Babe Ruth didn’t invent the home run. Peace activists called for nonviolence long before Mahatma Gandhi’s time. There were certainly other notable writers before William Shakespeare first picked up a quill. And Marie Curie was not the first female scientist.
While not the original innovators, all of these historical icons redefined their given fields and forever altered the way we think about them. When it comes to the community of office technology dealerships, Trevor Akervik and Brian Wyatt of Marco may soon be inextricably connected to rewriting what it means to be a top-flight inter-territorial (ITT) service partner.
The St. Cloud, Minnesota-based megadealer is staking its reputation and millions of investment dollars on a service-driven model that would transform many other dealers and OEM directs into partners, a bold initiative designed to double the company’s revenue beyond the $1 billion plateau over the next five years. The concept may blur the lines of competition, but it would apply Marco’s high service standards to a wider cross-section of the industry.
It’s an evolution five years in the making. The pandemic brought about numerous business changes in the 2020s, and from Marco’s viewpoint, client print volumes (which had been trending south for years) declined by a staggering 40%. The COVID aftershocks—led by supply chain shortages and skyrocketing inflation—took a huge bite out of dealer profits. Akervik, Marco’s president of the print division, knew that growth on the print side needed to be reimagined to an extent. Thus, a new, national go-to-market strategy centered on Marco’s service excellence and unlikely partnerships with dealers, OEMs and MSPs emerged as the best path to spur both the print business and future revenue.
“We wanted to reemerge from the pandemic in a different way, and we knew that the number-one thing we can manufacture at Marco is a wonderful customer service experience,” Akervik said. “It’s the one thing we have that we can ultimately control. Your service revenue streams and the profit derived from them are foundational to the longevity of your organization and its success.”
The blue-sky thinking represents a multi-faceted approach that enables dealers, managed service providers and OEM directs the opportunity to leverage Marco’s nationwide technical service network. It replaces the traditional inter-territorial (ITT) service model with a known quantity built around a one-hour callback, four-hour response and seven-hour resolution promise—all backed by a sterling Net Promoter Score and a nationwide network of 400 techs and counting. As much as it’s designed to drive Marco’s revenue (it’s supporting 15,000 new devices thus far), it’s also intended to help uplift the industry. In the process, it may redefine the face of competition (more on this shortly).
Fresh Perspective
It wasn’t quite a cultural shock for Wyatt when he joined the venerable dealer last December. He’d logged 25 years of technology services experiences with firms including ALTEN Technology, PaR Systems, Cyient and Topcoder. However, he’s following in the footsteps of two industry deans, Doug Albregts and Jeff Gau, in leading the 50-plus-year-old dealership into its next growth phase. The first six months at the helm, Wyatt noted, have given him great insight into the success and legacy of Marco.
“There’s a lot going on here at Marco, and it’s exciting and challenging,” he said. “The concept of customer service at the center of it has really been inspiring. For me, it’s really about ensuring that the teams have everything they need to execute on the strategy.”
The dealer itself hardly needs any introduction. Founded in 1973 and a key cog in the Norwest Equity Partners portfolio since 2015, Marco boasts 40-plus facilities stretched across 16 states, with more than 1,200 team members populating them. Konica Minolta and HP are two of its primary OEMs in addition to Sharp and Fujifilm. Its revenues have climbed north of $500 million, with wide-format gear and MPS helping to spark the growth. It offers the full slate of copiers/printers, production print, managed services, IT, security, VoIP, audio/visual and physical security solutions.
It’s been a bit of a 180-degree turn for Marco. The dealer kept a low profile coming out of the pandemic as it was “recalibrating,” according to Akervik. Notably an active M&A player in the past, its acquisition levels slowed to a trickle. But the dealer wouldn’t be quiet for long.
Marco is coming off a record year in 2025 that saw it set new company revenue standards in December, and that momentum spilled into 2026. Starting in the fourth quarter, the national service strategy launch began in earnest, and Marco was able to hire 60 new W-2 technicians from inside and outside the industry, adding $10 million in new business in the process. The dealer used a third-party firm to help ferret out mechanically inclined candidates from all four corners of the U.S. Currently, the dealer has 80% of the population covered by its tech service force, a figure it looks to continue growing.
In assembling the massive technician fleet, Marco is addressing the trend of aging and retiring service professionals. The world of IT is decidedly sexier than hardware when it comes to wooing young technician candidates. Few college/vocational programs exist for the development of the next generation of mechanical techs, adding to the uphill nature of the challenge. Part of the solution is enticing mature, mechanically inclined exiles from other industries into the fold, and Akervik wouldn’t rule out other possibilities, such as military veterans seeking another line of work.
“We’re rethinking what it’s like to be a destination workplace for a print copier service technician, and we’re looking for ways we can bring people into the organization for the last part of their career,” he said. “We’re generally looking for mechanically inclined young individuals who can experience over-the-shoulder training from those techs with the most experience in the industry.”
Birth of a Strategy
Every great idea has its catalyst. For Marco it’s a cornerstone enterprise client. This Fortune 500 healthcare behemoth has thousands of locations across the country and will need support for 30,000 devices over the next few years. Akervik noted the company didn’t relish the idea of having the client’s satellites serviced through the traditional, outsourced inter-territorial experience.
“It forced us to re-evaluate how we service customers nationwide,” he said. “We decided there was a lot of opportunity to deliver better experiences to customers, not only Marco’s but other dealers as well. Our ability to deliver visibility into the service experience— the post-call service notes, the SLAs we have—all helped to overcome the challenge of being direct competitors in many cases.”
