MPS = Death to the "little guy" (or is it?)

Over the past few months I've spoken to hundreds of small businesses within the office machine repair/service realm and more times than not I'm told a story about how they lost their largest customer due to some "big guy" coming in and offering MPS (Managed Print Services) to their higher ups, who are convinced and with the flip of a switch the business is gone.

According to Wikipedia, a Managed Services Provider is defined as: A managed services provider (MSP) is most often an information technology (IT) services provider that manages and assumes responsibility for providing a defined set of services to its clients either proactively or as the MSP (not the client) determines that services are needed. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_services)

The "Short Short Version" is basically charging the customer a monthly fee to manage all of their devices, which includes their supplies, service, and possibly even whole unit replacements when needed. The old school methodology is simply billing by the service provided at the time of servicing, and if the service provider also offers the supplies they charge per box...In an ever evolving market it's important for companies to be fully aware of their customers, the needs they have, and what they're willing to spend on their needs... simple as that.

When an MPS sales/suit walks into a meeting they've scheduled with the customers CEO, CFO, CIO, and any other VP that they feel would benefit, they are given the task of explaining the overall 'spend' that the customer has and they explain/sell them on the savings they will see by going to their MPS model. Unfortunately, loyalty and customer service are two things that have absolutely NOTHING to do with this conversation, which often times are two things that the smaller service organizations are resting their hats on.

Now a lot of the larger MPS OEM's (HP, Xerox, Ricoh, Lexmark, Toshiba, etc...) are subcontracting these "little guys" to handle their service work, which is nice since they still see revenue from the service side, but they have lost total control of any customer facing leverage they may have had in the past. The old phrase "If you can't beat em, join em" comes to mind... but I feel with just a little tweaking to their billing model they can simulate an MPS contract without the invasive software required to 'monitor' all of the users devises.

First start by determining your customers fleet of units that you'll be supporting. Are you able to maintain them all? Is the customer open to swapping out the units that cost more to operate than they're worth? Is your customer willing to entrust their entire fleet of machines to you knowing they'll always have the supplies needed and the rapid response when they're in need of service? If you've answered NO to any of these questions, you're at the highest risk of losing your customer.

Most MPS software can be utilized to monitor the customers entire fleet of office machines that are networked, they can tell you exactly what models of machines they have, how many prints each one produces, and even point out the users who are clicking the print buttons. The manual way of doing this is noting each device the customer has and checking page counts monthly, subtract the previous months' page count and you're given their previous month prints... do that each time for every device and you have the grand scheme of what to work with. Knowing that any given Monochrome unit is going to be 100%+ cheaper to operate than any given Color unit (unless it's inkjet, but that's another messy discussion) you first make sure that only those prints that "must be color" are sent to those devices. Users, in general, are lazy... and if the Color printer/copier is closer to them then they'll almost always send their print jobs to that machine... so clipping those will reduce their spend drastically without doing a darn thing.

The second most costly expense any given user has are the cheap odd ball machines whose supplies cost more than the printer did when it was new. These often go undetected since they were brought in on a one off buy typically as some random desktop users personal printer. Most printer/copier fleets have a primary brand, a secondary brand, and a bunch of one off cheap units... Convincing the customer to kibosh those cheap units will save them tremendously in the long run as well, since your end goal is a more uniform fleet to narrow your supplies required to keep them running. You can offer quality refurbished HP LaserJet printers as their replacements, which are universally known due to their ease to work on and maintain coupled with their low cost of supplies. (If you need a source for those printers let me know!)

Now it's time to encompass all of the costs associated with running these machines: Toner, Drum, Belts, Rollers, Maintenance kits, etc... since you already have each machines monthly print volumes you can determine the # of toners you'll need per year, as well as the other supplies which have page yields, add them all up and divide by 12, this gives you YOUR monthly cost of managing these. Since nobody works for free, double that number and offer it to your customer as your personalized "Managed Fleet Services". You do not need to install any intrusive software to the customers servers, you can lock your customer into a yearly agreement, and you maintain your customers loyalty since you went "above and beyond" that of a normal service company.

This was by no means an attempt to belittle nor bash any large company who offers MPS, but was aimed directly at the 'little guys' who are sick of losing customers to them. Now when one of those high paid 'suits' calls your customers asking if they're on any MPS contract, they can say "Yes" and the suit will move on.

As always, if you're in need of quality parts and refurbished HP LaserJet printers please let me know!

Joe Lalley - [email protected] - 844-840-6868 - www.lbrty.com