From Printer Cartridge Recharger to MPS Provider

By Scott Cullen

Why rock the boat when you’ve got a nice printer cartridge recharger business going for you? That’s a question we just had to ask Frank Topinka, president of Page After Page in Shrewsbury, Mass. after taking his successful recharger company and transforming it into a successful provider of managed print services.

What initially set Page After Page apart in the greater Boston market as a recharger was its ability to provide an ever-expanding customer base with desktop delivery. That worked extremely well, especially when the big boxes began stocking compatible cartridges.

Now Topinka is not one of those guys to bury his head in the sand. He could see the winds of change blowing even while his business was growing. A little something called print management was looming on the horizon along with the realization that this concept might eventually threaten his customer base. The solution was a new strategic direction.

“When industries mature you have to look at what the OEMs are doing and we were seeing Xerox, HP, and Lexmark do print management deals at the enterprise level,” explains Topinka. “It was clear to me they would eventually bring it down to this level of the market.”

The boat was now rocking as the company embarked on what turned out to be a significant cultural change. “People aren’t used to change and we had to change our strategy and direction and get all of our people on board for doing something different than what we were doing before,” recalls Topinka. “We were still in the same business and selling the same product, but the whole method changed dramatically, which means that sales could no longer go out and sell a service of repairs at a price, toner at a price, and supplies at a price. Now we needed a consultative approach, we needed to build relationships and all the things that went with it.”

The transition at Page After Page began about five years ago with the company developing new sales strategies and ramping up its back-office customer support. Learning how to assess the customer’s print environment, producing documentation to show customers how Page After Page could help them in the long term, and presenting proposals were wildly different from the way the company had been conducting business as a recharger.

Being an early adopter had its challenges. “Nobody was doing it,” says Topinka. “Now everybody’s talking about it although I would guess not many are doing it in the way that’s defined by Strategy Development.”

Acknowledging that Page After Page services thousands of laser printers monthly and half of those are five years or older, Topinka’s transition strategy evolved from the organizational change of phase one into phase two with a printer refresh program. That meant moving into printer sales. To do that effectively Topinka started training his staff on printer specs and pricing and partnered with a leasing company.

During this training period, Page After Page learned a thing or two about multifunctional products and how to sell them as well. They also formed partnerships with third parties and connected with print service consultants and leasing companies to ramp up their knowledge and connections in this area.

Here’s where Strategy Development comes in, helping Page After Page develop a program that encompasses a thorough print assessment, printer strategy techniques, and a cost-per-page calculator that extends a minimum monthly page count to a single invoice for all of their services.

Topinka believes in giving credit where credit is due and he credits Strategy Development with helping him initialize his MPS program.

“Without their training we wouldn’t have been able to get this off the ground,” he says.

He also learned about MPS by attending industry forums and events like ITEX and watching what the copier manufacturers were doing even though at the time it was mostly all talk and little action.

Was the recharger background helpful in making the transition to managed print?

“You don’t need to be making your own stuff to be in print management,” responds Topinka. “Obviously, we started as a remanufacturer before I even knew what this business was. I had a background in manufacturing and I came in and refined the remanufacturing process and upgraded our production environment and some of our costs went way down and our quality went way up, so we still deliver that particular component in our print management, but we don’t talk about it. It’s allowed us to have favorable pricing when we need it, but that’s about it.”

Moving into managed print was an eye opening experience as Topinka and his team discovered the joys and pitfalls of longer sales cycles and the challenge of penetrating new accounts. Because Page After Page was one of the first in the market to offer MPS, they had to contend with a lot of suspicion from customers and hear time and time again, ‘I’m not going to a cost per page program’, even though Topinka’s sales reps were explaining in detail all the costs and the savings.

“We still had success in attracting some new business that way,” states Topinka. “Our first big customer came through—a big print management deal worth about $20,000 a month—and they’ve been with us for four years now.”

Fast forward to today and Topinka concedes business has been soft for the past 18 months although it seems to be picking up of late. What’s easier now is taking the MPS message to customers. Even though business has been soft, Page After Page has not lost a single print management customer during this period. That’s the good news. However, the biggest culprit of the soft market has been the economy.

“Without a soft economy we wouldn’t have had any problems at all,” says Topinka. “It caused everything to change. Other than that we’d be doing pretty well.”

Topinka has found direct mail an effective method for reaching new customers. That often involves a premium that warms up the prospect so Page After Page calls the customer remembers them. The latest premium is a remote-controlled $150+ toy car from HP Power Tools with the prospect’s name and the Page After Page and HP logos on it. The only thing that isn’t included is the remote. To receive that, the customer must schedule a meeting with Page After Page to talk about print management. After the first 10 days of the promotion, 14 appointments were scheduled.

“It’s the hottest thing we’ve done so far,” beams Topinka.

Currently, 40 percent of Page After Page’s business is straight print management deals and Topinka would like to see that grow to 80 percent in the next three to five years.

“The way that’s going to happen is by continuing to do the things we’re doing, attracting new customers into the program and by converting existing customers where we can. Many of our existing customers have looked at it, liked it, but haven’t changed because they don’t have any pain, so they just stay with the program they’re on now. I don’t know if they’re ever going to change because they still get all the benefits without the cost per page. They like the transactional model. I’m okay with that as long as I don’t have a competitor come in and take them away from me.”

Customers tend to go with Page After Page because of their reputation.

“We’ve been doing it a long time,” says Topinka. “We have a very good service component and we leverage that. Our response time is under four hours and we have a high rate of first-time repair, in the ‘90s.”

Topinka also credits a sophisticated print management presentation.

“Our value proposition is well structured and thought through,” he notes. “Prospects see value in how we present and our assessment tools, findings, and proposals are all very intriguing. We also do desktop delivery. That’s difficult and unique and not many dealers do it or can do it, but that’s our normal model.”

If Topinka what he knows now when he first started down the print management path he says it would be a better understanding of how to improve margins.

“Trading up the contract through quarterly reviews, adding value, we didn’t really understand that; we do now,” he says.



Scott Cullen has been covering the office equipment industry since 1986. Scott is Publisher/Editorial Director for Imaging Solutions Reseller; Editorial Director/Managing Editor for OfficeSOLUTIONS and OfficeDEALER; Editor for PC Solutions; and a contributing writer and Editor for Independent Dealer, OFDA, Mercer Business, ENX, BERTL’s iTchat, Repro Report.