Buying and Building a Xerox Dealer to $30m

And let's just, for example purposes, say, hey, benchmark, you're supposed to buy a million dollars of equipment per year. If you bought a million dollars, then Xerox might give you a rebate or a discount on your next $500,000 or a million dollars of equipment to lower that price even more. And so when times were really good and you were close to hitting those thresholds, you might make another…

you know, buy a bunch of equipment in advance of future sales or something like that to lower your cost of goods sold, you know, in the business. And so again, it's that control mechanism of a dealership that I really like the most.

Yeah.

As opposed to in a franchisee model. Yeah. The holding company of, of the units might have its own name, but it's not front and center. It's not out there. It's just on, you know, on the, on the LLC documentation in this case, you know, you you're out there marketing benchmarks services.

Yeah. You're selling under the benchmark name.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's correct. And so, yeah, I mean, not only do you control the front end aspects, but you control the back end aspects as well. Does Benchmark have high customer satisfaction with its customers?

And are we providing good service? Are there things we can do different now as a dealership to differentiate us from other dealers with other manufacturers? And the answer to all that was yes.

It was just a matter of... you know, how you wanted to package it up and how good of a job did you want to do taking care of your customer base.

And another feature of franchise networks and being a franchisee is controls around territory or, you know, location density so that the franchisor should be protecting franchisees from stepping on each other's toes, competing in the same market against one another. I'm sure. I'm sure there's a spectrum there. But in general, there's this concept of kind of territories.

Is it the same in dealer relationships generally? Or might Xerox have five dealers all in your market who are all kind of competing with each other and beating each other up?

I think it depends, manufacturer to manufacturer. But I think that was one of the things that you really, as an owner, had to...