Print.IT Reseller - issue 56

01732 759725 38 INTERVIEW PrintIT Reseller (PITR): Can you briefly explain how Exertis’ print arm is structured and a little bit about your role within the business? Jamie Brothwell (JB): Exertis is owned by DCC Technology and within the group, we have a number of technology pillars – IT, consumer, enterprise, mobile and supplies. I work in the IT pillar which is the traditional Micro-P business – the first technology company DCC acquired. Our journey really started in 1984, with Micro-P, the first technology that we sold was print. If we fast forward to 2014, which is when I joined the business, our print business had kind of lost its way and we were struggling to make any money, to effectively justify why we were in print distribution. I was at Samsung at the time, and prior to Samsung I had worked at Midwich for eleven years and a lot of my work PrintIT Reseller caught up with Jamie Brothwell, Print General Manager at Exertis One-to-one with Jamie Brothwell there was print-centric. Exertis spoke to me and said ‘we need to shake up our printing business, would you be interested in joining?’ and I joined as General Manager in 2014. The first year was really just about understanding how the land lay and what the best way forward was. The plan was that when we got to the end of the first year, we would work out a three- year plan to move the print business forward. We do operate on slim margins in distribution, but ultimately we have to pay the staff and make a small profit. My philosophy is very much ‘well we don’t want to get rich, but we need to keep the lights on’. Essentially, we turned a small profit in the first year that I was here. PITR: What was the strategy to move the business forward? JB: We had a very established retail business which still exists today, we’ve maintained that and even grown it in a challenging market. We had an IT business which was transactional print, but to drive the business forward we wanted to move into A3, into the OA market with brands such as Samsung, Lexmark and more recently Epson, with what they call their RIP business. Selling products through our general sales floor wasn’t getting the traction that we required so we decided to set-up a specialist sales team, dedicated to selling to the traditional copier dealers who understood, lived and breathed OA. Today we have four sales people in that team and five brand specialists - product sales specialists that align to brands, and they’re all customer facing. And then we have a ten-strong product management team supporting them. Two years ago, we added three new members to the team, people I had worked with previously. And that really then ramped up the focus and really redefined our business to a point where we set up a satellite office in Norfolk. We’ve now got 14 people working out of that office. In February this year, we moved into a new purpose-built site which has capacity for about 30 people. We do have plans to expand further and I think we’ll have 18 people based there by the end of this year. PITR: What was the impact of the HP/Samsung acquisition on your distribution agreement with Samsung? JB : We don’t have the ability to buy HP products, but we continue to supply the Samsung branded products we always distributed, but we now buy them via HP. We are the only distributor of the original three that remain. I believe that Samsung branded printers will continue to be available for the rest of this calendar year but beyond that, they won’t. PITR: The market landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. What sort of growth have you seen within the print division? JB: The landscape has changed a lot over the years but we see it as an area we can still continue to grow in. We achieved 104 per cent growth in hardware in the two years (2015-2017) and are expecting to record a further 17 per cent this year. And that’s within a market which is somewhere within the region of five to 10 per cent down. PITR: Where have you seen the most success? JB: We have had a huge amount of success with the A3 business, we also inherited our Epson wide format printer business from sister company Computers Unlimited. We looked at that at a senior level within the business and we moved distribution of the Epson large format printers, ink and media business to the dedicated print team in Norfolk at the beginning of last financial year. That proved to be hugely successful for us and is an area we’re looking to develop further in terms of our service offering and wrap-around added value. Our goal is that 20 per cent of our business will come from services by 2020