Managing documents for public agencies is a lucrative market for reprographics firms.
The afternoon of the second day of the 2025 IRgA Workshop (September 18-19 in Arlington, VA) will include a talk about selling services to the public sector market. This conversation will be led by IRgA Board Member Joseph Szobody, owner of ReproConnect, a platform that helps reprographic shops profit from a suite of online services. A key market for shops with ReproConnect is the public sector market, and few people know the upsides and insides of that market better than Szobody. IRgA Managing Director Ed Avis interviewed Szobody about his presentation.
Joseph, why should repro shops be interested in the municipal market?
There are a number of qualities that make the public sector really attractive. The first one that really jumps out to me is how repetitive it is. Once you crack it, you have so many potential clients that operate the same way.
Another attractive thing is the longevity with public agencies. In public sector it might be hard to get your foot in the door. I mean, that's the downside of it. But the longevity of public agency relationships is so huge that if you can crack it, you will frequently have that client for years, maybe decades.
Sometimes when I talk to members about coming to this conference, they say “Oh, we tried to crack the municipal market, but our city government is already using something else.” What do you say to that?
My normal advice is stop focusing on just your own city government. If you're too focused on one big fish, you need to be casting a wider net and trying to find the municipalities and school districts that haven't yet embraced that technology because they're out there everywhere.
A good sales person and a good sales pitch are essential to growing this market, but you recently told me about some kind of trade show for this market.
Yes, I attended a state convention by an Association of Government Purchasers. It was entirely a group of people who are responsible for handling procurement and contracts, including capital programs like construction. My understanding is most states have something along these lines.
So we've established that this is a very good market. But what are you going to teach us?
I'm going to be talking about two completely different areas of opportunity with public agencies. The first opportunity is bid management. Print might be on the decline, but the need to administer bids, manage projects and handle the distribution and the bidding process for those projects is only growing. When you can show a municipality how you're going help them effectively manage their bids, they’re interested.
But to do that, you need to really understand their business, understand what's important to them and speak their language, which is something a lot of reprographers don't know. So we’re going to walk through that. We're going to look at the four or five main things that we've seen public agencies look for and need in a bidding process.
And then I’ll talk about how you can differentiate yourself from other generic bidding platforms that are out there. There are a lot of them.
The second major service I’ll talk about is managing historical facility drawings. I was recently at a convention for educational facility directors, and my conversation with them often was, “What's the current state of your documents?” Half of them would say, “We have thousands and thousands of boxes and basement rooms full of documents that are probably disintegrating and no one can find anything.” The other half would tell me, “Oh, no, five years ago we got it all scanned to PDFs, we're good.” But with a little bit of prying and a little bit of questioning, even that second group, you can identify pretty quickly that, well, a pile of PDFs really still is not that useful.
So the real question is, can you turn the PDFs into searchable, actionable, shareable data so that in a matter of keystrokes, your maintenance guy can find the operating manual for a boiler on campus that's acting up? Or can a contractor find the latest ceiling plans for a specific floor of a particular building in the university because he's about to open it up and he wants to know what he's going find?
So the opportunity there is not only upfront scanning, which is highly lucrative, but then providing the platform where the reprographer or the client can add metadata and organize it all in a secure, user-friendly system. That creates an ongoing revenue stream.
OK, you’re also going to talk about what’s new with ReproConnect itself, right?
Yes, I want to update attendees on what’s going on. I want to talk a little bit about electronic bidding on the planroom platform, the opportunity to provide bid management services to public agencies. A lot of people don't understand that you can actually provide a service to not just distribute the project, but securely and legally allow bidders to submit their bid documents online.
The second service I want to talk about is digital storefronts for client-specific reorders. We are setting up loads of these storefronts for construction companies with recurring signage needs or home builders with signage needs or any other big clients.
We have a client that has a big corporate contract, and they wanted a portal so the employees can buy the letterhead and business cards and checks and everything else that they need already pre-branded.
People also are doing this for grocery stores. The grocery store can come back every week and buy the stickers they slap on produce and the sale on tomato signs that go in the front windows and all that kind of stuff.
Can the signs be designed online?
We're trying to stay away from that actually. That's the Staples model. You know, you can go design your own business card and upload a logo and drag it around and pick your fonts, and that seems to cater more towards one-off type of orders, small stuff. It caters to the soccer mom who has a birthday party this Saturday and wants a flyer.
We’re focused more on the construction companies, and other types of customers that are doing large volume, where a single order is worth thousands of dollars and it's the same signs or other printed products over and over and again, with maybe just a some placeholder information changing.
Makes sense. What else?
Then I really do want to go into Hivebase. I alluded to the opportunity of scanning and archiving, hosting files, and now I want do a demo of it and really talk about how HiveBase provides a powerful solution for as-builts archives.
Then the last one is a tool that we're calling Pulse. This is a lightweight internal job tracker, a workflow tool, for print shops to manage all the jobs flowing through their office. It's designed for companies that do not have or do not want a big complex MIS system. It’s lightweight, affordable, easy to use.
Great, we look forward to learning about all of those things, Joseph!