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Photizo Group |
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December 23, 2013 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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Research and Consulting for the Imaging Industry |
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Crowley has succeeded in establishing a list of blue-chip clients, was a founder of the Managed Print Services Association, produced over 15 successful Transformation Conferences around the globe, provided over 80 reports and forecasts for the services industry, and positioned Photizo Group as the preeminent expert in the services market. Crowley has been instrumental in developing concepts and frameworks accepted as industry standards in Services, including the Brand Performance Index, Hybrid Dealer Model and the Customer Adoption Model.
Crowley has received several industry awards including being named as one of the 40 most influential people in the imaging industry by Imaging Week Magazine. In addition, he received the "Visions" award from the PDMA Magazine for the best article of the year in 2007. Photizo Group received the 2011 and 2013 leadership award from the MPSA in the Services category. In addition, the firm made Inc. Magazine’s list of the 5000 fastest growing privately held firms in both 2012 and 2013.
Before Photizo, Crowley was the senior manager for Worldwide Printer Marketing at Lexmark International. He led the team that defined and executed product strategy for the market segment representing more than $2 billion in revenues for Lexmark (more than 40 percent of total profits). Crowley also made significant advances as the international development manager at VTEL Corporation, managing director at IntelliQuest, senior product manager at Texas Instruments printer group (now part of Tally Genimicom), product manager at DataProducts (now part of Ricoh) and market analyst at QMS (now part of Konica Minolta). He developed his first service product in 1985 with the introduction of the first ‘on-line’ market research system which could conduct ad copy testing in 24 hours.
Crowley holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from the University of Missouri (Agricultural Economics Major, Computer Science Minor) and a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. He is currently pursuing a doctorate degree at the University of Manchester, Manchester England where his research topic is the transformation of product led firms to services led firms, with an emphasis on the unique challenges Japanese firms face in this transition. He is also Certified New Product Development Professional (NPDP) and a member of the BTA, CompTIA and the MPSA. Crowley is also the Executive Director of the Photizo Foundation, a non-profit organization.
"What we do for clients is that we become their trusted advisor.” – Edward Crowley |
Imaging
Photizo Group
859.846.9830
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Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine,
Published – December 23, 2013 CEOCFO: Mr. Crowley, what is the concept at Photizo? What do you do? Mr. Crowley: Photizo Group has one key mission in life. What we do is we look at markets that are undergoing dramatic change, whether that be the imaging market, the market for office products, or the 3D printing manufacturing market. We look at these markets and identify the ones going through major change. We then help clients carve a path through that change. We help them with consulting, in some cases training with market analysis. Really everything they need to carve a path through the very big market transformation. For example, in the past we seen some of our clients such as Xerox that have gone from 80-90% of their revenue being based on products and technology, to where it is now more than 50% driven by services. That is a huge shift, a fundamental change. In fact in Xerox’s case, running through 2013, 55% of the revenue will be services this year. That is a big change in how they do business, and that is what we help them with.
CEOCFO: You would look for industries where you see change and then proactively approach companies that would be affected by that? Mr. Crowley: That is exactly right. We basically proactively approach them and help them with navigating through that change.
CEOCFO: Are companies typically receptive? Are they understanding the changes as well as you or do you need to explain to them what is happening? Mr. Crowley: Typically companies are fairly intelligent in terms of seeing that the changes are happening. The problem is that companies almost always underestimate the speed and impact of the change. I’ll give you and example, there is a quote from Kodak that their CFO said “The problem was that the market fell by 40% a year for photographic products, we planned for that to happen, but the problem was it fell by 40% a year”. That is a very visible case for a company that completely underestimated the rate and the magnitude of the change. That is what the problem is, companies are making money, maybe less money than last year, margins are getting tighter or more competitive. Suddenly they realize they have reached a point where the market is falling at a precipitous rate. That is really the challenge.
CEOCFO: After your locate a potential industry change, what is the next step? Mr. Crowley: We have a couple areas we can help with. First, one area is on the consulting side. When you look at a firm moving from being a manufacturing company to being, what we call,service led where the focus is onthe service you deliver. When you make that kind of shift, you have to change almost every aspect of your business like the organization, the culture, what the metrics are, the processes and the operations. There is a lot of strategic controlling that goes into that kind of role. I think what makes this a little different as opposed to Mckenzie or Bane with strategic consulting is that we actually help the client make that shift from the strategy. We actually provide training and hold conferences about the different types of change. We also do things such as provide information services that help them measure benchmarks: where they are in respect to the competition. We have a host of services and really the business falls into three major types of deliverables. What we call information advisory services and publishing, we have consulting services which is very much a strategic IBM type of consulting. The third area is conferences and education. It really falls into those three deliverables.
CEOCFO: Would you walk us through an example of a company you worked with? Give us the highlights of how you worked with them and what you were able to provide. Mr. Crowley: One example is: we had a company where their market was going through a very rapid change. They were seeing that the whole buying cycle and process was changing and they were looking at how they could move into anew markets as a result of these changes. We actually did a very deep analysis that looked at the adjacent markets that they could move in to. In this case the company actually made a phone type product that was a component used in these products. We looked at what were other applications of this specific technology. From that we identified about five different market segments that they could go into. We did the sizing and looked at the competitive intensity in each one of those markets and identified one that would be a very natural transition for them. Then we looked at what were the options. They could either move into this market with their current product or even buy a company that has some these products and use that as a way to leverage into it. We then went through the due diligence and identified 28 different companies. Working with them we narrowed it down to 4. We did the initial due diligence on those 4 and even made introductions. From there they ended up moving to that space. That was a very in depth and detailed project that we worked on. Another example is actually a project that we are involved with now that is one of the world’s largest financial institutions. We are helping them through the process of going to an outsourcing model for their imaging fleet, instead of buying products. Our plan was to move that outside to where a vendor provides a complete service and just charges them for the amount of printing they do. It is a big change in how they do it, we are actually walking through the best practices and helping them through the vendor evaluation process. That is an example of doing a very hands on approach with helping them understand how to do this and building a model that they are ultimately going to take out and deploy on a global basis.
