In times of economic turmoil, despair and anxiety, one of the last places a business would expect to find comfort, solutions, education and perspective is a financing company. Yet, when the pandemic struck and uncertainty was the lone assurance, GreatAmerica Financial Services proved to be one of the greatest allies, confidants and solution providers to its dealer clients and their lessees.
GreatAmerica
Financial Services
The $2 billion, family-owned financing company serves the office dealer space as well as the commercial equipment reseller needs of the tech, construction, health care and automotive sectors, among others. They’ve stretched the definition of a financing house to include human resources (via PathShare HR Services), IT security and managed services (Collabrance), and a host of integration partners that have helped streamline and increase efficiency of doing business in the 21st century. But when the pandemic caused the aforementioned chaos, it was a blend of creativity, an understanding of business-to-business relationships, and the ability to learn and teach that earned GreatAmerica its wings.
Jennie Fisher, senior vice president and general manager, Office Equipment Group at GreatAmerica, shares her thoughts on how the company helped dealers and their clients skate through the difficult pandemic period while being mindful of the needs of both parties. With the lingering impact of supply chain issues and dwindling print output, Fisher provides perspective on how managed services, bundled offerings and educational opportunities can enable office dealers to transition toward new profit avenues moving into the post-pandemic landscape, along with how GreatAmerica plans to play a pivotal role to better serve clients as their needs continue to evolve.
Please provide a brief overview of GreatAmerica’s history and how its offerings have evolved over the years.
Fisher: While financing is at our core, we take a different and unique approach to the market and often find ourselves providing solutions and resources outside the scope of financing. This goes back to when Founder Tony Golobic set out to build GreatAmerica. His vision was to create a company that valued service and ethics to its customer and embraced the entrepreneurial spirit driving continuous innovation.
Our highly defined sales process and team-based environment is centered on gaining a deep knowledge and understanding of our customers’ organizations, their go-to-market strategies and the office equipment industry as a whole. We use this intelligence to create customized programs and resources focused on helping them be more successful. Being a customer-focused entity, these value-added resources, such as our integrations, PathShare or Collabrance offerings, often fall outside the scope of financing.
These solutions have evolved over time, just as our customers’ opportunities and needs have evolved over time. Some examples include our Partnership Program, Fleetview Remote Monitoring, MPS, Pathshare HR Services, Collabrance Master Managed IT services, HaaR and VoIP.
How would you characterize the first half of 2021? Are we seeing a return to pre-pandemic leasing demand levels?
Fisher: If not for the supply chain challenges, we would be back to pre-pandemic leasing at GreatAmerica. We are fortunate to be working with some very progressive office technology providers who have evolved their solutions into IT, telephony and services that provide opportunity to offset some, if not all, of the decline in print volume. In an instant, IT service providers became essential to their clients as reliance on them grew in order to keep businesses up and running in the new work-from-home world. While that world is fluid, there is reason to believe the office dynamic has changed for the long term. For this reason, the GreatAmerica HaaR, or hardware-as-a-rental financing solution, has been an increasingly valuable go-to-market tool when selling managed IT services and ancillary offerings such as security, VoIP and workflow solutions.
As an independent provider, our flexibility has allowed us to get creative in finding solutions to help secure opportunities in their funnel amidst the supply chain challenges. Our support and partnership have not gone unnoticed and earned us the position as a value-added resource to help them navigate through this. And, just like most of our customers, we have also placed a strong focus on originating net-new and are winning in many areas. Despite the supply chain issues, our performance is making a strong comeback.
Early in the pandemic, we discussed the need to protect dealer revenues while preserving their client relationships in light of payment-relief requests. How would you grade your performance in this regard?
Fisher: I would grade us an A! We reacted with options to provide economic assistance to our dealer’s customers while protecting their monthly pass-through revenues. Understanding cashflow is critically important to everyone at this time, and given the large percent of bundled contracts we bill and collect, we handle a significant portion of revenue for many of our customers.
We were also very careful to refer their customers back to them to negotiate relief. We immediately implemented digital signatures and ACH, which provided ease of extension and payment administration for the lessees in a WFH environment. GreatAmerica provided added flexibility to our remarketers in the timing of equipment being received, understanding that current circumstances may pose challenges in the logistics of shipping. It was important to provide education around navigating the CARES Act and Paycheck Protection Program through our website, webinars and blogs, and we began financing personal protective equipment.
As an independent provider, our flexibility has allowed us to get creative in finding solutions to help secure opportunities in their funnel amidst the supply chain challenges.
— Jennie Fisher, GreatAmerica Financial Services
We embraced the challenges our customers were facing, which seemed to change weekly. As we gained additional feedback from our customers on their challenges, we focused on creative financial solutions to help our dealers close deals in the funnel.
What are some of the current challenges GreatAmerica faces in extending financing programs through its dealer partners?
Fisher: Having the equipment to finance!
Tell us a little about the trends you’re seeing in leasing.
