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IT is like one of those monsters that absorbs everything in its path and just keeps growing. It had a nice base to work with before the pandemic, fueling up on everything from break/fix activities to managed services. But then this blobby mass consumed more each day when COVID hit, after which it gobbled up cybersecurity for a midnight snack before falling in love with the crunchy goodness of its latest addiction, artificial intelligence (AI).
Point is: There is a lot to digest in the world of IT, and we are always searching for answers and solutions.
Luke Ubelhor, Director of Managed Services at Donnellon McCarthy Enterprises (DME), is the kind of guy who likes to help make sense of the IT beast. Following a stint at IKON and a successful but relatively short time selling A3 MFPs, he partnered with some guys to form an IT consultancy firm—that’s where DME entered the picture. Today, he oversees a group that was responsible for $1.7 million of the roughly $25 million revenue the company generated last year, and he is bullish that DME’s IT practice will grow to $2.5 million in 2023.
Seriously, what wasn’t discussed? He spoke about how leadership and culture can help drive IT revenue in traditional office equipment dealers. Cybersecurity was another topic, of course, and Ubelhor provided some use cases for added color. Conversation occurred around recent acquisitions as well as other big metropolitan areas to expand into. We touched on the recent Ricoh-Toshiba news (print hardware partners of DME) as well as some takeaways from the Sharp National Dealer Meeting 2023 (another partner)—including the intriguing option of having ConnectWise monitor security on output devices as it would with networks.
The clip below contains less than half of our conversation, but there are still many insightful and strategic nuggets to make you sit up straight and start thinking.
And that, my friends, is a very good thing.
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