John Frisch
For the past 13 years, John Frisch has been enjoying life as president of Higher Information Group in Harrisburg, PA. The dealership was originally founded in 1969 and for the next 30+ years focused primarily on business equipment. Since acquiring the company in 2001, Frisch has transformed it from a company known primarily as a provider of business equipment to one that can manage customer information from inception to destruction.
Higher Information Group offers services in six divisions, including Business Equipment (Toshiba, HP, and Lexmark), Information Technology, Shredding Services, Document Storage, Web Design and Development, and Corporate Reprographics. It truly is a one-stop shop for its many clients located throughout South Central Pennsylvania.
During a telephone interview Frisch discussed his background, the challenges of running an office technology dealership, and how he managed to successfully reposition Higher Information Group to ensure its relevance in a changing and dynamic industry.
You’re much more than an office technology dealership, and the name of the company reflects that, how did that come about?
Frisch: I bought Harrisburg Copiers about 13 years ago. At that point I had been out of the industry for 3½ years. I used to work for another copier dealership as a sales manager and then owned half of a POS company. When I bought it, Harrisburg Copiers had 13 employees and was doing $1.3 million in business. They were on the skids and close to bankruptcy. We came in and pumped it up to 21 employees. We had to do $2.1 million or we weren’t going to make it. We did $2.3 million the first year. Today we have 67 employees all through internal growth.
About six years ago we had the idea for an organization that handles information from inception through the entire life cycle. Business equipment is still about 60 percent of our revenue. We have an in-house print shop, a retention portion, which is physical storage of documents and is comprised of three warehouses and a small section in our main office. We have IT. On the destruction side we offer document shredding. Three years ago we decided to change the name of the company because “Harrisburg Copiers” sounded too regionalized. We also wanted another “H” name so we could keep our logo. That’s why we changed to Higher Information Group.
You’ve set yourself up as a one-stop shop for information management. How many of your customers take advantage of virtually everything you have to offer?
Frisch: More than half of our customers use more than one service. That tends to reflect how long they’re with us. We might sell someone a copier then a year later they say they’re not happy with their shredder provider or they need IT services.
Who are your customers?
Frisch: Predominantly small to midsize companies. Less than 25 percent of our revenue comes from larger companies.
Why do your customers choose you?
Frisch: The biggest reason is our services. We’re able to handle their information needs across the board. Secondly, we’ve grown well over 1,000 percent over the last 13 years because we always put the client first. Whether you’re in sales or service, we encourage our people to put themselves in the client’s place and do what’s best for them.
Who do you consider your primary competition?
Frisch: We’re so diverse it depends what vertical we’re looking at. Our biggest hurdle is ourselves. We need to continue to develop our services and do a better job. When you’re specifically a copier dealership, for example, you have your main competitors, but because we’re so diverse it’s more about making sure our different divisions work in cohesion and we’re taking care of the client.
Is there anybody in your market that you compete against that positions themselves the way that you do?
Frisch: We break ourselves up into five or six groups depending on how you count it. There’s people who might have business equipment and do shredding and storage, but haven’t got into the IT side of things. The IT is a big differential. There are other people who might have a print group or shredding and storage. Because we have a data center in house and 20 technicians in IT we’re able to literally put our arms around a client’s entire business and host it for them. From an information management standpoint, that sets us apart.
Is it a challenge to make sure all these groups within Higher Information Group are on the same page and communicate well with each other?
Frisch: A year and a half ago we had specialists that would do IT or document storage and we broke our sales group up into specialists in different areas. We’ve since made the decision to go back to relationship sales where our clients would have one point of contact from a relationship standpoint. What we did was backfilled with support people. Let’s say you want to do IT as a sales person, you probably don’t know a ton about IT, but you basically understand what the client wants and then that person brings in a sales engineer to support them.
How’s business?
Frisch: We were up 15 percent over last year. Back in the ’08 timeframe we were flat, which was unusual for us.
Why do you think you’re doing so well?
Frisch: The biggest thing was going back to relationship sales. Clients were getting lost when we were saying if you want five of our different services you’re going to have to deal with five different sales people. Once we went back to a single sales person as a main contact and backfilled support, it’s helped our growth.
What segments of your business are doing well for you right now?
Frisch: We had a big year in business equipment while IT is by far our largest growth area. Printing is just kind of plugging away. Shredding and storage represent a small percentage of our business. We can have 30 percent growth there, but it’s not going to have a big effect on our top line revenue.
Why do you think IT is growing so well?
Frisch: After plugging away at it for six years we finally got it. IT is a very complex and expensive venture both in what you have to put in as far as the hardware to have a Data Center, but more importantly getting your people up to speed. We have 20 people in our IT group and getting them up to speed has been a long process.
What’s it going to take to get some of the other segments of your business to do better?
Frisch: Everything’s doing fairly well, but I have my eye on the print group. I’ve ignored that for a little too long and that’s why that’s been stagnant. Like anything if you don’t pay attention to it it’s not going to do as well as if you do pay attention to it. It’s a good market, but it is an area we’re going to focus on small transactions.
Where do you see your future growth coming from?
Frisch: IT is going to be our largest growth area. The hardest thing about that is building a relationship with a client. If you can sell more than one service to the client, that’s obviously a huge benefit. I think we can stay where we are in Central PA and probably grow 10-15 percent organically. In order for us to have larger growth we would need to move into other markets.
Do you want to do that?
Frisch: We do.
You purchased the business in 2001, what’s been the biggest challenge of these past 13 years?
Frisch: Starting the business under-capitalized. That was hard in the beginning. The other big inflection point for us was six years ago before the financial debacle we were less than half the size in revenue and had half the number of employees we have now. That was when we made the decision to add the four new services. We bought a 35,000 square foot building, aggressively made a big jump forward, then three or four months later doom and gloom set in with the economic forecast. That was scary. But now I sleep a little better than I did back in ’01 or ’08.
What’s the one thing you know now about running Higher Information Group today that you wish you knew when you first started?
Frisch: A lot of things. Looking back when I first bought the dealership Toshiba switched over to Oracle and we couldn’t get the equipment shipped to us for almost a month and a half. In real economic dollars that cost us close to one hundred grand. Whereas had I known then what I know now I probably would have reached out to some brokers and bought some used equipment and put it in on a temporary basis to hold onto some of the customers we ended up losing. Otherwise, I don’t have any major regrets. It’s just growing and learning as you move forward, and doing things better today than you did previously. Most of that comes through experience.
How does 2015 look for Higher Information Group?
Frisch: I’m an eternal optimist so I’m going to say great. Over the last two or three years we solidified who we are and what we do and our different groups are working well together. We’ve made some great improvements to our personnel. I think 2015 could be a year we get some expansion done. It’s all about timing and finding the right opportunities.
After all these years are you still enjoying yourself?
Frisch: I always enjoy myself.
