It doesn’t necessarily take a profit and loss statement to identify when an acquisition candidate in the office technology dealer realm doesn’t measure up to a buyer’s standards. During the course of his 40-plus year journey, James Morrissey has witnessed the good, the bad and the “um, we’ll let you know” of prospects that drift in and out of the M&A pipeline. The president of UBEO Business Services, one of the industry’s preeminent dealmakers and a $400-plus million revenue performer, has done enough deals to readily identify gems worth pursuing.
The undesirables’ traits, he notes, are readily apparent. Poor and/or indifferent management. Absent owners. Atrocious service. Outdated technology. Angry, angry customers. One can almost see the perpetual storm cloud that hangs above the headquarters of such operations. These owners aren’t trying to sell as much as they’re attempting to cut bait, hoping against hope that a buyer will look past the lame duck’s many imperfections and see a gem-in-waiting rather than a lump of coal.
Forty years has given Morrissey a keen eye for what good looks like, and he knows that reputation is everything in this business. The ability to acquire dealers whose very names are synonymous with quality adds even more credibility to UBEO and increases confidence that the new company’s standards will integrate nicely with its own. The common thread: unparalleled service.
“Everyone’s got a reputation. Our founder, Jim Sheffield, has an impeccable reputation for service,” Morrissey noted. “Look around the industry. Loffler has an impeccable reputation, as does Flesch. The same thing with Jerry Blaine at LDI Connect. Those companies aren’t for sale, but that’s the type of reputation we’re looking for.”
It also helps to have $50 million or more in annual revenue, which is the sweet spot Morrissey seeks in an acquisition. And someday, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, he envisions acquiring a $500 million behemoth.
Acquired Tastes
The pride of Austin, Texas, with 60-plus locations spread across 15 states, UBEO has enjoyed its share of reputable acquisitions. One of the biggest coups came in 2022 when Sheffield and Co. obtained Centric Business Systems of Baltimore, a $70 million operation then owned by the estimable Rick Bastinelli. At the time of the deal, Morrissey pointed out “Rick is top of the heap when it comes to integrity,” and it underscored UBEO’s discerning eye to add upper-echelon dealerships.
Another familiar face, albeit not on the same revenue scale as Centric, joined the UBEO ranks back in January: Advanced Business Equipment (ABE), a $5 million to $10 million performer out of Asheville, North Carolina. The dealership was led by Kevin Jackson, who gained notoriety for navigating his company (and the city of Asheville) through the adversity of Hurricane Helene back in 2024. The tireless, relentless mettle that Jackson demonstrated catapulted his already staunch reputation to greater heights.
ABE was one of three deals that fortified UBEO’s position in the southeast. With two additional signed letters of intent in hand (the acquisition of CMC Business Systems in Midland, Texas, was announced at press time), the dealer remains bullish on growth by acquisition. Having a staunch financial backer is critical to keep rolling on the M&A side, and to that end, Sentinel Capital Partners has been thrilled with UBEO’s performance and quality of prospects in the pipeline. Their support will augment the dealer’s quest to bolster its East Coast profile, particularly markets such as Philadelphia and Boston and down into Florida. The central region—to date primarily Texas-based firms—is still in play as well.
“We’ve got a pipeline that’s bigger than ever before,” Morrissey said. “These owners have spent 30 or more years building their businesses—they’re not going to turn it over to someone who’s going to chop it up for a couple of bucks. They’re already rich personally, so they would rather have their baby in the hands of someone who’s going to take care of the company and the employees and foster growth. We’ve done 27 deals, and we haven’t laid off anyone in those companies.
“I don’t think we’re losing deals to anybody. Any deals we want, we win, and we pay a fair price. You can’t overpay and tip the boat over with that acquisition.”
Growth Pains
The 22-year-old company boasts more than 1,400 team members across its network of facilities, which are largely clustered on the East Coast, Texas and Louisiana in the central region, and Nevada/California on the West Coast. Having done nearly 30 deals, UBEO’s member companies combined to carry most manufacturer lines—Ricoh, Canon, HP, Xerox, Sharp, Konica Minolta and Kyocera—with a client vertical profile comprised of education, healthcare, legal, government and marketing, among others.
