Buying and Building a Xerox Dealer to $30m

We'll assume that that's also what private equity was interested in when they came knocking. We're about to get there. How many employees were you at at this?

at the when you exited that's a great question uh i think we were right around the 90 mark so around 90 or so employees uh and and of those 90 about a third in sales about a third in the back office or operations and then about a third in service that's ultimately how that broke down most often times tell us a little bit about this financing

copier dealers or document management companies, when they're selling equipment, they use an equipment lease all the time. I mean, a lot of businesses lease that equipment because at the end of four or five years, they're going to want to change it out and get the newest technology. So it doesn't really make sense for them to own it.

And so in doing so, instead of just sending that business to a national finance company or national leasing company,

the background that i had been able to develop felt like it would be a really great marketing tool for our sales people to be able to walk in there and say hey you're gonna you're you are only ever gonna call one number we're gonna sell it to you we're gonna service it for you and we're gonna finance it and you're gonna make one payment it'll all be on one bill every month to us your lease payment

your service payment and your lease payment will all be on the same bill. And that really worked. That was something that resonated whenever I call on businesses or deal with other businesses.

I mean, it's amazing to me the number of business partners you have to have in today's day and age. And so to be able to simplify that for a lot of the customers that we had, I think meant a great deal to them and was a strategy that really worked well for us.

Yeah, I can totally see that being a successful pitch and value proposition. I will say, Jeff, that it seems like the business of financing is a very different business. So you really are spinning up a completely different business unit that doesn't have any of the same motion of your existing businesses of sales and service, correct?

Say more about having this finance arm effectively. Yeah.

That's a great observation. Yeah, we had to have a separate business. So we had a separate entity name for that business.

And I had different people that were running that business than I did, you know, in the main business benchmark. Because you're right, it's a totally different business. You're in a finance business, you're, you know, making credit decisions.