When one thinks of Indiana, the word Heartland comes to mind. The state is a booming agricultural center—with corn and soybeans leading the way—and industrial business is thriving on the backs of hard-working folks who embrace American values. It’s affordable living and a sports fan’s dream; one can almost hear the refrains of the Notre Dame Victory March in the distance.
Given the pastoral connotations, technology may not be the first thing most people connect with the Hoosier State. The leadership at U.S. Business Systems, however, believes there’s a lucrative opportunity to move beyond the meat-and-potatoes office technology catalog in embracing robotics. Could the Elkhart, Indiana-based firm be operating on the razor’s edge of AI and tech?
Actually, President and CEO Ron Hulett sees more of a correlation with the early days of copier sales as opposed to Silicon Valley. While driven by tech, the robotics are also mechanical. Although automated home vacuums and programmable mowing devices aren’t new—the Roomba is almost 25 years old, and commercial, vision-based autonomous mowers have been with us since 2019—the novelty hasn’t worn off. The dealer’s current lineup, which it rolled out this year, consists of commercial floor cleaners in addition to commercial and industrial delivery units. Commercial lawn care units are on the horizon.
With AI fever gripping the world, it’s spiked the interest in business automation applications. And the “cool” factor is off the charts. Just ask customers.
“At the moment, it’s kind of like a walk down memory lane,” Hulett said. “The sales model is what the copier model was back in the 1980s and 1990s: call on people and push for a demo. The market is similar; everyone has floors or spaces they need cleaned, product they need moved or ‘product’ that they deliver to their customers when customers come to their place of business. The lineup of equipment continues to broaden and address different functions such as lawn care or sports field maintenance. We believe it’s a good opportunity for the dealer community.”
Whether its schools, healthcare facilities, office and retail, manufacturing or warehousing, the placement opportunities for cleaning robots are limitless. Commercial cleaning machines are intuitive and programmable, and can return to their automated stations to change out dirty water, self-clean and recharge. Industrial models can help sweep warehouses and parking lots to clean and eliminate projectiles and other sharp objects that can puncture tires, benefitting from autonomous navigation that avoids impediments. The machines can be dry sweepers or sweepers/moppers (the CC1 Pro, for example, is a four-in-one indoor sweeper, scrubber and wet/dry mop).
Restaurants, hotels, casinos and senior living communities benefit from the commercial delivery robots, while industrial models can serve manufacturing facilities, warehouses, distribution centers and logistics operations, among others. The productivity gains and scalable automation enable facilities to accomplish more without expending valuable resources.
Overall, the robots offer an alternative to using people for menial and time-consuming tasks, and Hulett raves about their performance. One of the important diversification boxes they check off is managed recurring revenue in the form of maintenance agreements. Preventive maintenance and consumables replacement ensure the dealer remains sticky to the client. As for the profit margins, they’re fairly impressive, he noted.
Hulett feels it’s important to capitalize on the opportunity as quickly as possible, as the field of suitors will undoubtedly swell in the coming months and years. “Market saturation will happen quickly, so becoming subject matter experts fast can position us to be the area’s best choice for these products,” he noted. “Having a field service team trained and able to support the products, a marketing plan already working and all of the processes in place to do business in the space before the competition will afford us the opportunity to be creative with programs since we’ll have data to analyze and forecast trends.”
Early Years
A multiline dealer (Kyocera, Sharp, HP and Toshiba), U.S. Business Systems debuted in 1992, providing service for office machines such as Olympia typewriters prior to garnering Minolta authorization. Two accounts helped forge the dealer’s path forward: a large psychiatric hospital and a manufacturer of recreational vehicles. It was tough sledding, even with the cornerstone accounts, as there were nearly 50 local companies listed in the Yellow Pages that sold and/or serviced office machines.
Hulett and his brother, Tim, gained an unexpected sensei in Richard Cashman, who was actually an executive for a U.K.-based dealership. Cashman gave a presentation at a conference the brothers attended in 1999, and it truly resonated with them. They spoke afterward and struck up a friendship that’s still going strong more than 25 years later. Cashman proved to be the missing link in the Huletts’ business strategy.
“He’s a brilliant and gracious man who’s helped us in so many different ways,” Hulett noted. “Our background was primarily in service. He taught us a great deal about running and managing a sales operation. We sort of blindly followed his guidance; as the old saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know.”
Leveraging Cashman’s wisdom, U.S. Business Systems garnered momentum with a new sales strategy and assembled a sales team that helped move the revenue needle. One key was embracing the “connected copier” early on, according to Hulett, and in 2004 the dealer rolled out a branded program called Managing Your Printing Costs (MYPC) for contracting HP printers. While the initialism didn’t take hold across the industry, this forerunner to MPS established the dealer as a prescient vendor.
Managed IT followed in 2012 and has become a cornerstone offering for the dealer, thriving during the pandemic to the tune of $2.7 million worth of IT products and services sold. The Huletts also got the jump on the “everything-as-a-service” movement, unveiling hardware-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service in 2016. Print was eventually added to the fray, creating content-as-a-service.
Road Warriors
U.S. Business Systems serves the northern Indiana and southern Michigan markets. Elkhart itself has been dubbed the “RV capital of the world,” producing roughly 80% of the world’s recreational vehicles, which naturally makes it the driver of the economy (pun intended). The manufacturing community, education, professional and hospitality are other vertical sweet spots for the dealer.
“The marks-on-paper business is still the prevailing leader,” Hulett said. “There are various products we’ve added in that space, such as wide-format and thermal printing, that veer from the standard MFP placement, but they put marks on paper and we contract them.”
