Last month, Nashville, Tennessee-based Novatech shocked the industry with the announcement that Founder and CEO Darren Metz was transitioning into the role of executive chairman, to be replaced by Dan Cooper, a 30-year industry veteran with tenures at Xerox’s Global Imaging Systems (GIS) and Danka Industries.
Cooper’s impressive resume includes tutelage from such industry notables as Dan Doyle, Tom Johnson, Michael Shea and Tom Salierno. He flourished while at Electronic Systems (ESI), a subsidiary of GIS, and ESI established itself as a pioneering company in the area of managed IT. He was president of GIS at the time of his departure in August of 2018, at which point Cooper began considering his next position.
To gain perspective on the future of the dealership, we spoke with Cooper about his career, the Novatech opportunity and his goals as CEO.
Tell us about your career prior to joining Novatech.
Cooper: During the first five years of my career, I worked for a company in Virginia that was bought by Danka. I had a great opportunity to work with some innovators in the industry that gave me a lot of experience at a young age. In 1999, when the business was struggling a bit, I left to join ESI, which had been bought by Global Imaging the year before. I worked with Bill Kamarek, truly a visionary in the industry and one of the early pioneers of office providers. He retired from the company a year later and I led it for seven years. When the board of directors at Global wanted to broaden the leadership team, I ended up working for Tom Johnson. I joined the headquarters, remained as CEO of ESI and started helping Global operate the companies that we were acquiring. Eventually, I was responsible for all of the companies and became the CEO of Global in 2017.
Then, a number of changes took place with Xerox and their board that have been well-publicized. I’m a financial model type of guy; it’s how we operate and go to market. I believe in the dealer-based model, and obviously Xerox is going to change that. So my message to them was to find someone to do the change they were looking to do.
What intrigued you the most about the Novatech opportunity?
Cooper: The opportunities in the industry started coming and I took some time to review them all. What was appealing to me about Novatech was the history of the company as an entrepreneurial business that is not afraid of taking risks, being innovative and going into new markets like 3-D. Having visited the company many years before, I knew we could have a successful transition between Darren and myself. Trivest Partners’ (Novatech’s capital partner) market approach is to buy good, quality companies, and when the owner retires, they put in another leader and continue to let them grow with the company. That was the appeal because it was the way we operated Global Imaging for many years.
Looking at our markets, Nashville is on fire. Tennessee has a good business climate in general. The company has made four acquisitions in the Georgia marketplace, and Atlanta is one of the top markets in the country with a lot of room to grow. Fifteen years ago, Novatech went into the Texas marketplace, and they’ve been able to expand beyond Dallas. We have other operations throughout the southeast, so the company’s been able to demonstrate the ability to manage multiple markets. That’s something we look to continue to do.
One of the clinchers for me was that when I was talking to them, they were in the midst of making a managed IT acquisition of DynaSis in Atlanta. The biggest part of my background since my days at ESI was in the computing field, and understanding that if you’re on the customer’s network, you can be the trusted advisor and bring a lot of value-add. DynaSis has been in the managed IT space for 25 years; they were a market leader and twice the size of an average managed IT firm. The ability to take that solution field across the entire company was very appealing.
If you look at the manufacturing partners we have on the print side, we have the premier partners: Canon, Konica Minolta and HP. All those things taken together led to the decision that Novatech was the right place for me.
How do you plan to put your signature on the company, so to speak?
Cooper: At Global we owned 40 companies, similar to Novatech, so I have a fair amount of experience in understand the way Novatech goes to market. The number one thing that I will put my stamp on is moving towards a more managed office environment, taking the acquisition we made from DynaSis and driving this throughout the company. Novatech wasn’t doing much in the managed office or managed IT space. My personal opinion is the entire office community is moving toward the managed environment, whether it’s managed print services, hardware as a service on the computing side, or managed IT to provide the support. Number two is developing future leaders in the industry. That’s something I’ve been pretty passionate about my entire career at Global Imaging. Most all the succession and development we did was from within, and I think there’s a great opportunity to develop a lot of leaders inside of Novatech as we begin to expand the company at a faster pace. We will utilize a lot of the talent we have at the company.
Tell us a little about you short- and long-term goals.
Cooper: The first thing I did was to spend a significant amount of time with the employees. I’ve been to every market except Dallas, and I’m heading there next week. It’s about understanding our sales and customer satisfaction strategies, then spending time with manufacturer partners to understand what their goals are. I’ve had some initial phone calls and am learning about the pace in which they’re moving and diversifying their business models. The short term is focused on driving the front end of our business, driving the revenues, creating cash flow out of what we’re doing. We’ve got a strong acquisition pipeline, and I’ve been spending time with that part of the business as well.
A lot of it entails continuing on our current path with the methodology that the company’s employed. We have plenty of capital from our investors and there’s a great opportunity to expand the business in areas that make sense to us. It’s approaching the marketplace with a total managed office environment. Taking over the client’s network and becoming a trusted advisor is a lot of the focus. To do those types of things, you have to grow the employees. You have to do a lot of development with them. In general, we’re bringing a lot of youth into our industry. Our challenge, for people who’ve been in the industry a long period of time, is getting people to come into the industry as a career. That takes a lot of coaching and development, helping them to understand the business model that the company can operate successfully in.
You have extensive industry experience with Xerox’s GIS and Danka. How will that serve you in an ever-changing landscape?
Cooper: The financial model is definitely something we will use to improve the business at Novatech. The company’s already strong, and to take it to the next level involves teaching the industry financial model to all the managers in the company. We need to grow in the markets we’re competing in. There are some very fine companies in those markets, so we’ll put a lot of focus on the front end, the sales side. We don’t want to just grow through acquisition, we want to grow through net-new business. We have some really unique things that we can bring to the customers.
I alluded to the company taking risks, and we really have the capability to sell and service almost anything that prints in a business, including 3-D, where the company was an early innovator. We have some unique relationships in that area and I think that applying a financial model to that industry will benefit both the manufacturers and us. I’m definitely taking the computing experience that I had with a couple of great companies and applying that to Novatech, and this will be a big piece of what we do. In general, if you take care of your customers and keep them happy, they’re going to continue to do business with you. When a company is an acquisition company, you tend to lose focus on what got you here, and that is taking care of the customers. These are a lot of the principles that the company was founded on, and we’ll continue to ensure we’re focused on it.
Many M&A specialists struggle when it comes to organic growth, so what is Novatech’s key?
Cooper: It’s in the DNA of the company. I give a salute to Darren for that. The company was originally headquartered in Memphis, then opened up in Nashville from scratch. They moved the headquarters to Nashville and built a very impressive building. They went into Knoxville net-new, went into Chattanooga net-new, went into Atlanta through an acquisition, and in Dallas they bought a small Panasonic branch. The DNA of the company has been if we can’t find something in the market, we’ll start from the ground up and get that net-new business.
What can you do to build upon what Novatech has accomplished
