By Ed Avis
In the early 2000s, Joseph Szobody was a student at Wheaton College in suburban Chicago when he started a business out of his dorm room creating custom websites for small businesses.
“I was developing web solutions for all kinds of industries,” Szobody remembers. “From a small chiropractor to the Midwest's largest entertainment resort. I did a lot of one-off custom solutions, built to their specifications.”
At one point he worked with a large-format equipment dealer, who later referred him to a reprographics shop in Indiana. That shop needed a custom website that included the ability to show a list of .tiffs that customers could order. He completed the project, figuring it was another one-off. But then another reprographics shop reached out to him, and then another.
“Very quickly other shops started asking, ‘Hey, can you do that for me?’” he says. The proverbial lightbulb went off in his head. He researched the reprographics industry and realized that a lot of shops probably needed this kind of online planroom solution.
“I saw an opportunity to focus on making one simple tool and selling it to the whole industry,” he says. “I was still in college and working from my dorm room on my own. By the time I graduated I there were a half dozen reprographers using the planroom.”
That was 2005, and ReproConnect was born. He started growing his development team, hired a salesperson in 2006 and by 2008 he had over 50 reprographics firms using his software.
Today, Szobody, who was recently elected to the APDSP Board as the vendor representative, presides over a business with eight employees and over 240 clients. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife and five children.
A Simpler System
ReproConnect’s software was not the only planroom software being used by reprographers. In fact, there were already several fairly sophisticated systems that helped shops manage their documents. But they were primarily focused inwards – that is, the focus was on back-office document management, and not as much on the end user. That’s where Szobody saw opportunity.
“We felt what was lacking was a forward-facing, customer-focused sales platform. We believed the end-user experience is where an online planroom succeeds or fails,” he says. “We saw companies selling their products as back-office tools that could generate all sorts of reports, but they never asked the question, ‘Do customers find it easy to use?’ We saw quickly that if we could build a solution that focused on the end-user – who at that time was the sub-contractor – and was easy and pleasurable to use for the subcontractor, he’s going to use it.”
And if subcontractors used the tool, they would order prints. Which at that point was the real benefit of ReproConnect – it helped the shop sell more prints. No one was concerned with downloads or electronic bids then; it was all about the paper.
Evolution
Within a few years the reprographics industry had evolved and print business started to decline. ReproConnect responded by developing tools that not only encouraged users to buy prints, but also fostered the idea of earning revenue from digital services.
For example, their digital planroom can be configured as a tool to sell downloads of drawings. Download revenue is now an important stream for many ReproConnect users, Szobody contends.
ReproConnect also introduced virtual planrooms – a planroom site customized for each individual customer. The virtual planroom runs on a separate domain and is designed to look like it is part of the customer’s own website, which could be a school district, municipality, architect, or general contractor. When a bidder visits the virtual planroom, he or she sees only the documents pertaining to that specific client.
Why is the virtual planroom important? One reason is customer retention. Once a company or municipality sets up the virtual planroom offered by a given reprographics shop, that company is not likely to ever stop being a customer. Nobody wants to give up the customized, integrated planroom that provides a total history of the company’s documents and jobs.
Plus, the virtual planroom makes the reprographics shop look like a partner, rather than a vendor, Szobody says.
“The moment you set them up with their own planroom and projects, it’s amazing how you flip the psychological switch. Now you’re building something for me with my name on it. Now you’re my partner.”
Another tool which evolved from the planroom is FileRocket, a simple upload tool for ad-hoc orders. And a tool that Szobody envisions as a big money-maker in future years is BidPoint, which allows a reprographer to manage a sealed electronic bidding process for public sector clients. This became even more interesting when COVID shut down the submission of paper bids in many municipalities and school districts.
“Now ReproConnect is not just one product as much as a suite of services that reprographers can leverage however fits their needs best,” Szobody says. “But it’s first and foremost a platform to make sales. That’s what drives us every day – every new feature has to fit into that paradigm.”
Industry Trends
A side benefit of having 230 clients using your software to manage their print flows is that you see a lot of information about the industry. Szobody likes to keep an eye on aggregate trends to help him better understand what’s going on in reprographics.
And what does he see after this particularly brutal year?
“We’re seeing a trend that’s been going on for the past several years – digital services with downloads and digital bidding are blowing up. Print orders continue to struggle, but not tank. Last year print orders were down, but within 5 percent of the previous year.”
Szobody offers an important caveat here: Since he’s looking at aggregate data, it’s likely that some very successful clients are lifting the overall numbers, and that a lot of clients experienced worse than a 5 percent decrease in print orders in 2020. Nevertheless, in the big picture, the future of reprographics is not as bleak as some would have it.
“What we see for the future of reprographics is two-fold,” he says. “Those who are crying like Chicken Little, saying that the end of repro is near, are overblowing the situation. I have much greater confidence in the longevity of the industry. And the second thing is that I remain optimistic about the reprographers who are willing to reinvent themselves and get into digital services. For the ones who are willing to be creative, try new things, think bigger picture with digital revenue, there’s no stopping them. The world is only becoming more digital and people will always need help managing and distributing their information.”
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