Think global; act local. Remember that old gem? Well, Axis Business Technologies seems to be doing just that. While keeping an eye on meta trends that impact clients and the industry, Axis is firmly rooted in Colorado Springs, where community ties and great, timely service still are competitive advantages.
“Our advantage in our marketplace is that we have seven technicians amongst a staff of 17. We have more technicians than anyone else here in town, and people rave about our service, which is what I think has kept us in business,” said CEO Paul Bircham. “We stock parts locally; we stock supplies locally. The big guys, mostly out of Denver, have offices here, but they send their technicians down from Denver, which can be an hour to two hours away, depending on traffic.”
Some people care, some people don’t care, he continued, but most people want to do business locally with someone who’s from the community. “I’m from the community, and we care about the community.”
Axis Business Technologies’s service area extends to the New Mexico border on the south, 60 miles north to Denver, 180 miles to the east of Colorado Springs, and 80 miles to the west into the mountains. “It’s a pretty big, territory but most of our customers are in Colorado Springs or in Pueblo, which is a city that’s about 40 miles south of us,” he said.
Welcome to Axis Business Technologies in Colorado Springs.
Operating among the striking beauty of the foothills of the Front Range, a subrange of the Southern Rocky Mountains, Axis Business Technologies services different types of local clients, including, small to medium-sized businesses drawn from sectors such as medical, schools, the military, churches, and a lot of non-profit organizations. “We have a lot of non-profits in Colorado Springs,” said Bircham. The competition, such as it is, comes from Xerox direct, Canon direct, Ricoh direct, and other OEMs.
While the main business focus is still on MFPs, accounting for 90% of revenue, among a service portfolio that includes MPS, computer and network solutions, and data recovery, Bircham said the company is focused on expansion.
While MFPs remain Axis Business Technologies primary business focus, accounting for 90% of revenue, the company also offers MPS, computer and network solutions, and data recovery services, and Bircham said it remains focused on expansion.
MFPs still reign at Axis, but CEO Paul Bircham thinks IDP is a big part of the dealership’s future.
Adding IDP as a revenue stream for Axis Business Technologies
“I think document management or intelligent document processing is a big part of our future,” Bircham noted. He’s looking at a subscription-based system which would be a good fit with the local market. “There are not a lot of early adopters of technology in Colorado Springs. A lot of companies still do business like they’ve always done business. We’re trying to gradually introduce products and services to streamline their processes and get them to adopt some technology,” he explained.
These systems have historically needed significant time investment to get up and working, but AI now makes it easier. And, because intelligent document processing system will be inexpensive and subscription-based, clients won’t need servers or their own software systems to manage. “It’s a pretty quick turnaround to get it implemented for them. And, if we can get our base to start adopting that subscription model, that’s really going to generate a lot of additional income for us,” he added.
The other goal is to build up the sales team. Axis Business Technologies employs two sales reps and is actively adding a third so it can increase its coverage and keep competing with the big guys. The company, which in its early days introduced some of the first affordable office machines in the area, had one individual in charge of sales for 24 years, but times have changed.
In 1978, Bircham’s father started Bircham Office Products, which changed its name to Axis in 2017.
Axis traces its roots back almost 50 years. Bircham’s father immigrated from England in the early 1960s with his young wife. The couple started out in upper Wisconsin, ventured to Ohio for a few years, and eventually moved to Colorado Springs, where Bircham, Sr. hooked up with a partner and began selling copiers. He grew the business and attempted to buy it but was instead let go and signed to a non-compete for a year. Bircham’s Office Products was founded in 1978, selling toner and paper that was compatible with Xerox devices.
It stayed that way until 2017, when Bircham changed the name to Axis Business Technologies. “I changed the name because we didn’t really sell office products. People thought we sold desks and chairs and pencils and notepads. But we never really sold any of that. It was the name [my dad] came up with back in ’78, and it stuck,” said Bircham.
“And basically, from a competitive standpoint, we’re competing with Xerox and Konica Minolta, and the name Bertram’s Office products just didn’t seem like it carried a lot of clout in the marketplace. I felt as though we needed a more commanding name in the marketplace that revealed what we actually did,” he recalled.
It’s just one of the changes he made since joining the company in 2001. “The company, when I joined, was like going back to the 1980s,” said Bircham. The building needed to be refurbished, the carpet needed to be changed. The town had grown exponentially, but the sales hadn’t grown to keep up. I just attribute that to the fact that we didn’t really have a sales force. We had one guy, one person that did all the selling. And I think that really hurt the growth of the company back in the early ’80s and ’90s.”
Premium customer service is at the core of Axis’s success, says Bircham, no matter what they are selling.
He also expanded the company’s offerings to include multi-functional copiers/printers, scanners, paper shredders, paper folders, document management workflow software, Epson wide-format printers, IT Services, Crexendo VoIP systems, and Samsung large-format displays.
Staying focused on high-quality service
Digital copies had appeared in the market a few years before he joined the company but, as Bircham recalled, no one there knew how to network them, so they were outsourcing the job to a third party. Bircham took over and trained everybody on how to network printers. “I went out on every install and did all the networking. I would take technicians with me to show them how to get it set up, how to get it to print, how to scan the email. And I did that for many, many years,” he remembered. Bircham is still a jack-of-all trades, looking after the website, payroll, and sales.
Along the way, he bought the company from his parents and his role morphed into the CEO position as they stepped back from everyday operations.
As happens in most family businesses, the journey to the owner’s chair included a stint in a much larger operation. While earning his MBA, Bircham did an internship with Burlington Northern Railroad, a very large North American railroad. After graduation he took a permanent position in Fort Worth for five years. “This was a Fortune 500 company. I was in their finance department, so I got a taste of the corporate world right out of the grad school,” he recalled. “I became a little disenchanted with the corporate world because I had grown up around a family-owned business, and I realized that my contributions to this multi-billion-dollar company didn’t really make a big difference to me.”
What he really wanted was to start his own company. In the ’90s, he founded a copier company in Texas, which he ran until 2001, when he sold the business and moved back to Colorado. By then, Bircham had gained experience in the corporate world, finance, and accounting while gaining firsthand knowledge of the copier business.
The Service Department keeps operations humming for Axis customers, from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado to the New Mexico border.
Looking ahead, he’s getting the family business ready for the next generation of leadership at Axis Business Technologies. His daughter, Riley, runs the accounting department; his son, Camden, will be heading up the intelligent document processing operation.
He knows his children will face a different business future, more technologically advanced, driven in large part by AI innovations, and more globally focused. Does he think the same attributes of great service and community focus that have served him well will do the same for his kids?
“I’d like to think so. We’ve become kind of a global economy, so being local may or may not be important. With intelligent document processing and AI, that might not be something important in the future, but I think, being local has always been kind of a criteria that a lot of business owners look for when doing business with another company.”
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