The uniformity of top-tier service quality and the ability to whittle ITT partners from potentially dozens to just one provider in Marco makes for a compelling value proposition for competitors, Akervik notes. The leap of faith wouldn’t be possible in most cases without assurances. As such, Marco has fashioned a master services agreement, as well as rules of engagement, that provides a church-and-state separation and codifies being competitors in one world and partners in another.
Marco’s techs are registering high Net Promoter Scores across the entirety of its current footprint in the expansion markets, which Akervik sees as a catalyst for customer retention. “We want to extend that capability to other dealers that consolidate their ITTs to Marco’s national platform,” he said. “We want to help dealers get more three- to five-year cycles out of their customers. We want them to be able to deliver a comprehensive client business review with all the service data across multiple states—if that’s what’s required—through one pane of glass. That simply doesn’t exist in our industry with anybody else, so it’s really hard to pass up on that value proposition.”
Another key to the strategy was the consolidation of five Marco logistics centers into a massive 100,000-square-foot facility in Des Moines, Iowa. The cavernous warehouse is the poster child for Marco’s “two days to everywhere” guarantee. The Des Moines operation includes a comprehensive parts-and-supplies division and endless rows of machine buybacks destined for refurbishment, then sold through third-party resellers. More logistics facilities are to be rolled out this year, which dovetails nicely with the technician infusion.
According to Akervik, the refurbishment opportunity is another offshoot of the pandemic and a golden opportunity for Marco. “The post-COVID effect is undeniable,” he said. “Machines at the end of their lease cycle are coming back with far less usage than they had prior to the pandemic. There’s a ton of useful life left in those devices, so they can be refurbished for a second partial life cycle. We’re thinking about that as we’re expanding into new markets to introduce Marco where maybe we don’t have brick-and-mortar locations. At the same time, with low usage devices, there are OEM reclamation parts capabilities that that can reduce some of the inflationary impacts of price increases on parts.”
Clear Window
The one element that ties everything together is Marco’s Insights Cloud Portal, the “pane of glass” that offers clients and partners the full scope of their service relationship with real-time information. Insights provides pertinent data on service calls, meter reads and toner levels, and in the case of a dealer, OEM direct or MSP, Insights furnishes an aggregated dashboard for all accounts.
Insights brings order to chaos for those dealers that have a high amount of ITT partners but no aggregated repository of information and no consistency in how it’s provided (or in some cases, not provided). Marco takes the sting out of ITT partner management by effectively eliminating it.
According to Wyatt, Insights has evolved significantly during its 10-year journey, starting out as a platform for internal use only. It’s getting a splash of AI in the form of agents that can interact with clients to help with suggestions and input.
“It’s multi-tenant, which means it has a commercial grade SaaS architecture where multiple parties can have their own secure sections,” Wyatt noted. “It’s impressive from a technology perspective, and we feel as if we’re 10 years ahead of the competition. We just made a strategic decision to open it up to the market. Once people see it in action, they’ll appreciate it. It’s getting better continuously.”
There’s no denying that Marco has made a significant investment in the overall strategy, from the logistics centers to the massive technician talent onboarding/training to modifying and expanding the Insights portal. Being part of the NEP portfolio helps with furnishing the tools needed to bring it all together. Judging by preliminary results, Wyatt doesn’t anticipate a long runway en route to ROI.
“We’ve been investing a lot over a long period of time, which makes it incremental,” he said. “We’re seeing a day-one ROI on a lot of what we’re doing, and we’ll definitely see a lot of return this year. The traction we’re already seeing from Marco customers and the dealer community gives us confidence in a quick ROI. It’s also tough to put a value on really good customer, technical service and client satisfaction.”
BTW IT
The national service strategy is the new baby that’s getting a lot of attention, so to speak, but Akervik points out that it’s also paving the way for cross-selling opportunities and new clients on the managed IT end. Having technicians in more places is yielding more clients, and the Insights portal provides a glimpse into both print and IT realms for Marco’s direct clients.
Moving forward, Wyatt believes a great customer service experience is the alpha and the omega that will enable Marco to continue its double-digit growth. The plan to double revenues in a five-year window will call for approximately 15% CAGR, and he noted the dealership is already meeting that criteria. Adding a third national OEM to go with Konica Minolta and HP will significantly aid the process.
Becoming that ideal candidate for ITT consolidation, Akervik notes, will be contingent upon establishing deep trust within the dealer community. These are the same dealer execs who have sat shoulder to shoulder with Marco leaders at peer association meetings, which has helped boost familiarity. It’s also a matter of dispelling the widely held belief that megadealers don’t have the ability to deliver the higher level of service excellence that a small, independent provider can offer. Marco has the Net Promoter Scores and client referrals that suggest it’s up to the challenge.
But it’s not just dealers—it’s also manufacturers and MSPs, the latter of which has a population of 40,000 in the U.S., many of which lack a service infrastructure. The national office dealer landscape, meanwhile, counts roughly 1,500–1,700 individual companies. Akervik sees a golden opportunity to support MSP customers from a print service and logistics standpoint.
For those potential partners who are leery of exposing their customers to arguably the industry’s most formidable competitor, Marco has created landing pages on its website specific to dealers so they can get a feel for the process. The idea is to open a conversation with them to go deeper into details. Considering the monstrous investments in time, money and resources, the program isn’t designed to pilfer random accounts.
“We know this isn’t a short road or an easy road, but it’s a road worth traveling,” Akervik said. “Marco gives dealers, OEMs and MSPs a way to simplify national service delivery, improve the customer experience, and gain better business insights without having to build the infrastructure themselves. Our industry deserves a great service experience on a national scale. And we know that we can deliver on it.”
