We’ve just returned from the summer gathering of our document management industry’s leadership, PRISM 2017. The conference was an excellent opportunity to network with contemporaries from 6 continents, all focused on the future of document management. Beyond the networking, Secure Records Solutions was in the spotlight. Christopher stepped into the position of Vice President for the international industry association, and also had the opportunity to address the conference on the unique ways our business is growing. I’ll share a few highlights:
Some background on Christopher, SRS
- Family business tradition over 4 generations
- Started career in Finance
- Involved in other family business interests, specifically real-estate
- First PRISM conference 6 years ago in Miami
- Attracted to the problem of records going away
- Involved in Conference Planning for 4 years
- Board Member
- Advocate for the industry working together to develop and scale solutions for our common future
Our View on the RIM Industry in the US
- Consolidation is leaving some middle markets without an independent
- Technology is allowing us to sell across a wider geography – we serve clients in 48 states
- Still finding pockets of un-vended records where Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) pushes them over the edge to let us take the boxes. Focusing on solving the problem, not selling them an existing service.
- It’s getting harder to sell traditional storage. Having to sell into specific niches with specific strategic advantages. We aren’t getting inbound traffic for it, having to creatively sell consulting, BPO to get more boxes. We are increasing our bottom line on storage each year while reducing its % of our total revenue.
- Specialization of knowledge (becoming the subject matter expert) and security standards (packaging and marketing compliance) is allowing us to sell an alternative to the commodity of storage.
- Our small-medium clients prefer buying BPO that surgically solves their problem instead of the commodity of storage. They believe paper is a problem, a disease that they want cured. It is not our job to talk them out of that.
- Growing other service lines very quickly, particularly shredding and project management.
- Reducing expense in sales, focused on inbound marketing, specifically marketing scanning and shredding
- Packaging solutions to make them easy to understand, de-commoditize storage and services.
- Opportunity to acquire related businesses
What We’re doing to Manage Sales
- Removed sales staff
- Trained admin team to qualify and follow-up with leads, Christopher gets qualified leads they can’t handle, reviews all pricing.
- Team of Rivals approach to managing inbound marketing
- Google Adwords, Organic Web leads, ShredNations/RecordsNations, SalesDouble, Referrals, Driver Leads
What We’re working on at SRS
3 Themes:
- packaging a la carte services that already exist to make them easy to understand and buy
- developing unique bpo solutions that can be marketed very specifically
- acquire businesses in related industries to cross sell customer lists and add synergies
Consulting
- Hospital Indexing example
- Hospital IT example
- Another healthcare example – EMR conversions
- AP workflow improvement
Identifying inefficiencies with existing clients: EMR Software Conversion Strategy
Project Management
Packaging Services: Going Paperless Made Easy
What’s our future?
– We are the natural candidates to help our clients solve their paper problem. They hate the fact that they produce paper, see it as inefficiency in their system, so why not embrace that and help them? We have to be serious about helping our clients find unique solutions to their workflow problems, which will often include storage as a component.
– As we develop insights on the kinds of common problems our clients deal with, we have the opportunity to develop proprietary technology solutions to scale these solutions and create a recurring source of income.
