Oh, Crap, We Forgot To Charge For Our Value Add!

Oh, Crap, We Forgot To Charge For Our Value Add!

by ray stasieczko July 26, 2025

If Your Business's Added Value Gets You Zero More Dollars, What Value Is It?

If you ask folks in the business print services industry what makes them different, the answer is often a list of permissions to show up. However, more and more, they are sharing a list of things their organization does that are outside the norm of the industry's standard practices.

When I hear of these added values, the next question is, how much more can you charge over your competition for these enhancements? Unfortunately, too many times the answer is, "We don't." I then say, "REALLY?"

The Added Value or enhancements a business delivers over its competitors is always an added cost to the deliverable! Unfortunately, these added costs are often not compensated for by charging more to the end-user, especially in commoditized industries.

Here's a simple example: A print services organization that delivers supplies and performs on-site service activities outside the industry's regular hours, or provides level one or two IT services, helping clients continuously navigate a workflow software as the client continues moving outside the original scope of work, for example. All these enhancements sound like a great added value.

But is it added value or desperation to maintain or acquire a client? Obviously, this print service provider must increase its costs and modify its processes to create enhancements that deliver above industry standards.

So, surely this service provider isn't compromising its profitability in an atmosphere where profits and revenue are decreasing due to the pressures of innovation, disruption, and commoditization?

In my thinking, even if your organization has a unique approach to delivering print equipment, its supplies, services and softwares that go beyond the industry's standard practices, and your organization has miraculously eliminated or reduced its basic costs. Why are you delivering this added value for free? is the answer so, when performing these enhancements, you can match the pricing of a competitor without losing money.

Why would you not raise your price to the end-users? Why would any organization that believes they can deliver added value above and beyond their competitors charge less for those services, regardless of whether your organization has a lower cost to deliver or not?

It is critical that when any B2B service provider is being disrupted through innovative changes. Service providers must clearly understand their current value to the clients they serve. Any miscalculations in the value of their importance, regardless of any enhancements to the end-users they serve, will be costly.

This miscalculation can easily cloud the service provider's judgment, causing them to create additional cost centers without adjusting the client's costs, resulting in a greater loss of profits.

Those delivering products and services into a marketplace where commoditization has replaced a once-appreciated value that carried a higher importance to the businesses being served. Must have a strategy to bring new value to the clients they serve. New value they actually charge for.

This new or added value must come from diversification; it will never come from making a commodity more valuable to the clients. The Facts are that no one overpays for a commodity. That defines a commodity.

The business of selling, supplying, and servicing print equipment in businesses has passed the point of no return in terms of its importance and value as a component of a business's processes.

This doesn't mean that some verticals won't still value the current print processes; however, remember that once all businesses, regardless of size or vertical, could not run their business without the ability to put structure to unstructured information. That structure came from copying or printing that unstructured information onto paper. In the good old days, the processes of printing and copying were growing like crazy! Unfortunately the good old days are GONE!

So, I think it's safe to say that no one selling, supplying, or servicing business print equipment believes that the majority of businesses in the world can't live without a copier or a printer. Because we all know many of them can. However, more importantly, even organizations that must print are printing less every day as digitalization continues to eliminate the need for businesses to print.

Those dealers who have built successful businesses selling, supplying, and servicing print equipment to businesses are most definitely at the intersection where innovation and disruption are demanding that the road ahead will have to be reconstructed.

Staying with a commodity business can be beneficial; however, it's not logical to consider maintaining outdated processes and cost centers as revenues and profits erode.

Over the last six years, since the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has witnessed massive growth in e-commerce, AI, robotics, communication platforms, and many other disruptions once unimaginable.

However, sadly, in the business print industry, many are still forging ahead, as nothing has changed. Some are even trying to utilize innovative technologies through outdated processes.

A notable example of business print industry procrastination is the case of e-commerce. How many dealers allow clients, whether current or prospective, to purchase hardware, supplies, software, or even schedule a service call without being interrupted by a human or having to provide excessive information, thereby turning an online experience into a frustrating one? Why?

I believe it's because these business print service dealers recognize themselves as being much more critical to their clients, and of course, this self-recognition is out of alignment with the thinking of many of those clients.

Dealers must face reality and adjust their cost centers downward, especially when serving low-volume, low-revenue clientele. Implementing e-commerce with an online payment portal and leasing or financing functionality is not just a good idea; it's becoming a necessity for all B2B businesses, as it already is for B2C businesses.

Print service providers, who have also successfully diversified into other services, are not discounting or offering sales on those other services. Instead, those who gain success in diversification are implementing cost-cutting strategies in their print business to increase profitability as they balance the cost centers of print with the reality of profits.

Print service organizations can no longer afford the costs of selling print equipment like they once did. There has to be a more efficient way! And for many of the industry's clients, there are its online portals!

As print industry service providers continue to diversify, they will also realize that all the new services they diversify into will have a limited tenure of relevance just the print services business. Today, the speed of change is the slowest it will ever be.

The Managed IT Service space is an excellent example of another B2B services business being commoditized, which led me years ago to warn my friends in the print sector who were diversifying into Managed IT Services that they should move upstream in the marketplace, as I believe this is a necessity for B2B MSPs to be valuable.

Today, we see many components of a business's IT stack that MSPs once thought could only be delivered to end users in a certain way by them. My, how times have changed.

Unfortunately, I am troubled when I hear people still talking about managed IT Services as if it were still 2015. Especially those who have been soliciting print service providers to help them sell IT services to low-revenue accounts, aiming to build a lifestyle IT services company. That approach didn't make sense ten years ago, and it certainly doesn't make sense now.

Something to think about. Why do many service providers in both the print sector and the IT services sector continue adding cost to enhance their deliverables when they can't recoup those costs from the end-users they service based on the commoditization of these services? Is it desperation?

Why, instead, are service providers not redesigning their business processes to eliminate costs from less valuable services, thereby aligning with the end-users' views on the value they truly receive from the services being delivered?

I believe that many service providers can't imagine that added value in business services deliverables could be defined as less interference, fewer service interruptions, and significantly fewer complications. When a B2B service provider recognizes this, it becomes apparent. These providers can only logically think Wow, the end-users don't need me as much as I still thought they did.

Sometimes, in a disrupted marketplace, failing to implement logic allows one to escape reality. Of course, procrastinating in doing what is logical is always a painful temporary.

No matter the greatest intentions in the world. Every service has an evolving life, and when there is a misalignment in value between the client and the service provider, there will also be a misalignment between the service provider's cost to deliver the service and what the client will pay.

Status quo is the killer of all that will be invented.

Ray Stasieczko, Host of The End Of The Day With Ray! A print industry YouTube series. I welcome all those who haven’t already to subscribe.




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