Centric Business Systems Acquisition Marks UBEO’s Latest East Coast Foray

Jim Morrissey, UBEO Business Services president

UBEO Business Services picked up right where it left off in 2021 with the announcement that it had acquired Centric Business Systems of Owings Mill, Maryland, a $55 million performer and longtime ENX Magazine Elite Dealer. The acquisition gives UBEO—which has holdings in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Massachusetts—a significant presence in the Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware and Washington D.C. markets.

According to Jim Morrissey, president of San Antonio-based UBEO, the acquisition only marks the beginning of what is expected to be an extremely active 2022 for the dealer, which announced five deals during the previous year. Morrissey said the company currently has a fertile pipeline, particularly in regards to East Coast prospects.

In Centric Business Systems, UBEO has added a distinguished and well-respected dealership to the fold. Behind the leadership of Rick Bastinelli, Centric has flourished beyond the $50 million plateau since opening its doors in 1990. A Sharp, Ricoh, HP and Kyocera dealer, Centric strengthened its Richmond, Virginia, holdings last year by acquiring a base of customers from Service First Copier. That complemented its growth in A4, MPS and production print.

Rick Bastinelli, Centric Business Systems

“In an ever-changing business environment, it is important that we continue to make strategic, long-term business decisions for our customers and employees,” said Bastinelli, who will remain at the helm of Centric. “By joining UBEO, we have even more tools in our toolkit to help us serve our customer needs, bring even more diversified offerings to our marketplaces, and provide greater career advancement opportunities for our employees. We truly see this as a partnership that will allow us to continue to grow our community.”

Jim Sheffield, UBEO CEO

“Our goal from the beginning has been to buy high-quality companies that line up with UBEO’s customer-centric philosophy and the Centric team epitomizes those values,” said Jim Sheffield, CEO of UBEO. “Centric is a strong and strategic fit for UBEO. Combining our best practices will provide significant value for our customers.”

Morrissey noted that the deal, which was completed in December, took a mere 120 days to finalize. “Rick is top of the heap when it comes to integrity; everything he said (about his company) was true, we checked all the boxes and it happened quickly. We were all motivated to complete it by year’s end,” he told ENX Magazine.

UBEO won the agreement in a competitive scenario. When Morrissey’s team learned that Bastinelli was in the market for a suitor to take his company to the next level, it paved the way to initial talks.

“Rick had done his due diligence, talked to a number of companies,” Morrissey said. “We’re very excited to have Rick turn his baby, as he calls it, over to us. Centric is a nice fit, they mirror UBEO’s current culture and direction of where we think business is going. It’s a good match.”

Low-Key Approach

UBEO has taken a low-key approach to its outward reach in the M&A theater. Morrissey talks to many consultants and dealers about UBEO’s objectives, its views on the industry’s trajectory, what it plans to do and the path it is taking to accomplish those ends. From an acquisition standpoint, that entails finding strong cultural fits and companies like Centric that meet UBEO’s definition of a standout performer, as opposed to reclamation projects.

“The interesting thing about the acquisition game is dealers have a lot of history as to who’s doing what,” Morrissey noted. “It’s not what the acquirers say, it’s what they’ve done. And everyone pretty much has the blueprint of what these companies are doing. When we acquire a company, we don’t do any hacking and whacking, or chopping and slicing.”

UBEO had taken a regional approach to growth prior to Morrissey’s arrival and is now looking to become more of a national presence while employing a strategic approach to M&A growth. Morrissey has extensive experience on both sides of the ball, from OEM positions in the Northeast with Xerox, Ricoh and Canon to dealer leadership roles with Alco Standard/IKON Office Solutions. He continues to leverage that experience as UBEO sets its sights on further expansion.

“We’re not looking to become a monster in size, we’re looking to be the premier provider in the industry,” he said. “We’re not looking to fill the map, but we do have our eyes on the central, west and east as a strategic initiative. We’ve bought a cluster of companies in the Northeast, and this deal really adds a lot of horsepower to the region. We’ve got quite a bit of East Coast acquisitions on our plate for this year, and we expect our holdings to be very large there during 2022.”

Morrissey believes 2022 will be deal-laden as dealers continue to reconcile the continuing business challenges. Those companies that do not take the necessary growth steps to weather the post-COVID storm by fortifying areas such as production, software and processes will struggle as a viable, ongoing concern.

Platform Building

And while UBEO has carved out a name for itself in recent years as a top M&A player, the headlines don’t bring attention to the efforts Morrissey and Sheffield have made to grow its platform through technology and process-enhancement investments.

“We’ve implemented a significant amount of technology around what we’re doing so that when we do acquire companies, we’re not just taking on more volume,” he said. “We’re gaining synergies to take advantage of better processes. We feel that not only did we fare well during COVID, we spent a lot of time on infrastructure and hiring the right people in roles who will be able to manage the infrastructure that we built. “We want to be nothing less than the premier provider in the industry, and we’re excited to talk to companies who want to get on board with that notion.

“We feel very good about our current pipeline, and we’re going to methodically go after each market with the same due diligence that we’ve done so far to make sure we’re not getting distracted or getting into things we don’t see as value. All the infrastructure building and the investments we made over the last three years are going to pay big dividends. We can’t be more excited about 2022.”

Erik Cagle
About the Author
Erik Cagle is the editorial director of ENX Magazine. He is an author, writer and editor who spent 18 years covering the commercial printing industry.