Production print represents a significant area of strength for UBEO (more on this shortly), and the company also specializes in areas such as enterprise content management, graphic printers and plotters, and solutions that include print and mail fulfillment and litigation services. M&A continues to open doors, as the company’s burgeoning footprint has set the stage to grow the number of larger strategic accounts it services.
The 2026 campaign got off to something of a sluggish start for UBEO. The company made headlines last year when it announced that more than 50 account representatives had been hired across its network, but it can take about nine months for new salespeople to get up to selling speed. Net-new business is complementary to the firm’s M&A growth trajectory, but there’s a fundamental truth that hasn’t been fully embraced on the sales front when it comes to the eroding sales volume of MFPs, particularly within the midmarkets: the MFP won’t always be the center of the sales universe. Morrissey feels about 60% of reps have bought into the concept that a different approach is needed.
“It’s a struggle to ask people who’ve been selling one way successfully for 20–25 years to sell a different way in order to manage the transition that’s happening in the industry,” Morrissey said. “Our numbers look good from a revenue standpoint, although there’s headwind for everybody in that the average selling price is down, and customers in the mid-market are definitely buying fewer machines—if they bought 10 boxes before, they’re buying seven now. When you add in price increases, the need for more net-new customers has become very apparent to gain market share.”
Show and Sell
The sheer breadth of UBEO’s production print is quite impressive. Its production lines feature Xerox, Ricoh, Canon and Konica Minolta; HP, Canon and Océ for wide-format machines; and Duplo, Xanté, C.P. Bourg and MBM for finishing solutions. According to Jeff Galovic, vice president of strategic planning, the company has made extensive investments in hiring production print specialists, analysts and service technicians. Likewise, UBEO sank large dollars into software for both the offerings and internal training.
vice president
of strategic planning
Technical service superiority has created a significant point of differentiation for UBEO. Galovic points out that many competitors, including OEMs, have cut back on service, opening a window for the dealer to demonstrate its prowess. Tech pilfering attempts have become the norm; Morrissey points out that UBEO’s competitors try to ply them with pay increases as high as 30%. However, the few techs who do jump at the offer almost always return because the competitor organization had no idea about how to run a production operation.
UBEO has worked tirelessly to optimize its service department. “We’ve created a great structure in terms of statement of work and how the process should go,” Galovic noted. “We’ve developed what we feel is a production program that goes from A to Z and can rival and quite frankly beat out anybody in the business, including the manufacturers.
“You need to get out to the customer quickly and fix machines the first time because these customers are in high-stress environments, and they can’t afford to be down. You need to be at the top of your game because those situations will escalate quickly if you’re not prepared to take care of the customer.”
Training has been especially critical, including the aforementioned need to adopt a tack that’s less box-centric. The program, in general, is less about making cold calls or how to write a proposal. The most valuable instruction strikes at the very heart of UBEO’s identity.
“What we’re teaching people in our new-hire training is really about the differences at UBEO, selling the value prop and the things that make us so unique,” Galovic added. “We’ve really focused our training to that exclusively. Sometimes, we’ll recruit people who may have industry experience. But even some reps with 10 years of experience haven’t had the suite of services in their bag that we offer, so we’ll dive into production, wide-format, software and Pro IT, and teach them all about the breadth and scope of services.”
director of marketing
Ronnie Hay, UBEO’s director of marketing, credits Galovic with recruiting highly talented specialists into the organization and devising a structure that benefits from impactful collaboration between the regional leaders and specialists. Their meetings assess the successful and struggling product lines and provide feedback that informs strategy and next steps.
“It’s the strength of our national footprint. We have so many talented people who’ve come to us from across the industry,” Hay said. “Everyone in that entire system is supportive of each other up and down the organization, and Jeff deserves credit for building that structure.”
