To live in the shadows of Chicago is to know the city’s rich history of legendary sports coaches and managers. Phil Jackson led the NBA Bulls to six titles. Mike Ditka guided the Bears to a Super Bowl title in 1985 and became a cultural icon. Even before Iron Mike, George Halas was an NFL legend in the coaching ranks—the NFC championship trophy is named in his honor. Joe Maddon famously ended the Cubbies’ 108-year drought with a World Series win in 2016.
Replacing these (or any) leadership immortals, as one might guess, can be a daunting task. Oftentimes, the standards they set are impossibly high, and the expectations for their successors are rarely met. Fair or not, the shadows these larger-than-life personas cast are impossible to escape.
Nestled along the shores of Lake Michigan, some 30 miles north of the Windy City, sits Lake Forest, Illinois, home to Impact Networking. When he launched the company from the confines of his basement in 1999, founder Frank Cucco didn’t have a Jordan or Pippen among his staff of four people. But he had audacious goals, vowing to one day reach the $30 million plateau—quite the tall order in such a competitive market. Cucco didn’t reach $30 million, however; he blew right past it and struck the $100 million mark by 2017. With the help of his fellow founders, which included longtime president Dan Meyer, Cucco was able to carve out a name for himself and embarked on a quest to become one of the nation’s preeminent managed IT providers. Mission accomplished.
In early 2025, the company announced that Cucco, who was CEO, and Meyer were moving upstairs to start Impact’s board of directors. In their shoes stepped Mike Lepper as CEO and Anthony Cucco as COO. As Impact now sits at approximately $200 million in revenue, the road to becoming a billion-dollar company falls to the new leadership regime. Lepper is no neophyte, having joined the dealership as a sales rep in 2010 before scaling to executive vice president and partner prior to last year’s elevation.
The young guns have plenty of growth tools at their disposal. Impact carries the Kyocera, Ricoh and Konica Minolta lines. Among its offerings, managed marketing has sparked the company with 18% growth, followed by managed IT and cybersecurity at 14%. The dealer has made major inroads with artificial intelligence (AI) and early results indicate Impact is poised to enjoy significant revenue infusion in working with verticals including manufacturing, construction, accounting, law firms and healthcare.
Separation Strategy
One of the biggest changes in Lepper’s leadership tenure was separating the print division from the dealer’s managed services in 2025. Some employees lived in both worlds, but many of the managed services folks didn’t know the print business. So as individuals “worked in their swim lanes,” as Lepper termed it, new hires were brought in for both divisions.
The foundational shift provided its share of challenges. But like any good coach, Lepper was able to make some halftime adjustments, so to speak. On the strength of a fertile pipeline, December marked the best sales month in company history. Sales continued to soar through the first half of 2026, and the improvements were drastic.
“Dosing change appropriately has been one of the biggest takeaways,” Lepper said. “The best change on paper still causes disruption among your employees. I think we were trying to move too fast, and we missed a few things, but it all provided valuable learning experiences. Change is about getting the right people in the right seat on the bus and allowing them to move things forward.”
As a dealer that thrives off making technology work, Impact has maintained a leading position in the realm of AI, both internally and client-facing. In-house, it’s used for the print and managed services divisions. From automating meter reads and recording data to aggregating managed IT tickets, Impact has been able to eliminate thousands of hours from its own staff’s plate while ensuring clients need not trouble themselves with data handling. Sales leverages AI for scripting, more polished communication strategies and as a research tool. Standard departments including AP/AR and purchasing also benefit from the ability to automate and remove time-consuming elements.
Selling AI is a compelling opportunity. Lepper notes Impact was able to hammer out a significant six-figure accord with a major insurance client. In tandem with managed IT and cybersecurity, the opportunity is there for Impact to make major inroads from a sales perspective.
“Outsourcing IT is big, and cyber still has a sexy sizzle to it, but AI is what everyone’s talking about,” Lepper said. “It’s the next greatest thing out there. What we need to do is thread those three services together in a conversation. It might be tough to sell all three solutions at once, but people get excited at the mention of AI. Most people don’t realize AI is built into IT and cybersecurity solutions. We’ll spend the rest of 2026 focusing on our go-to-market plan and positioning ourselves to get these larger opportunities, because they’re everywhere.”
AI Potential
Considering that Impact’s managed services business billowed to the $100 million revenue mark in 10 short years, AI will play a pivotal role moving forward by optimizing the service department. The aforementioned ticket aggregation, voice agent support and ticket routing will ease growth pain via labor reduction. Providing world-class customer experience, Lepper notes, is the company’s North Star.
Managed IT, cybersecurity and AI all have their caveats surrounding data protection and, particularly in the case of AI, the need to develop corporate policy on acceptable usage. This is especially true as a growing percentage of American workers are actively leveraging AI for personal use, not merely using applications that incorporate AI into the technology.
