Fires. Floods. Earthquakes. Economic downturns. Recessions. Backup and disaster recovery plans have contingencies for just about every imaginable event, for the lack of a better word. They’re geared toward helping businesses pivot and resume normal business activities as quickly as possible, in a manner that is opaque to the customer. Chaos may reign in the back office, but client-facing activities must continue unimpeded.
When COVID-19 became an official pandemic on March 11, it added a new wrinkle to the recovery plans of dealers, resellers and all other providers within the office technology network. With little time to react, businesses embarked on their next phase of business continuity through remote operations. The particulars of this process have been well documented, but as a part of our modified May/June State of the Industry report, we asked dealers to grade their performance on the pandemic pop quiz. Additionally, we wanted to know if dealers were able to take anything away from their experience that will be beneficial moving forward.
Doing Better Business of Altoona, Pennsylvania, gave itself strong marks for its level of preparedness. The company was positioned well financially and from a technological standpoint. Working from home was nothing new to employees, who frequently telecommuted prior to the pandemic. Having four warehouse locations also ensured the company had redundancy in the event any staff members contracted the disease (which has not been the case).
“I feel like we were very prepared and very proactive,” noted President Deb Dellaposta. “We knew with school closures the exact impact this would have on our finances and also on our productivity. We furloughed 60% of our team members, have 35% working from home or in the field and 5% operating three of our warehouses. We’ve been holding weekly meetings with our Select Dealer Group to share information and best practices. We have been communicating with our clients via email, website, social media and the telephone and have processes and procedures documented to ensure everyone’s safety. We continue to deliver and install equipment in home offices and essential businesses with these new procedures.”
The biggest drawback, she notes, is not having answers readily available for employees. The company is communicating more often and utilizing its own technology more, which has been helpful in creating solutions for clients.
Not having a pandemic playbook created a unique set of challenges for LDI Color ToolBox, but the Jericho, New York-based dealer leveraged its vast expertise in critical technology sets to quickly pivot in serving the client, according to Brian Gertler, senior vice president.
“As a technology company, we entered with a unique skillset and expertise in managed IT, Pro AV and video conferencing to handle our own remote communications capabilities and the requests of many of our clients and prospects,” Gertler said.
Pivotal Investments
For Impact Networking of Lake Forest, Illinois, the leadership core of CIO Doug Gamache, CTO Frank DeGeorge and Vice President of Managed IT Patrick Layton—in concert with their respective teams—paved the way for the dealer to weather such a unique disruption. According to CEO Frank Cucco, the trio of executives strongly influenced him in making significant technology investments in the years leading up to the pandemic, and their counsel has been validated.
“We have been meeting monthly for years, strategizing on what technologies should be introduced into the company and constantly upgrading and fine-tuning our systems,” Cucco said. “This pre-planning allowed us to flip a switch and have 600 employees work from home without a glitch. With that said, I feel this team of experts had us 100% prepared to take on this challenge and continue to operate at a very high level.”
When the pandemic struck, St. Cloud, Minnesota-based Marco’s IT services strategy, built over decades, was affirmed. CEO Jeff Gau noted that since the company utilizes its own managed services, its IT acumen provided insight into the remote worker’s needs. In fact, the dealer’s own roster of 1,300-odd employees were working from home within four days.
Certain types of equipment were tough to come by in the early stages of the quarantine, according to Gau. The company was also mindful of the network security issues in terms of breaches, and Gau has witnessed how it has hampered a number of his dealer friends who have been attacked.
“We hired a CISO and started a really robust security strategy about 18 months ago,” Gau said. “It’s still playing out, but it’s been very helpful. With things like dual authentication and changing your password to one that is 16 digits…sometimes it seems like it’s too much. But a lot of the things we’re doing and were thought of as overkill got tested, and in fact, they’re not overkill. That’s been my biggest takeaway. You err on the side of being over-prepared, and in the unlikely event that you need it, you’ll be glad that you did.”
Avoiding Excess
Inventory can be a tight rope to walk in the time of a pandemic. Jim Loffler, founder and CEO of the Loffler Companies in Bloomington, Minnesota, noted that while it is great to take advantage of discounted manufacturer pricing by carrying excess inventory, it’s certainly not a position a company wants to be in when belts are tightened.
“Right now, you want to be doing just-in-time inventory rather than buying a two- or three-month supply,” Loffler said. “Maybe as we get back to normal, we’ll resume buying a lot of inventory.”
In the end, however, the pandemic proved to have characteristics that were unlike any other. “I don’t think you can ever truly prepare for something like this. Anything similar is going to have a unique set of circumstances that go along with it,” noted Chip Crunk, president and CEO of Nashville, Tennessee-based RJ Young. “The challenging question is, when this is all over, what is business going to look like? I think we’re going to see a lot of volumes change and not be there.
“A lot of clients are going to start using more of the home office and doing the staggered shift approach, which is going to affect volumes long-term. I think our whole business model is going to have to change to adapt to that.”