Further underscoring UBEO’s commitment to the production print segment is its wealth of showrooms. There are more than a dozen satellites across the country that have high-end production in their showrooms and roughly 24 that have light production on hand. This especially resonates with commercial printers, which comprise 30% of the dealer’s production client list. These customers love to see systems in action, run their own jobs through them, examine the color and quality of output, and ask technical questions. It’s the print manufacturing world’s version of geeking out, in a sense, and extremely impactful in getting the final nudge across the sales’ finish line.
Each location has at least one annual hosted event to tout production machines. Morrissey points out that the shows draw upwards of 150 premium prospects, which helps to fill the business pipeline.
“When customers come in, they can see two or three different solutions, and we’ll cater to the one that fits their needs,” Galovic said. “If you offer only a single line, you’re trying to force your customer into what that system can do. With multiple lines, we can tailor the right solution for them. While it’s a significant investment, we’re expecting to enjoy continued strong growth this year.”
Filling Funnel
Demand generation marketing has been an impactful tool behind the dealer’s organic growth. UBEO transformed its efforts in that arena from a challenging startup into a highly effective, technology-driven operation. By building the right team, strengthening leadership and leveraging automation, AI and advanced prospecting tools, the company modernized customer outreach to align with evolving buying preferences.
Today, the demand generation team sets more than 4,000 appointments annually and is expected to generate $24 million in revenue, demonstrating how strategic investments in people, processes and technology have produced measurable sales success. “We’ve been able to integrate AI into our demand generation platform. It’s a very strategic process that’s adapted over time to the way customers want to be contacted,” Galovic added.
Hay believes that dealers who are embarking on a demand gen initiative need to balance quality and scale. “You have to have the tools, processes and technology to meet the customer’s scale because they’re getting so many inbound messages, emails, phone calls and ads all the time. But you can’t sacrifice quality. We wanted to ensure we maintain our value proposition. This is the first touch that some of our future customers are going to have with us, and everything about it has to reinforce that we’re a quality and value provider.”
Speaking of AI, Morrissey notes the dealership has more than 30 team members with Claude platform licenses and countless others who use it personally. It’s been a boon in reducing activities that once took three hours to complete, for example, down to mere minutes. UBEO takes great pains via governance and security to ensure its data isn’t being compromised or unwittingly shared. The other facet of AI is project-driven usage; e.g., UBEO continues to tweak its cradle-to-grave procedure for order processing. Fully realized, it will eliminate redundancies and the need for excessive fact-checking.
“Jeff and I have seen this movie twice already; you could break a company’s back with these IT infrastructure projects,” Morrissey pointed out. “Now we can run models to see if it’s going to work and what the percentage of failure is, etc. We’re focused on standardization, so that when we do implement one system, we won’t have language problems and coding problems and all the other things that come up.”
Morrissey believes UBEO’s greatest growth opportunities lie in expanding IT services, workflow automation and AI-driven solutions as customers increasingly seek outsourced technology management over commodity offerings. He also sees significant potential in capturing market share as manufacturers reassess their direct customer relationships and increasingly rely on dealers. UBEO’s strong service organization, he notes, positions the company to capitalize on those partnerships while continuing to grow its customer base.
Unlimited Potential
Looking ahead, Morrissey believes acquisitions will continue to be in play. He could envision completing a deal to integrate a nine-figure dealership to quicken the company’s march toward being a billion-dollar provider. The UBEO platform is such that it can withstand bolting on dealers of any size, or perhaps five smaller competitors to achieve the same end. Either way, such unions would create “a powerhouse of synergies available to leverage in the market.” Regardless of the MO, Morrissey feels the inability of competitors to deliver on the services they promise to clients will help accelerate UBEO’s quest.
“I’m more excited about the future now than I’ve ever been in the seven and a half years with UBEO,” he said. “You’re either green and growing, ripe or you’re rotting. We’re hungry. There’s a $21 billion market available to us, and we’re at $500 million now. The opportunity is there to take.”
