Print.IT Reseller - issue 50

01732 759725 Q&A 44 PrintIT Reseller (PITR): What are the big challenges facing businesses today? Phil Jones (PJ): Well I think in 2017 and as we move into 2018, businesses in any area are all dealing with the environment we now find ourselves in. We use the three Vs to describe it: it’s all about the volume, the variety and the velocity of change that we are all experiencing. There’s a huge whirlwind of things going on and all businesses are trying to figure out really where they are and how they are going to position themselves for that period ahead. So for any business, whether it be Brother or whether it be one of our customers, I think people are trying to find certainty in uncertainty, and the businesses that are going to survive and thrive are the people that get that nailed down. PITR: How are these trends manifesting themselves in the printer industry specifically? PJ: The printer industry I think has had quite a challenging year. It’s really been PrintIT Reseller met up with Phil Jones, Managing Director of Brother UK to talk about the challenges facing businesses and what this means for printer resellers One to one with Phil Jones a year all about the chess players and the chess pieces. We’ve seen a lot of consolidation going on. We’ve seen the elastic snap actually for some major customers with continuing mergers and acquisitions. The strong continue to get stronger and that in my view is the people who continue to invest in services, who have high degrees of customer intimacy and are rapidly adapting their business models to the new environment we are all trading within. PITR: And how is Brother itself responding to these challenges? PJ: Two years ago, I set in place a new strategy to react to the challenges I could see forthcoming in the market. We called that Transform 2018 – which was a three year vision really to reinvent the business and particularly to reinvent our portfolio around recurring revenue products, so ‘print as a service’ particularly. Now, that required us to make quite a lot of investments in various different things including platforms, people and our processes. But having that direction of travel clear, meant that we knew what we could decide we were going to be investing in. And we’ve made significant investment in those three things as well as opening a state-of- the-art technology showroom at our HQ in Manchester. So we are now in a position where we are winning some of the largest managed print services deals we’ve ever won in our history. Really demonstrating this fantastic new capability that we have. PITR: Have you been successful in bringing resellers on the Transform 2018 journey? PJ: Resellers are a very important component actually of our Transform 2018 journey. Brother is a channel orientated business and as a result of that, of course we want to make sure that the people partnering with us can also deliver our promises to enterprise and SMB customers who are buying either our basic printer service solution or our fully managed print service solution. And, you know, that’s been quite an educational journey because some people are at different places in their lifecycle as a reseller. So they might have the ambition to want to do, for example, managed print services business, but they might not have the platforms, to We’ve seen the elastic snap actually for some major customers with continuing mergers and acquisitions Continued...