CEOCFO: Is there always a solution? Mr. Crowley: I think there is always a solution. The question is: Is the client feeling enough pain to accept the solution. Sometimes there are solutions that are pretty painful. It can be selling off businesses or moving into adjacencies. There are not easy decisions to make and clients have to be in a lot of pain to be able to do that.
CEOCFO: Why choose Photizo Group? Mr. Crowley: What we do for clients is that we become their trusted advisor. There are a couple of real key aspect to that. One piece is trust. That means that we are getting in the trenches with the client. We are getting our hands dirty working with them. They are making very big decision. We are helping them with things that are very critical to their business. There has to be a huge level of trust in us and we have to be very open. Everything we do has to reinforce and build that trust. We have a 99% client retention rate. We have fired a few clients but other than that they really stay with us. The trust is one big piece and the other piece is the advisor piece. That is a key world. Advisor means that you are not just giving them the easy answer, you are really stepping in and telling them what is best for their business, helping them look outside of what their current paradigm is and helping them to see the bigger picture. That is not an easy thing to do if you do not have a high level of trust. I have had a client situation not too long ago that has crafted a global program. I had to help him see why that global program really had the wrong metrics and was accomplishes the opposite of what they thought it was. It is not an easy thing to do but again, if you develop a level of trust you can have those kinds of conversations and really help them with those tough decisions. The trusting advisor piece, that is what really differentiates us.
CEOCFO: You recently introduced Advance Document Services, how does this fit into your business model? Mr. Crowley: If you look the office products or in the imaging market. There is a fundamental shift going on. That shift has a couple of aspects to it. One is that there are typically two people for every imaging device. If you have a 10,000 person company, you probably have about 5,000 printers and copiers lying around. Most people are floored by that, but when they do an audit they discover that it is true. What happens is, because it is bought a department level, nobody knows how big their costs are. It begins an out of control expense. One big trend is that firms are saying “We can not do that anymore” and they are going to other firms to help manage it, whether it be a vendor or a reseller, and basically saying “manage this for me and make sure it is the right size, cost and the devices are deployed the right way”. That is what we called traditionally managed print services. We have an ongoing study where we have surveyed over 6,000 companies worldwide and we have found the average savings to be over 30%. That can be a really big number. Dowd Chemical has a very well documented case study. They say that over the first three years of their contract, it was somewhere around 27 million dollars, which is a huge number. That is something that a CEO would stand up and take notice of. They are shifting their model and comparing it to a utility model, saying “I am not going to own the power plant, I am just going to pay for the electricity I use”. Same thing on pages: “I am not going to own the printers and copiers, I am just going to pay for how much I print”. So that is a big shift. The other part of that is: once they do that and they have got it to the right size they start to say “You know what, I am printing too much. I now have iPads, a newer generation work force, and my data is available on the cloud. I have constant access to it through wireless and cell networks, why am I printing?” What is happening is, let us say in the case of a bank, they are saying “Take this invoice process that is very paper intensive and make it electronic. Help me take my patient admitting process, which is very paper intensive, and make it more electronic. It makes it faster, reduces my cost and speeds up the process”. That is Advance Document Services. It is all about understanding the customer’s business process, their workflow, and then bringing the right set of solutions. It can be consulting, it can be business process and management. It can be software. Bringing the right set of services and tools to the table so that paper is not used and it is done digitally. That is, again, another big shift in that Advance Document Services is the new area. We used to call it Advance MDS. That is a very big change in how companies are doing business and it is a big change for the vendors. That is why, if you look at Lexmark for example, they bought 12 software companies over the course of the last several years. They are buying software companies left and right because they are trying to build a set of tools to do that. It really changes what the vendors had in their product portfolio.
CEOCFO: So you are utilizing your clients in a number of arenas? Mr. Crowley: Absolutely. A number of arenas and market segments. That is what makes it fun. We really get to work with a variety of clients here.
CEOCFO: How is business? Mr. Crowley: It is great. We made the Inc 5000’s fastest growing privately owned companies the last two years in a row. We have an office in Tokyo now. We have people spread all across the U.S. We have one of the top 50 technology firms. 75 or 80 of our clients are in the top 200 tech firms. It has been really good, we are having a lot of fun.
CEOCFO: Why should the business world look to Photizo?
Mr. Crowley:
The key thing is that
almost whatever market you are in, your market is probably going through
some level of disrupt or change. It could be because of the way technology
is moving, changes in the workforce or the globalization of the market. We
are seeing a level of disruption across industries and market segments that
we think is pretty unparalleled. You really need to have someone you can
work with when you are going through that type of change that can help guide
you through it. That can help you manage through that change because in that
kind of environment, the one thing you can not do is not change. Refusing to
change is a prescription for disaster. We want to keep our clients from
running into that wall. |
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