Usherwood—Crafting a Legacy in Managed IT

Celebrating its 40th year in business, Usherwood Office Technology has come a long way. Charles Usherwood started at the New York Telephone Company straight out of high school, then on to the National Cash Register as a technician before opening Ontario Business Machines 40 miles north of his hometown in Oswego, NY in 1964 with partners.

Louis F. Usherwood

In 1976, the partnership split up, and Usherwood Office Technology was born. From the years 1976-1986, they ran a successful Canon dealership, in addition to selling other office technologies such as cash registers, calculators, and Franklin computers. With the advent of the personal copier in 1978 by Canon, most companies that were reluctant to buy a copier could buy a copier, and based on the cartridge model that Canon introduced, Charles and Carol Usherwood were able to build a fruitful business.

In 1986 Lou Usherwood came into the family business, starting in the Syracuse branch and eventually buying the business in 1997. Once business grew big enough in Syracuse, they moved headquarters from Oswego, NY back down to Syracuse to a bigger marketplace, and haven’t looked back since. Rather, they’ve expanded to cover much of the Northeast, including offices in Albany; Binghamton; Buffalo; Burlington, Vermont; Jamestown; Potsdam; Plattsburgh; and Rochester, with approximately 120 employees serving over 7,000 clients statewide and generating over $20 million annual revenue. Their primary equipment vendors are Canon, Xerox, Samsung, HP, and Cisco.

Usherwood Office Technology offers IT services that include flat-fee Managed IT plans. With all inclusive, continuous maintenance of network infrastructure, complete offsite backup and disaster recovery, and multi-layer security for IT networks, this technology as a service approach eliminates downtime and makes IT reliability and costs predictable for their clients. In addition, Usherwood is a proud Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with a long history of implementation and support of Microsoft Software Solutions.

We spoke with Lou Usherwood, President of Usherwood Office Technology, to get the scoop on what it’s like running a second generational business, how to foster a great workplace culture, and what we can look forward to from Usherwood in the coming years.

What do you strive for at Usherwood?

Usherwood: Well, we strive for a lot of things. I guess most importantly we strive for balance. We want our employees to have a good balance between work and non-work activities. We want to have the kind of company that every one of our employees would be proud to talk about and would have an easy time getting up every morning to come to work, with a team that is unified towards results.

How is business this year? Which segments of your business are growing the fastest? Where do you see your greatest opportunities for growth?

Usherwood: We’ve got two months left in our fiscal, and we’re up about 4.5%. The segments of the business that are growing the fastest are Managed IT and our greatest opportunities for growth lie within that, so Usherwood is throwing ourselves 100% into the pursuit of becoming best in class in that area.

What were some of the biggest changes in your business over the past five years?

Usherwood: I would say, in my business, it was that we grew into more of an organizational structure. The biggest changes have been how we go about solving problems. Where they typically were handled by an individual basis in the earlier days, now we have an effective leadership team that tackles the big challenges in this company. I think that has really allowed our business to grow at the rate that it has.

How do you see your business evolving in the near future? What do you see as your biggest challenges?

Usherwood: I see the business evolving to where the multifunction copier and printer are basically end points that point towards server-based infrastructure as a service. I see the biggest challenge in doing that is getting our certifications and our technicians up to the level that will allow us to transition to a total IT company. We are working hard on that, and fast.

How did you make the transition into IT services? What were some of the challenges in transitioning to that space?

Usherwood: We have a rich legacy in IT, dating back to 1987. We had a computer services company as well as a computer training company for a short time in the late ‘80s. So it wasn’t as big a transition. What ultimately happened was that in 1997 when I bought the company from my parents, I hired my brother, Charlie, who was working for the EDS company (Electronic Data Systems) doing network outsourcing for General Motors [at the time]. He and I both knew that this was all going to converge. We went to a Microsoft boot camp together and got certified by Microsoft to become a Gold Partner in 2001, and we’ve been doing IT since then.

The challenges we’ve had transitioning to that space along those many years was we didn’t understand the model of profitability for the type of business as we do now. We joined a best practice organization so we would understand what good looked like. We’re in one now that’s really allowed us to think forward into the future in a much different way.

Who is your ideal customer?

Usherwood: Because the copier and printer business is different from the managed IT business, at some levels, the ideal customer for both of them varies to a degree. But I will say that for our mid level IT, where we can provide everything from servers to telephones to printers to MFPs, then we are looking at 20-250 employee range [the SMB space]. That’s where we feel is our sweet spot, where we have the best value proposition for our clients.

