” McArtor said. “Our strength is helping these team members succeed, via coaching and mentoring to specific outcomes. We need to spend our energy and time on developing people using the analytics to guide us, so we have some kind of measurement that says, ‘Here’s where we’re going, here are our goals and are we making progress toward those goals?’ That’s what separates us from others. There are other companies that can provide all the benchmarks in the world, but they don’t teach you how to fix it.”
McArtor notes that the union and rebrand have been positively received by clients and prospects, and NEXERA’s team of 24 specialists is helping to spread the word about the unique value proposition the merger has created. And as the consultation isn’t limited to the service aspect of an operation, NEXERA can break down all the elements, from contract billing to finances. In addition, it can outline the correlation between the various departments and illustrate the impacts they have on the overall health of the operation. Most importantly, it paves the way to a plan of action dealers can follow.
How it Works
Typically, a dealer will approach NEXERA regarding a specific pain point. NEXERA staff who touch upon certain elements within an operation will sit down, virtually, with the client’s key personnel via a webinar to discuss what needs to be done. “The first process is really about fixing what’s happened in the past,” McArtor said. “Sadly, most dealers’ employees are trained by another employee, which at times creates systemic problems that were not intentional, but can severely impact process and data accuracy.”
Online training and coaching follows to make sure all pertinent parties are up to speed on the solutions necessary to avoid repeat mistakes. For example, NEXERA has a client that had hundreds of customer numbers for one customer—a difficult process to remedy in any ERP. NEXERA was able to correct the problem and train the new billing person on how to avoid this in the future. The key, according to McArtor, is to ensure dealer systems are improved going forward.
After an issue has been solved, NEXERA will schedule monthly or quarterly reviews to ensure that fixes, suggestions and training have been followed through on as instructed. This could entail bringing in other inter-related departments, if needed.
“Often times in the process, we see other things that either (clients) weren’t aware of or aren’t part of their core expertise,” McArtor noted. “An owner sometimes doesn’t understand all the metrics around what’s going on in service. Sometimes they become compartmentalized around their sales organization and maybe finance, but aren’t keenly aware of what’s going on unless they’re billing for inventory or service. A lot of times, our evaluation process is about taking a holistic approach and looking at all the operations, focused on the pain points but also looking at where we can make improvements that would ultimately bring more profitability or efficiency to the dealership.”
Best of Both Worlds
Elixman has long been a fan and proponent of BEI’s analytics, which he feels are the only true measure for looking at key performance indicators and everything related at the employee level when it comes to service. The same process for coaching service personnel is the same blueprint he ascribes to for coaching sales.
“It is such a great combination of entities, because most of the time, we find that dealers just need help of some sort. And maybe it’s just a few hours, but we’re in a position to do that with the team that BEI has,” he said. “They have four individuals who all served in large dealerships as service managers. They understand day-to-day operations versus simply looking at a benchmark.”
Now that the organizations are under one umbrella, McArtor notes the next step is developing tools with the core competencies of both teams, such as interactive dashboards and more interactive coaching-development programs. NEXERA’s exclusive iDaaS billing program will be a critical component going forward, and McArtor is interested in expanding into areas in which data analytics components do not currently exist, such as managed IT.
NEXERA is also catering to the needs of dealers who are considering selling, acquiring or preparing their firms to be passed on to the next generation of ownership. For sellers, NEXERA helps clients improve their EBITDA through methods such as improving manpower efficiency from a service perspective. With buyers, NEXERA can assist in the due-diligence process, and improve an obtained business by eliminating operational inefficiencies. As for succession scenarios, NEXERA can help that next generation of ownership operate the business in a way that it can be successful.
Change Management
McArtor notes the industry is in flux, given the decline of print, evolving billing methods, the A3 to A4 convergence and the need for dealers to diversify—all impacts to NEXERA’s client base. “Successful dealers will have to learn how to adapt to these changes,” he said. “But the key to being successful is going to be how do you take your existing and most valuable resources—the people—and help them make these changes successfully.”
As NEXERA builds upon its brand awareness, McArtor wants to ensure that integrity continues to be a focal point in its endeavors by delivering on what is promised. “We take care of our people the same way we want them to take care of our customers,” he said. “We are still merging cultures and processes that will improve our efficiency and how we communicate internally.
“In the long term, we will continue to develop best-in-class management tools to help our dealers make their companies more profitable. The new name has been well received, and because we can address some other aspects of a company’s business, it has opened new doors that were previously closed to us.”
