Marco's headquarters location in St. Cloud, MN
Editor’s Note: Reprographics shops face competition from other shops, FedEx Office locations, big box office stores, and other businesses. But some of the most sophisticated competition comes from regional and national chains of office technology providers, such as Gordon Flesch, DEX Imaging, Marco and UBEV. In upcoming issues of APDSP Today, we’ll provide an overview of each of these competitors. Click here to read the previous report about Gordon Flesch and click here to read the report about DEX Imaging.
By Ed Avis
Marco is a copier/printer dealer and technology provider with 43 locations, most in the upper Midwest and a few in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. The company was founded in 1973 as a typewriter and furniture retailer, but today offers everything from managed IT services to wide-format printers.
Competitive Angle: Managed Print is a Focus
Managed print is one of Marco’s focuses. According to their website, they are “one of the top three managed print providers in the nation.” Part of their pitch is that they are SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, which means the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants has examined their internal controls and systems related to data security and privacy.
The company’s managed print service is based on the type and number of print devices placed on-site, not on the quantity of prints. They tout this model as more convenient and more predictable. Their key pitch is that they will save the customer money – “Save money on print costs” is the top item on their list of advantages, and the button customers hit to get a quote says “Get a Budgetary Quote,” instead of just “get a quote.” When you dig down into their offer, you see that they say “a good MPS provider can save up to 30% on print costs.”
Marco’s site has specific pitches for healthcare and educational managed print customers, including a lot of detail about why these types of organizations can benefit. A case study in each category brings the message home.
Competitive Angle: Printer Sales
Marco is a competitor to you if you sell wide-format or office printers.
Their wide-format printer options are HP. Their website features DesignJet, PageWide and Latex printers, and they participate in HP’s Cash In & Trade Up Program that allows customers to trade in old plotters for cash back on new HP models.
Marco offers a much broader line of small-format copiers and printers, including products from Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, Kyocera, Lexmark and Sharp. The company also offers a wider line of production printing equipment, such as the WEBJet 200D (an inkjet printer that can handle 36,000 colored sheets per hour); Konica Minolta digital presses; and the AccurioJet KM-1, which can print magazines and postcards.
In 2022 Marco opened a demonstration facility for its production print equipment. In a magazine interview about that facility (click here to read that article), the company’s CEO, Doug Albregts, said this when asked about growth areas: “Wide format is another area of growth where we see an accelerating sales opportunity. But it’s not just about these products, it’s about bundling creative solutions and how we bring them to market more efficiently, how we drive demand with our customers and how we creatively offer best-in-class services. This is how we will be defining our organic growth strategy moving forward.”
So large-format sales will presumably become a larger part of their business in coming years.
Competitive Angle: Document Management
Another area Marco serves is document management, through its M-Files system (they call it Enterprise Content Management). This is a rather complex system (I base this on the fact that when you click on the tab that says Solution Knowledge Base, it unexpectedly flips you over to a not-user-friendly cloud-based “vault” based on M-Files….I guess this gives you a preview of what the service would actually look like if you were a user). The service appears to be marketed towards healthcare, government and law firms. There’s no pitch on their site towards AEC.
Company Growth: "Buy Traditional, Add IT"
Marco repositioned itself from retailer to technology provider during the late 1990s, and added managed print and IT services in the mid 2000s.
The company’s growth since 2005 has been powered by acquisitions. They acquired 42 companies in the Midwest from then until 2018, when they moved east by acquiring Phillips Office Solutions, which had 10 locations in Pennsylvania and Maryland.
In a magazine interview that year (click here to read the article), then-CEO Jeff Gau said the company went from $1.2 million in sales to $60 million. "What we're able to do, is you buy a traditional copier and printer company and then we add the IT services to it," Gau said.
The company bought another 13 firms from 2019 to 2022. Its most recent acquisition was Karpinski’s Office Systems in Coudersport, Pennsylvania.
Conclusion
Marco is definitely a major competitor against reprographics shops in their market areas in terms of equipment sales and managed services. But they are not a competitor when it comes to printing or AEC document management.