Where Are They Now? KT's Office Services (Feb. 2010)
By The Business Solutions Network
In our February 2010 issue, we featured KT's Office Services , an office services VAR that was projecting 20% growth by the end of 2010 due in part to selling MPS (managed print services). (Check out, “Copy Managed Print Sales”). I caught up with Kathy Early Cauldren, CEO of KT's Office Services, to see how her business has been going since she last spoke with Business Solutions. Following are her responses.
McCall: How has your business fared since we last spoke with you?
Cauldren: In 2010, we had a very busy year with the educating of our clients about MPS. In 2011, selling MPS enabled us to provide many other solutions that help clients gain and maintain control of their IT environments -- including printers, PCs, servers, inventory, antispam and antivirus protection, archiving, disaster recovery, and office supplies and accessories. In 2012, we have upgraded our offerings, our business processes, our website, and we're streamlining the sales process for our clients.
McCall: What has contributed most to your success since we last spoke?
Cauldren: The biggest success factor is the consistency of the information, teaching the end users the true cost of printing and controlling the environment, what contributes to their costs, and how (with a little hard work) they can achieve savings.
McCall: Are there any new technologies/solutions you're offering which are impacting your business?
Cauldren: KT's is always adding new products and strategic partner alliances, like Barracuda and RedBeam, to our product line. We have added solutions for inventory control and management, data control, management, and disaster recovery.
McCall: Speak to any failings you've experienced since we last spoke.
Cauldren: Failings are an occurrence that we must learn by, unfortunately, particularly when educating clients about MPS or other cost savings solutions. One example, we went in and did an assessment for a large school district on their varied printer fleet, which we are able to support. With our report, we found some expensive printers that would best be replaced and other devices to be redeployed. Since we are a device agnostic solutions provider, we showed the end user where and how to make these cost savings changes without a large capital purchase. With the client in the mindset of managed services, a large nationally recognized manufacturer came in to do the same thing and took our client with them. We could not compete with this large manufacturer. Lesson learned: educate and close!
McCall: Are there any other tips/tactics that you think are worth mentioning that are contributing to your success?
Cauldren: We take a look at our business and product offerings all the time and choose products by what it does for the end user, how we can support the product, how the manufacturer will support us, and most importantly how we can pull the product offerings together to provide an overall solution for the client.