The 2026 campaign has presented its challenges, and the dealer found itself behind revenue targets. Hulett believes a strong fourth quarter would help hit the mark or at least come very close. He pointed out that RV sales have dropped in 2026, approximately 13% quarter over quarter, and that was coming off a year when sales of the vehicles missed their targets significantly. As RV sales goes, so does the Elkhart economy, but U.S. Business Systems has a history of finishing the calendar year with a flurry.
Arguably the bread-and-butter growth driver is managed services, both print and IT. Managed print grew 23% while managed network services increased about 33% in the past year. Maintaining a focus on recurring revenue streams and eschewing transactional business has been critical to the success. The dealer loses few accounts, and in cases where clients bounced in favor of a cheaper price, they generally return when they realize the services from the new provider fell woefully short of what U.S. Business Systems had delivered.
“The MFP market is very mature, and the growth simply has to come from other areas,” Hulett noted. “We’ve worked hard to be creative in our managed offerings. Those include things that perhaps other dealers haven’t thought of or aren’t willing to put out under a managed plan. Bundling as many different products and services that we can ties in more business and gets the revenue contracted. That just naturally drives growth.”
Personnel Reset
The disconnect between a company’s staff and its intended culture can be subtle in its transformation. About five years ago, Hulett noticed a “slow fade” was taking place; he likened it to beach erosion that only becomes apparent over time. Action was necessary to place the proverbial right people in the right seats, which is typically a painful-but-necessary process.
“Tim and my roles were re-assigned, so to speak, some time ago,” he said. “We had to develop new revenue streams where the value proposition could take front and center. During that time, our sales team had shrunk considerably, our quality of service had dropped and morale went with it. After speaking to our biggest clients, it was clear something had to be done.”
While the quest is ongoing, the recruitment initiative has made a tangible difference in the past four years. The Huletts imported talent from outside the industry, which added a learning curve, but they’ve acclimated. There’s more cohesion, and team members are attuned to what the dealer is looking to accomplish.
The staff at U.S. Business Systems is now counted as a strength. The dealer’s been able to retain a solid core of individuals who prioritize the needs of their clients. Even with the shakeup, the company boasts a lot of veterans with 10 to 20-plus years of service, and their common denominator is a hunger to win. All newcomers must demonstrate they’re aligned with the core values that emphasize customer service with integrity, professionalism, the desire to learn and grow, striving to find one’s better self and good citizenship.
The AI Opportunity
Like robotics, AI offered as a service or in a consultancy capacity will attract an influx of providers, and Hulett believes companies like his will need to move quickly in sealing accounts before market saturation takes hold. His concern is centered on the data security and protected information side of engagements. He’s witnessed tools being deployed inside client environments “without knowledge of stakeholders, or even done by the major stakeholders without the full understanding of what they’re inviting in their environment.” Shadow IT—the use of AI tools without the clearance and/or knowledge of the company’s IT division—can be downright damaging for a business.
“Unintended consequences can result from people using the flavor-of-the-month AI tools, so we try to educate and remediate these from creating vulnerabilities that the clients aren’t aware of,” Hulett noted. “We have tools that operate from within a secure platform and wrapper, and we offer those as well as development services to clients to assist them with achieving their AI adoption goals.”
Hulett sees no special sauce/magical elixir that will spur future growth. It’s old-fashioned grinding and persistence from a salesperson’s perspective and being relentless in calling on prospects when competitors throw in the towel and move on to other opportunities. It also requires coordination with some of the other tools at their disposal. As he observed, “Marketing the company and the deliverables has evolved into a robust engine with a lot of different cylinders.”
Expanding within current accounts and cultivating new ones is the order of the day for U.S. Business Systems. The RV business offers countless opportunities, given the abundance of products requiring tags and labels, which opens the door to thermal printing devices from Toshiba. Hulett cited an example where a client had an emergency with its existing thermal device, and the rescue solution eventually billowed into a fleet of nearly 150 units.
Above all, managed IT will be the primary growth catalyst in the dealer’s arsenal, and given the competitive nature of the offering, Hulett knows he can’t lift his foot off the accelerator. It’s performance driven, and there’s no lack of potential suitors if his company can’t leverage its systems, staffing and processes to deliver as promised.
“Once you’re in and performing, that account just keeps growing,” he said. “There are projects, products and other services that come once you prove your worth and show you’re a trusted partner. The competitive landscape is rapidly growing in IT, and the personnel resources aren’t easy to acquire. If companies are thinking about getting in this business, they need to get after it…it’s getting tougher.”
Future Vision
Beyond reaching revenue targets, setting the bar for robotics placements and garnering new managed IT pacts, one of the primary goals for Hulett is expanding his sales team and their capabilities to plan, prepare, and present compelling offerings regardless of what “product” fits the opportunity. The 2000–2012 period saw a growth apex, fueled by a larger sales unit, and the plan is to replicate that period. He’s doubled the number of account reps in the last six months, and when their training wraps up, Hulett will seek to add even more talented performers.
Financial metrics are important, but Hulett wants to know the story behind the team’s efforts. Customer satisfaction, low turnover, delivering on core values and employing people who exemplify it—they’re among many factors that will keep clients happy and engaged for the long haul. That’s most important to Hulett.
“We’ve tried hard to build a team that fits that mold,” he said. “I feel like we’ve managed to do that, and it isn’t easy. Yes, we want to hit the financial metrics—we have to—but are we doing it the right way? Answering yes to that equals success.”
