Bill Wosilius knows what a good managed IT provider looks like. That’s because, quite frankly, he’s seen more than his share of firms that don’t quite appreciate the notion that managed IT is more about service than technology. That’s a nice way of saying lackluster competitors.
Well, that’s someone else’s problem. All of Wosilius’ current challenges upon becoming president of DEXTEK are of the uptown variety. He’s guiding this new managed IT and cybersecurity division spawned by office dealer heavyweight DEX Imaging. The dealer’s recently announced foray into the world of managed IT—driven by the debut of DEXTEK branches in Cleveland and Orlando, Florida—boasts a commander with three decades of demonstrated IT brilliance.
An Air Force Academy graduate who spent 12 years in the military, Wosilius had dipped his toes into retirement upon stepping down as CEO of Denver-based NexusTek in February of 2024. Rest and relaxation didn’t take. Upon meeting with DEX founders Dan Doyle and Dan Doyle Jr. last year, he discovered the fountain of professional youth. Wosilius was presented with a roster of 86,000 DEX Imaging clients nationwide to target. It was an offer too good to pass up.
Last week, Wosilius carved out some time to discuss the DEXTEK journey, the challenges of debuting a new managed service for a long time print-centric provider and developing a platform that will take service to another level. Like a sports franchise with a proud history of success, DEX Imaging identified and secured a head coach with a winning record.
How long was DEXTEK in development, and what was the impetus behind choosing Cleveland and Orlando as your launching pad?
Wosilius: When you think about DEX Imaging’s history and legacy and in the office technology space, [DEXTEK] is a natural extension of that. The buyer persona that we’ll be selling to is exactly the same as on the copier side. The commercial logic that a small- to mid-sized business would use to decide whether or not to outsource IT is similar to the commercial logic on the print side. Lots of other [dealers] have done it or tried. I spent the last five years prior to this as the CEO of NexusTek, which was a managed IT/cybersecurity services business that does about $100 million a year in business. The go-to-market engine sale process is very similar. Any business that’s in the print space has to be in the managed IT space to remain relevant.
I sat down with Dan Doyle Jr. and said, OK, how do we want to do this? There was sort of a walk-before-we-run kind of feeling/approach, which I agree with. If we’re going to do that, it makes sense to start in markets where we’ve acquired other businesses that did a little bit of managed IT services. Meritech was one of them in Cleveland, and North American Office in Orlando was another. By starting in a couple of markets that are familiar with this concept, we don’t have to explain how to sell IT to the sales force.
Did you do a lot of research or talk to people familiar with DEX Imaging prior to coming aboard? What did you find most compelling about this organization?
Wosilius: I met the Doyles early last year, as DEX was carving out from Staples. I’m old enough to not have to work for people I don’t like, but I just like the Doyles and the entire leadership team. I made a futile attempt at retirement and didn’t do a very good job of it. I’d say the most compelling reason I joined is we’re the largest in our space. We’ve got a customer base that needs this, and if they don’t get it from us, they’re going to get it from somebody else. What got me excited is I’ve got 86,000 customers to potentially help. I’ve spent my entire career in this industry, but I haven’t ever had the opportunity to do this right, which is to help change the strategic direction of a business that was in maybe a parallel industry.
Managed IT is always cited as a strong diversification for dealers, but something of a high risk, high reward proposition due to the sometimes slow journey to profitability. Do you see your background in IT as enabling DEXTEK to avoid some of the typical growing pains?
Wosilius: I’ve been in managed IT and cyber for 30 years, but none of it was done within the confines of a print business. Margins in our industry for managed IT and cyber are north of 50%, and you expect that to trickle down to the rest of the business. More importantly, the reason why DEX wanted to do this—and frankly, the reason we started two weeks ago—isn’t necessarily because of margins. In the early stages of this business, we’re going to be such a small piece of DEX. Five years from now, when this investment has gone a full cycle, that mixture of print versus IT should be very, very different. That, frankly, adds value to our shareholders as well. In this business, the services that we provide for our customers make us quite sticky. We’re effectively becoming their IT department. Clients become increasingly more and more dependent on us to help them grow.
There are a number of reasons why you want to get into this space. Technology is getting more complex, not less. Cyberattacks are getting more common, not less. So I think it’s just a natural extension. Plus, DEX Imaging has 86,000 customers give or take, nationwide. That’s a lot of companies we can help with something that’s frankly not all that different than what we’re already doing.
What are some of the points of differentiation behind DEXTEK’s value proposition?
Wosilius: Having been in this industry for 30 years, I can tell you that the bar is fairly low in terms of service quality. Depending on the source you follow, there are somewhere around 10,000-40,000 managed IT service providers in the United States. A lot of them lose sight of the fact that this is a service business, not a technology business. And I’ve been preaching that since I got here. Customers who would outsource their IT to a company like DEXTEK care about predictability and care about service. They don’t necessarily get enamored by the blinking lights of technology, the speeds and feeds, and all that stuff. They just want IT to work. What we’ve done is build our service delivery model and the entire organization around that. We’re standing out as our customers’ trusted advisor, and not a pain to deal with like many of our competitors.
[Chief marketing officer) Nancy Lycan helped us build our tagline: We monitor IT. We measure IT. We incentivize IT. People have asked about what we mean by incentivizing IT. The answer is my team gets paid through a variable compensation program based on what customers think of us. We put our money where our mouth is, and if you’re not happy, we’re not happy.
What are some of the goals you guys have set for the short term?
Wosilius: We just crossed our first major milestone. I came on board just over five months ago, and the amount of heavy lifting that went into getting this thing launched not only in the market, but building the team, the service offerings and all the stuff that goes with it is no small task.
Now it’s about really making sure we’re building pipeline, building sales bookings, growing the business and working in hand in hand with our with our print reps in these first two markets. We have to execute on that model. We’ll know more in a few months. But if we get to this summer and we’re not talking about opening another new market, then something has gone wrong.
