I joined Marco in 2001, so I didn’t experience what happened in 1991 firsthand. But it’s not a story the company keeps quiet, and it’s not one I’d want to, either.
Here’s the unvarnished truth. In 1991, the U.S. went through a short but significant recession, and Marco failed to turn a profit for the first time. The bank threatened to call our loan. For a business that had already spent nearly two decades building something real, it was the kind of moment that forces a decision: cut your way to survival, or commit to building something that doesn’t put you back in the same position. Not ever.
Marco wanted to take the second path. Fortunately, around that time, a Japanese business philosophy called Kaizen was gaining attention in American manufacturing. The idea was straightforward—continuous and incremental improvement, applied consistently, compounds over time. Toyota had built an entire operational culture around it. Marco decided to give it a try.
The numbers turned around. More importantly, a way of thinking took hold that didn’t leave when the crisis did.
I bring this up not because it’s a great origin story—though it is—but because I think the pressure dealers are feeling right now rhymes with what Marco felt in 1991. Margins compressing. Volume declining. The easy path visible and tempting. And the same question underneath it all: do you cut to survive, or do you build through it, think creatively and focus on continuous improvement?
Continuous incremental improvement isn’t always glamorous work. It’s also difficult to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing, especially when times get hard. But continuous improvement is what we’re still dedicated to. So I wanted to share a few more notable ways we’ve gone about that over the past few years.
A Creative Solution to the “Unsolvable” Technician Problem
This won’t come as news: the copy/print technician shortage has been with us since pre-COVID, but it’s gotten worse. Experienced field techs are retiring. Fewer people are going into this line of work, and the pipeline of people who can replace the depth of knowledge required for advanced equipment is already at a breaking point.
Most of the industry is struggling with it—hiring where possible, stretching capacity where necessary, feeling helpless when they can’t always meet their historic response times and losing clients as a result.
We decided to approach it as a workforce design problem rather than a hiring problem.
Our technicians now use smart glasses in the field. When a newer tech encounters something outside their experience, they can show exactly what they’re seeing to a more experienced colleague in real time. The experienced tech guides them through it remotely. The job gets done, and the client doesn’t feel the gap.
What that changes operationally is also significant. We can put someone in front of a problem on day one who can handle it effectively, not because they’ve seen everything but because they have real-time access to someone who has. It doesn’t eliminate the shortage, but it changes what the shortage costs us and what we can promise a client about the consistency of service.
The investment here wasn’t just the technology. It was the commitment to building a service model that doesn’t depend on a supply of experienced technicians that may not exist in five years. It was an investment and a significant change in how our techs operated. But we made it early and committed fully.
Investments in Predictive Maintenance
For most of this industry’s history, service has been reactive by definition. Something breaks, you dispatch. The metric is response time: how fast can you get someone there?
We’ve been moving toward a model in which the goal is to not need the dispatch in the first place. Predictive maintenance means monitoring devices, identifying failure patterns before they become problems and staying ahead of supply needs before the client runs out. The proof of it shows up in calls that never happen, which is genuinely hard to point to but very easy for a client to feel over time.
Committing to this operationally required upgrading our software so we could offer this service to a broader range of devices. We’re not the only ones who made this change, but we were one of the first. That means we invested before the return was visible—and before clients expected it.
That’s a hard thing to justify in a tight quarter. It’s a very easy thing to justify when you look back five years later at what it achieved.
Infrastructure To Support Long-Term Service Goals
Late last year, we opened our 100,000 square foot logistics center in Des Moines, Iowa. The primary goal was to ensure two-day shipping to clients across the country, but we also wanted to create a better cushion to smooth out supply chain issues.
That enormous building is a real commitment for a company that could’ve kept operating the way it always had. But we’ve learned over 50-plus years that the gap between what you promise a client and what your infrastructure can actually deliver has a way of becoming visible at the worst possible time. We’d rather close that gap on our terms than discover it on the client’s.
Making Our Work More Visible
The investment I find most interesting to talk about is also the hardest to explain quickly. We’ve designed an app that gives our managed services clients real-time visibility into their own tech infrastructure. It includes what they’re running, how it’s performing, what we recommend and data about our own performance. It’s easy to see exactly how quickly we’re resolving tickets and what devices are causing most of them.
What changes when a client has that visibility? The very nature of our relationship with them. We’re not asking them to trust our read on their environment; we’re showing them their own numbers and helping them act on what those numbers say. The conversation shifts from a client taking our word for it to a client making decisions based on their own data.
What Connects All of It
Smart glasses, predictive maintenance, a logistics hub, a client-facing data platform—these look like separate decisions made at different times for different reasons.
But they share a philosophy. Each one is an answer to the same question: what does it take to improve our services at a level that compounds over time?
None of them were urgent when we made them. The technician situation was manageable. Service was working. Clients weren’t asking for fleet data. The distribution network we had was adequate.
The urgency came later. It always does. When COVID hit in 2020, businesses scrambled to stand up remote work infrastructure almost overnight. We’d already built it. Not because we saw a pandemic coming but because we’d been investing in IT capabilities for remote work scenarios well before anyone was asking for them. When the moment arrived, we were ready.
In 1991, the easy path was to cut. I’m proud to say that Marco took the harder path, and it has ever since. What came from it wasn’t just a return to profitability—it was a way of thinking about the business that’s shaped every significant decision since.
The dealers who are going to be standing in 10 years aren’t necessarily the ones with the best margins right now. They’re the ones who are still building something incrementally and consistently, even when the pressure is pointing the other direction.
That’s what Kaizen actually means in practice. Not a program. Not a quarter. A commitment to keep improving regardless of what the moment is asking for.
We’re still at it.