Lepper believes the company has been judicious in its pace of adoption; if anything, the dealer could’ve been more aggressive with it in 2025. But considering the degree of change via the separation of hardware and solutions and the challenges he alluded to, plus bolstering the customer experience, reorganizing service delivery, adding a new professional services automation tool for the IT department and implementing a new ERP system, it’s difficult to fathom Impact being more aggressive.
“From a training perspective, our people are getting a better understanding of how to take this product to market and how we can push things faster,” he said. “At the same time, we need to continue to deliver on customer expectations. These solutions aren’t a set-it-and-forget it proposition; they’re ongoing services and [the situation] calls for a more consultative sale.”
One of the signature events Impact hosts each year is its Cybersecurity Summit, a series of educational presentations held several times a year in various regions across the country. The upcoming meeting is slated for Sept. 16 at its Indianapolis offices, on the heels of its June headquarters event. These gatherings allow the dealer to flex its subject matter expertise and further demonstrate its commitment to remaining a preeminent service provider. Lepper notes the show has migrated to being geared more toward C-suite executives, which calls for a decidedly different conversation than an in-the-trenches cybersecurity manager. However, the June presentation appealed to both: a morning tutorial with corner execs followed by an afternoon product workshop. While education is foremost, Lepper said the dealership was able to close a few deals as a result.
League Leader
As an acknowledged leader in the managed IT realm (its SMEs pen a quarterly column, “Impact of IT,” for this publication), Impact is tasked with remaining ahead of the curve, regardless of whether the topic is AI, cybersecurity or—more recently—quantum computing. It’s a matter of constantly delivering on the world-class service proposition and proffering the optimal solutions.
“First and foremost, we’ve got to be educators and leaders in this industry,” he said. “We’ve always tried to be on the cutting edge of everything that’s going on from a technology perspective, making sure our stack is the best of all breeds and that we can support it appropriately. We can get some good data points and deliver a world-class customer experience.”
Although this month’s State of the Industry report is on diversification, it’s hard to imagine Impact evaluating any other possible product or service offerings when it already possesses such a robust catalog. But one of the more fascinating hidden gems is its virtual production studio services. It’s heavily used internally to help connect Impact’s 24 offices across seven states, whether it’s for Lepper or Anthony Cucco to craft State-of-the-Union-type addresses or for developing sales and marketing go-to-market strategies. It also helps support Impact’s growing managed marketing department while enabling clients to execute professional-grade productions.
While unlikely at this point, Lepper would never rule out any offering that dovetails with the company’s technical and service proficiencies, from cybersecurity to AI and marketing. “I think we’ve got a pretty full plate as of now,” he offered.
Impact’s been active in the M&A space over the years, although growth by acquisition hasn’t been a priority. Prior to the agreement Lepper made earlier this year with Alltura Solutions to join the fold and rebrand as ImpactWest, one of the dealer’s most recent pickups was the 2021 addition of Quality Assured Office Machines, which became Impact Northeast Wisconsin. Alltura, founded by former Pacific Office Automation executive Eric Pitassi, is working as an independent company while using Impact Networking’s infrastructure to support MIT, cybersecurity and AI customers like a channel relationship.
“We’ll probably explore more of these partnership-type opportunities that will get us more feet on the street to sell our products or services we can actually support because we have the infrastructure built,” Lepper said. “We’ll look at the financials on a business, but we haven’t really seen anything that’s caught our eye or made sense (to acquire).”
The big three offerings—managed IT, cybersecurity and AI—will certainly provide some of the more optimal opportunities. Managed IT is an oversaturated market—a definite red ocean scenario according to Lepper—but Impact’s foothold and ability to maintain top-notch service will help fend off the sharks. Cybersecurity skews more blue ocean, he added, while most companies still have an immature AI posture. Being able to learn from the AI practices it’s implemented internally will help bring a compelling talk track to prospects.
Focusing on blocking and tackling while employing a customer-first mantra will be the order for Impact as it pushes forward. Adding new logos to the portfolio is always a given, but considering the vast product and service catalog at the sales reps’ disposal, cross- selling—an area of deficiency for many dealers—could yield significant growth. And Lepper impresses upon his account execs to be mindful of keeping existing clients happy and engaged.
Next-Gen Development
Keeping existing team members equally happy and engaged plays no small role in the organization. For years, the Impact Leadership Institute has been pivotal in developing current and future leaders, managers and rank-and-file workers. In the last 18 months, however, the dealer has leaned on third-party instruction that goes beyond company learning. One of its biggest partners is Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Lepper points out that many of the school’s professors ran multi-billion-dollar organizations, and that level of hands-on knowledge complements Impact’s internal classroom and field training.
In addition, Impact leverages the Apex Learning Management System platform to help team members chart their goals, track their performance and access various learning materials. Users can also earn certifications through the system. The home-grown talent is vital, as having a world-class technology component isn’t possible without having the proper personnel to convey the company’s value proposition effectively.
“We’ve made a lot of changes, and we’ve shook up the staff quite a bit,” Lepper said. “For a business our size, you need to keep bringing in the next generation, those people who are going to level up the company. We’ll be continuing to improve upon it as we grow.”
