Meet the New Breed of Dealer, Not the Same as the Old Breed of Dealer

Here’s a new take on an old story; an IT company buys a copier company and then makes a move into managed print services. You don’t see that happen every day, but that’s what happened in 2006 when D.A. Rainsberger Co. purchased CBI, a long-time Kyocera Mita dealer and a technology solutions client of Rainsberger since 1988, bridging the gap between the old and the new worlds.

The relationship between the two companies made a boatload of sense from the start. 

“We saw that once the MFP was connected to a network the MFP industry was going to become part of the IT industry,” recalls Gary Rainsberger, president of Center for Business Innovation.

“We were among the first doing hosted applications and had customers with copiers,” adds Jim Rainsberger, vice president. “We knew those things had to merge and when this opportunity came up it seemed like a logical fit.”

Taking a copier company and merging it with an IT company, no matter how logical it sounds and how long they’ve been working together, still was an adjustment on both sides of the aisle.

“The IT people were used to going out and selling services not a box or hard product,” states Jim. “And for those who came from the copier side, they had a long history of selling features and talking about why their box is better than somebody else’s box. There were adjustments on both sides and that created a bit of a challenge.”

So how long has it taken for everyone to make that adjustment?

“It’s still proceeding,” says Jim. “You’re dealing with an entrenched way to sell that everybody is comfortable with. You can find someone who wants to buy a copier and close it that day, but that doesn’t happen with a solutions sell. It might be six weeks to six months before you finally close that and that’s a major fundamental change for a box seller.”

Yeah, yeah we’ve heard all that before, but that was the reality that smacked the Rainsberger’s squarely in the face. Welcome to the copier business. Enough about copiers, let’s talk about services, which is what makes Center for Business Innovation stand out from the pack.

Center for Business Innovation positions itself as a managed service provider with managed print services one of the four key services the company provides. They’ve even taken the initiative to brand their services under the Absolute.Reliance brand. The four key components include Desktop.Reliance, a desktop monitoring and maintenance service; Server.Reliance, a server monitoring and maintenance service; Data.Reliance, which provides hosted applications as well as protects data; and Print.Reliance, the managed print services portion of the services offerings.

“We’re kind of like a four legged stool,” explains Jim. “MPS is only a quarter of our managed services. That’s a critical distinction that needs to be made because people sometimes use managed services and managed print services interchangeably and they’re not necessarily the same thing.”

Center for Business Innovation has been providing three of those components for years while managed print services remains the newest services offering.

“It’s gaining a lot of momentum,” says Jim. “We have several thousand print devices under management right now.”

As traditional copier dealers have struggled with managed print, Center for Business Innovation still had a lot to learn about managed print despite their IT background.

Fortunately Kyocera Mita has put together a solid managed print services program that has helped ease the transition for many of its forward-thinking dealers, Center for Business Innovation included. The gaps have been filled by Strategy Development who provides Center for Business Innovation with both MPS and traditional sales management training.

“Our newly hired sales manager, who came from the copier side of the business, had to go to the MPS and sales management training with Strategy Development before he started with us,” reports Jim.

And what does this new sales manager know now that he didn’t know before?

“Everything,” quips Gary. “MPS was brand new to him and he had a lot to learn there.”

When it comes to MPS those who have a lot to learn tend to be the rule rather than the exception.  

For Center for Business Innovation, the biggest challenge they faced in adding managed print to their services offerings revolved around infrastructure changes.  

“You need a meter collection agent and a server whether it’s yours, a rental, or Kyocera’s,” says Jim. “Then you needed to know how to collect the meter reads, get it into your server, and then get that information into your billing system.”

This required changes within the billing system and that’s one of the things the Rainsbergers know now that they wish they had when they first began trudging down the MPS path.

“If your system tracks every individual device and you bill against that and credit against that, and you’re now selling a managed print services operation to 2,000 devices, you need to change your model because you don’t want to bill each one of those every month and provide the collection on that,” explains Jim. “You need to change your infrastructure to accommodate that.”

How far in did it take you before they realized this?

“That first bill was a real revelation,” laughs Gary.

Now they know and business, particularly on the managed services side is doing nicely. About 40 percent of the company’s sales come from hardware while 60 percent is from services. That will likely change.  

“We expect the hardware component to maybe go down to 30 percent,” predicts Gary. “Services are what’s going to drive sales now and in the future.”

Meanwhile, the managed print services portion of the business has been growing at a 25 percent clip.

“We’re not really happy with that and would like it to have grown more,” concedes Gary. “On the other hand from where we began, that’s an acceptable growth rate. At this stage maybe it’s good it wasn’t more than that just to get some of the kinks ironed out.”

The company has a few competitors in the various markets it serves throughout Michigan, but no one is doing managed services like they are locally. The ability to offer a varied menu of services along with hardware tends to give Center for Business Innovation an edge.

“Customers want one bill and in the SMB market they’re happy to outsource that to somebody who can confidently do that.”

Customers can be found in both the public and private sector, including a fair amount of local communities and small governments.

The primary reason organizations choose Center for Business Innovation is that one-stop shopping experience, which eliminates multiple vendors and vendors pointing fingers at each other whenever problems crop up.

“We can provide total services so if there’s a problem, it’s our problem,” says Gary. “That’s a real plus for them.”

The Rainsberger’s have learned from experience if they can’t get to a C-level executive to discuss the wide range of services they offer, they’re better off waiting. One prospect had folks interested, but they weren’t C-level executives  even though they had promised those C-level folks would be there when the Rainsbergers came in for a meeting. On the day of the meeting, the Rainsbergers were told the C-level executives couldn’t make it.

“We canceled the meeting until they could be there,” says Jim. “Unless you’re dealing with the people whose daily concern is the bottom line, then you’re not dealing with the right people.”

“Once we get to the C-level people we make good headway,” adds Gary. “When you spend a lot of time and walk away with nothing, you quickly realize we really never got to the people who could make the decision.”

Not that other dealers need to be told that MPS is where it’s at these days, but for those who have yet to see the light, Gary has some advice.

“If somebody is sitting on the fence about MPS, it’s either get on board or the train has left the station,” he says. “If you don’t do it for your customers somebody else is going to do it and the customer is going to realize the value of the more complete solution and you’ll be left out in the cold.”

Looking ahead, the Rainsbergers have high hopes for the next 12 months.

“We’re going to continue to see growth in managed services, which includes MPS, continuing to escalate here in Michigan,” says Gary. “As far as box selling, that’s more of a challenge because of economic conditions, but that’s going to start to climb too as a result of the services leading into moving those boxes.”

How many dealers can do what Center for Business Innovation does? Not many. Usually it takes a village of IT providers and office technology dealers to do it, but what separate this company from its competitors is a strong brand, a rich history, and their ability to do it all and do it well thanks in part to a little help from their friends such as Kyocera Mita and Strategy Development.