But a lot of the agents would just rather not. Yeah.
Acquiring Minds
Buying and Building a Xerox Dealer to $30m
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yeah that's fair yeah i mean because there was you know you're talking about a lot of people that had already in that in the xerox eco sphere where you know that had spent 20 to 30 years i would say a little bit more set in their ways you know i come along i i don't know come i i don't know that much about you know how that business is working and i'm learning in it every single day but i did i…
to it and saw the benefits financially and, you know, on a potential exit someday on what that type of revenue growth would bring to the table and knew that the investments in the back office and infrastructure needs and, you know, let's call it what it is, an increased amount of working capital that would be required. uh, would, would, would pay dividends in, in, you know, in an exit for the…
And so, um, yeah, I, I think that's one of the things that excited me most about the business was, um, you know, being able to be a part of that transformational, um, you know, next chapter for, for benchmark and, and then also by being a dealer, you know, having a lot of opportunities to provide financing, um, you know, for all of those customers as well.
Well, and we're definitely going to want to hear about that. But just to understand, again, this shift in model that was happening, driven, I guess, by Xerox itself. Xerox's motivation here, because it's now losing revenue, it's basically...
shifting that revenue to you all, I guess, is because it wasn't a core competency for Xerox. They wanted to just focus on the manufacturing and not have to deal with service, essentially. And they were willing to let that revenue go to to you all, the dealers.
Yeah, I would say, you know, I'm not I wasn't privy to the inner workings of Xerox, but but what I would say is like and Xerox was a great partner, by the way. You know, what I would say is that. You're talking about a mammoth organization that had been around for a long period of time.
And their business from a macro level was really changing to where it was getting harder and harder for them. to be able to effectively generate the return they wanted to by having all of that infrastructure in-house on the agent side where they were deploying and installing this gear and all of that and then servicing it.
You know, when you get that big and become that and you're in a period of time where there's in the document management space where there's really, you know, as technology increases every day, there was a lot of consolidation going on. And so it was really hard for them to keep, in Jeff's opinion, keep their costs contained to deliver the margin. So I think their thought process was.
Let's decentralize all of our processes. Let's encourage more authority locally. Let's give them the tools to run their own businesses.
And let's slim up the mothership to be able to be a good partner and provide support to our partners instead of providing support to the end customer. And I think they also felt like that by doing so, you had a real chance for, you know, customer satisfaction to improve even more by getting more local people, you know, involved in the decisioning.
You know, I compare it a lot of times, you know, when I was back at Benchmark to education, you know, making choices for our kids locally. You know, rather than making them nationally and having national programs, oftentimes different pockets of the country are going to want to do different things. And, you know, and I feel like not trying to be political, but I'm just saying I felt like that was…
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