And what about the copier/printer side?

Usherwood: I would say we love everyone, I guess. What we really want to encourage our clients to realize is they have one phone call to make, they have one email to place for all the endpoints within their office. And Usherwood is in a position to service those products effectively.

What was one of Usherwood’s outstanding accomplishments? What did you do to stand out from your competitors?

Usherwood: We are really excited when we win a deal that covers all the pieces of the pie. For example, in July of last year, we did a facilities management contract where we had a server that we were responsible for, which is the Managed IT piece, we had the print management piece, where we had sold a fleet of copiers, and we provided the staff to run the print shop, copy center and mailroom. And we put it on a six-year contract. To me, that just brings out the best of what this company has to offer.

Is there a product or solution that you are looking to provide in the future?

Usherwood: Yes, we’re investing heavily in our knowledge bandwidth on security. Security from several different angles: security from a network standpoint, security from a display and camera content application, and service as well. I would say that’s where we feel the investment today will produce results that we’ll be very happy with in the future.

Congratulations on winning Best Places to Work for the past two years. In your opinion, what makes your workplace such a great place to be?

Usherwood: We try to make it fun by having events after hours or by taking groups out to lunch. Being a best place to work means that the employees that we have know how to conduct themselves in a professional manner so that they can be part of an award winning team.

What do you look for in your employees? How do you recruit and retain good employees?

Usherwood: Well, we look for honest, loyal people first. I’m sure we all do. I think identifying the needs of the different types of employees is most important, because they have completely different needs. On the technical side, we want to challenge those folks. We want to push them towards certification, but by doing so, we also allow them to increase their hourly pay. It’s a two way street. With our admin employees, again, I think the challenge piece has got to be there, as well as knowing that we really care about them and that we’re flexible with them in ways that they hadn’t had with past employment. And in terms of retaining sales people, they like to make a lot of money, so you have to give them compensation programs that will allow for super achievement. We like to give them the support when they need it, but we also don’t want to micromanage that group because we know the best sales people out there are self-motivated.

What keeps you motivated and excited about the work that you do?

Usherwood: It’s easy to work for a business that has your last name in it. When I get up in the morning, I know it, when I go to bed at night I know it, and that keeps me motivated. It’s exciting when we open branches. I get to see the sign go up, I get to see the logos go up, I get to see the products go in with our name tag on it, and it just makes me really excited that perhaps if I do this correctly that I can leave a legacy that my grandchildren’s grandchildren may someday read about.

Are your children involved with the business as well?

Usherwood: My 24-year-old daughter worked a year for me and is now starting her second year at law school up at Syracuse University. So she’s involved as a board member of the business. My 24 year old daughter is going to run my human resources department in September, so I’m excited about that. And my youngest daughter is still in her senior year in college, so we’ll see. I’m trying to recruit her as a sales person but right now she’s not biting. But I’ve got a little time to keep selling.

What is your least favorite thing about your job?

Usherwood: That’s always an interesting question. I think I try to push myself to take those least favorite things and make myself do them so that they aren’t my least favorite things. They are the things that maybe I’m not as good at, and I have to push myself to learn better, or I have to reeducate myself. And it’s not that I don’t like it, because I like challenges, but as with anybody, I’d love to already have the knowledge and already have had the experience. So sometimes I have to fail forward. I guess that’s the phrase I use for it. I’m going forward, but sometimes I may not know exactly what I’m going into when I get into it.

Outside of work, what do you do for fun?

Usherwood: I’m a hockey player. I play 3-4 times a week. My brother and I meet down in Tampa every April to play in the 50 over nationals, so we like to play at a high level of the sport. I organize a team out of New York and we go down to Florida every year and try to win the championship. We got third place two years ago and this year we had an off year and we ended up at sixth.

Other than that, I do genealogy. My mom and dad did it for four years after I bought the business from them in ’97 and traveled to Europe and England. So when my mom passed I took that over.

I’ve been able to find amazing stuff. We’re in the Mayflower society on one side. And we do our DNA. I have in the office a genealogy room where we’ve got ten 24 x 36 boards that tell the history of Usherwood back to England until the 1500s. What’s funny is that our clients, when they come in, spend more time in that room than they do looking at our products.