Paul Schwartz
We are just so busy and can’t find enough people. It’s a challenge all the time and has become even worse in the last year. I think it kind of dovetails with the biggest challenge of our clients, the independent dealers, and that is the migration or absorption of MPS. It’s one those benchmark things in the history of this industry that has reinvented the industry and realigned everything. Just as it’s all changed for the dealers really fast, it’s changed for us really fast too.
For example, it used to be that the most important thing for a technician was they were break-fix and OEM-trained on a certain model. That was the key. Starting a few years ago they needed to understand the network, but the dealership might have an IT guy that did that or the customer might have it. Now, the technician has to have the OEM training, it’s still important, but it’s on the same level of importance as being A+ certified on network.
That’s changed everything. The sales reps we recruit now, if they don’t know how to sell in a sophisticated network environment and don’t know how to solutions sell, they’re going to have a tough time getting a job. All of a sudden all the metrics of who we recruit and the qualifications has changed. Things are always evolving and changing, but this happened fast. We were very fortunate in that we had some clients that were on the forefront of this. Four or five years ago some of our more cutting edge clients started coming to us saying ‘We need people that are more engaged on the network side.’
The best thing from our standpoint is we have a database of almost 55,000 people is that there’s finally a name for this—MPS. And when you’re going through lots of people’s resumes in a database it makes it a lot easier when you have something to call it.
In the last five or six months we’ve noticed our clients migrating beyond MPS to managed services. That’s still one of those areas where they haven’t come up with a single name for it—managed services or professional services. We’re now starting to get a significant number of job orders from people to set up and manage that part of the copier dealership. We have one client for example, which is pretty typical, who has gone out and bought a small IT company. However, a lot of our clients are choosing to grow it in house.
It appears for the most part, not across the board, everybody is back in growth mode again and they’re adding people. Our number one priority is to keep them staffed. Our number two priority for our clients is we’re looking for game changers and change agents for them. Our thing for the next year is helping our clients remain ahead of the curve and evolve, and find them the talent they need to grow into the new areas the industry is going into.