Fisher: As many of our customers are focused on diversifying their offerings beyond output, we are starting to see more solutions and services play into their offerings (i.e. VoIP, marketing, IT, etc.). Our invoicing capabilities allow us to combine various financing options for these solutions into one monthly invoice (1nVOICE). As they evolve their solutions and services, we continue to focus on evolving our financing solutions.
Is the end-user consumption of products and services in a bundled format the future of leasing?
Fisher: It is still a viable go-to-market strategy for the future and many of our customers that do not bundle are realizing how it could have protected their monthly pass-through revenues during the pandemic. Bundling is a value we bring to the marketplace with our invoice solutions and technology integrations. While output declined, the monthly service and supplies portion was protected. The dealers that did not bundle now appreciate the value it brought during this time in protecting recurring revenue. Moving forward, the question is about what bundling will look like. The need to finance and invoice for service is becoming more prevalent, and increased transparency into what the customer is invoiced for monthly may become more important. At the end of the day, the ability to invoice all services and solutions on a single invoice will still bring value to the end-users.
What have been some of the positives that have enabled GreatAmerica to prosper during this uniquely challenging period?
Fisher: We focused first on our dealers, doing what we could to help them transition to a virtual environment and continue to close transactions. We were able to pivot our offerings in response to COVID-19, and design and deliver timely education and relevant products to support the managed print services market throughout the pandemic.
We instantly understood that the dealer channel, like all of us, was struggling to navigate the unchartered waters in 2020 and we wanted to help. We brought educational materials to the market through our Build for Tomorrow webinar series, which included expert and dealer panels to help share best practices and new ideas pertinent to the times we were facing. Topics ranged from selling virtually to bundling, billing, MPS and diversification strategies.
One notable education piece was MPSecure, an educational package our customers could leverage with their customers to create awareness about the dangers of unmanaged print devices and the risk they pose to an organization’s network. The materials were delivered in the form of branded and unbranded content including video, social, blog and whitepaper components, in addition to a customizable toolkit our customers could use to easily market the offering under their name. Not only did this campaign educate our customers on the opportunity for remote printers, it also provided them a way to flip the script from cost to security.
PathShare HR Services certainly serves as a differentiator for GreatAmerica among financing companies. Talk about its value proposition, especially at a time when employee acquisition and retention have dominated national headlines.
Fisher: PathShare HR Services arose from dealer needs regarding recruiting, hiring and talent acquisition. While that has long been a concern for all industries, it’s a much greater challenge now because the pool of candidates in the market is not plentiful. PathShare focuses on helping customers evaluate their current hiring needs, identify what is and isn’t working, and understand what talent acquisition should look like. Director of HR Consulting Sally Brause and her team help develop an ideal profile of characteristics to identify in prospective candidates. They help dealers build steps into their existing process to attract and retain top-notch talent. That was their number-one focus during the pandemic, and we’ve onboarded many clients to help them develop that focus.
Sally and her team will work with a dealer to evaluate the culture of the organization, and during these conversations, dealers often realize they need to focus a little more on cultivating their culture. Another area of need was centered on the dealers’ organizational structure, especially as business slowed. Dealers wanted to focus on integrations and their back office to develop a strategy for how they would proceed coming out of the pandemic, what that transition would look like and how they could set themselves up for future success. Sally and PathShare are trained implementers of EOS Traction, which has provided a number of opportunities for us. PathShare has been a true value-added resource throughout this time.
Is there anything new on the horizon from a program or partnership standpoint?
Fisher: GreatAmerica is proud to be a founding member of the Consortium formed by Stramaglio Consulting. We are excited about the opportunity to bring value-added partners (some not active in our markets, which I find exciting) together, as well as strong progressive technology resellers to form a think tank of the future, if you will. Stay tuned. There are good things to come!
As far as programs go, we are currently exploring ecommerce opportunities in the office technology space. More consumers are turning to the internet to make purchases online and customer buying habits have evolved into the business world. If we are not all actively adapting and responding to these technological advancements, our competitors will. We are actively involved in ecommerce in the IT space and contemplated developing our own solution. However, knowing our customers do not want to be tied to an individual finance company or manufacturer, we are focusing on our ability to integrate with all available options and are currently working on several different opportunities.
What is GreatAmerica looking to accomplish heading into the new year?
Fisher: We are looking to help our dealers continue to navigate through the pandemic and emerge stronger than ever. This means placing a strong focus on evolving technology and services and creating financing solutions to help close transactions, whether it’s MFPs, software or services. It also means providing digital automation and improved capabilities.
We formed a data analytics team prior to the pandemic to focus on making better, faster decisions—turning data into action. We are also looking for insights as to how we can continue to evolve our experience delivery in the form our customers desire. Now more than ever, it’s important to have a partner who invests in the future and isn’t operating off antiquated systems. This has always been a part of our mission at GreatAmerica in helping customers achieve greater success—for today and for the future.
