The Swenson Group

Sometimes a vision can seem clearer on paper than it does in practice. When Dean Swenson decided to transform his business in 2003—leaving the comforts of being a Xerox Agency member to begin anew as an independent Konica Minolta dealer—the reset button was hit on his annual Read More

This is easily one of my favorite features of the year, when we ask our Elite Dealer honorees that one question on everyone’s mind: What was the greatest challenge you experienced this year, and how did you respond to it? Obviously, there are universal business conditions that Read More

Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A., Inc. (Konica Minolta) is pleased to announce its FY22 dealer award winners, recognizing the many accomplishments during the company’s 2022 fiscal year (April 1, 2022 – March 31, 2023). The awards were announced on Wednesday, June 28 Read More

There was a time, not long ago, when cloud-based solutions aimed at the office space were met with skepticism, trepidation and even a dose of fear. The “host locally” crowd gradually dissipated to a fringe core of holdouts, however, based on two primary drivers: the pandemic Read More

It is not enough for dealers to simply be providers of managed IT, software and workflow solutions to their client base. They need to be coaches, teachers, confidants and soothsayers. Yes, there is a psychology to workflow solutions and a dealer’s role in shining the light on the Read More

When the editors of ENX Magazine were making minor adjustments to the Elite Dealer nomination form at the onset of the year, one of the annual questions we pose, “What was the most significant challenge you endured during the past year,” was tweaked with the preface “Aside from Read More

Hard to believe, but we’ve almost clicked off the first full month of 2020. For those of us who still write paper checks, it’s time to stop scribbling out 2019 and get with the New Year. Ah, but were it not for the lessons delivered by 2019, we would be ill-equipped to deal with Read More

Coming off a 2019 that witnessed a dizzying degree of M&A activity from players large and small across our humble industry, it will be interesting to see what the new year holds in store. But if 2020 is anything resembling its predecessor, fasten your seat belts and hold on Read More

As we wrap up April’s look at the value of peer groups, one of the common refrains uttered by all of our panelists is resisting the urge to implement too many ideas brought back from meetings all at once. Easier said than done. Many dealers remark that they’ve emerged from peer Read More

One of the harbingers of spring is baseball season. The sport has undergone a major metamorphosis in the last 20 years, particularly in the way that performance is measured. For years, batters were judged by three primary statistics—batting average, home runs and runs batted in. Read More

It’s not uncommon for dealers who are new to a peer group to be a bit bashful initially. You look around the room and see dozens of grizzled veterans representing big-name dealerships, and the tendency is to sit quietly and let the heavy hitters do all the talking. But don’t sell Read More

The 2018 campaign has largely been a rousing success for the office technology dealer universe, aided to some degree by a healthy economy (the December stock market swoon notwithstanding). Beneficial though it may be, dealer growth is always tempered by the need to have an Read More

Dean Swenson, President and CEO of The Swenson Group (TSG), began his career at Xerox in California soon after graduating from UC Santa Barbara in 1991. He recalled that at that time Xerox was in the early stages of channel marketing and they were incentivizing employees to start Read More

Everybody makes mistakes and the dealer community has made its share as they struggle to make a go of it in the Managed Services business. This month in the print version of ENX magazine the main feature is “Managed Services Made Easy.” The individuals we interviewed for that Read More

The main feature in the July issue of ENX is “Managed Services Made Easy.” That piece examines how to get started in Managed Services and whether or not buying an IT company is the easy answer. I also asked the experts I interviewed for that story to identify the biggest fears Read More