SumnerOne’s next-generation leaders are helping influence the family-owned company’s future direction.
SumnerOne’s Managing Directors Liz Sumner and Edmund Sumner have their eyes focused on the future. As the daughter and son, respectively, of Ed Sumner, longtime chairman of SumnerOne, they are looking to solidify their family’s business for at least another three decades, to ultimately celebrate the St. Louis, Missouri-based company’s 100th anniversary.
Since 1955, the Sumner family has been providing its clients first with mimeographs, then printers and copiers, followed by a ride on the technology wave into today’s offerings of MFPs, managed IT, managed print, document management, disaster recovery, and most recently, industrial and production print.
Above: The Cannata Report’s CJ Cannata (left) join Liz and Edmund Sumner in the lobby of SumnerOne.
Both Liz and Edmund grew up steeped in the company business initially led by founder Bud Sumner, their grandfather, and then their father. While Ed remains the company’s chairman, their mother, Mary Sumner, presently serves as chief information officer and industry thought leader, hosting roundtables among CIOs within SumnerOne’s major geographies and teaching several college-level courses locally.
Upon graduating from Nashville’s Vanderbilt University with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1999, Edmund started his industry career in Los Angeles with a direct branch, though he had some reservations and initially was looking to explore other professional avenues.
“My interviewer and I had a great conversation,” said Edmund by email. “Having learned about my family’s business, he told me, ‘Try the industry, don’t try a family company.’ That is, he advised me to get to know the industry outside of any family influence or sense of obligation. It was great advice. I fell in love with the industry and he became a mentor.”
After establishing himself in the industry, Edmund joined SumnerOne in 2006 as VP of business development before being promoted to his current position in 2013. For the past decade, he has been the company’s No. 1 producer in terms of revenue. His enthusiasm for the industry has only grown, and his commitment to his family’s business, employees, and customers was evident when speaking with him.
For Liz, she chose to take a longer path back to the family business. After graduating from Boston’s Tufts University and completing her MBA at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh, Liz joined Philips, an international company that has consistently transformed itself over its 100-plus year history, developing innovative, life-shifting products from light bulbs and x-rays to Compact Discs (CDs) and 3D scanners for CT scans.
In 2016, after 13 years at Philips, Liz felt ready to bring her expertise back home. Armed with a sharp mind, an inclusive sense of humor, and a conviction in the limitless potential of this industry, returning to the family business was an easy choice.
“It was a combination of a sense of duty and the business opportunity,” said Liz by email. “That is, I owe it to our hundreds of loyal associates (who basically paid for my education, and arguably a whole lot more) to know clearly what my role and contribution to the company is going be over the next few decades, whether that’s as an employee, owner, or both. I had to dip more than a toe in to figure that out. The opportunity part goes without saying. This industry is far more interesting from the inside looking out, than the other way around, where it looks like sleepy, old copy machines! There’s a lot of growth potential.”
Today, SumnerOne is the largest family-owned, independent office technology company in the Midwest, as well as one of the most successful dealerships for Canon, Kyocera, and Konica Minolta. Both Liz and Edmund are working hand-in-hand with their father Ed, mother Mary, and COO Kevin Laury as a unified management team intent on maintaining profitability and scalability as the firm continues to grow within its regional footprint.
“There is no perfect-built formula about how to be scalable and profitable,” said Liz. “Everyone wrestles with what you run in-house, what do you outsource, do you have a separate sales force, do you have traditional generalist sales reps, and so on and so on. This debate has been coursing through the industry for over a decade, and the net result is that there still is no formula.”
While many dealerships are trying to adjust and tweak their businesses, Liz and Edmund are going even further. They are taking a step back to look at the business from a higher level to strategically plot how SumnerOne can continue to provide the best service to their customers while maintaining the company’s successful, profitable legacy, especially when it comes to the services it provides.
“If we take as a given that we have to be in this [managed services] business, then, how big does it need to be, how central or core does it need to be in our portfolio?” said Liz, who acknowledged there are many entry points on the spectrum between being “all-in” on managed services, fully transforming a business model to focus mainly in this area, and choosing to not offer these services at all. “Right now, I think SumnerOne is seeing this area as a ‘must do,’ but not as an end-all-be-all; we have to transform our entire revenue stream of the business to be a bundled managed service provider.”
With a discerning eye on how SumnerOne can rise above its competition as a dedicated service provider for its customers, Liz and Edmund are exploring the company’s current and potential lines of business—everything from managed services to security to production print—to maximize their clients’ efficiency and collaboration, while simultaneously driving consistent revenue streams. At each inflection point, Liz, Edmund, and the firm’s management team are asking, “Am I the best source to provide this service?” Developing the internal resources, acquiring them, or outsourcing them are all on the table—and so is choosing not to pursue certain avenues where they feel SumnerOne may not deliver the best value for their customers.
“The issue is ‘choosing wisely’ what we want to (and don’t want to) support in the service motion, and how we can differentiate ourselves versus the OEM direct, or other large players like Marco,” said Liz. “If we chase too much at once, the same kid and cereal metaphor will probably apply… a sick tummy and a sugar nosedive.”
Homing in on Production Print
Looking out over the next 10 to 20 years, one area of focus for SumnerOne is production print. Today, production print represents a small slice of the company’s revenue. The dealership is looking to grow this segment up to 20% over the next decade.
Above: SumnerOne invited The Cannata Report to participate in a strategic production print session with Konica Minolta, led by Vice President, Sales Operations and Optimization Yasmina Ben-Bouchta, and Senior Vice President, Production Print Solutions, Erik Holdo.
“Amazon will never drop ship a production print device, it’s impossible,” said Liz. “It is protectable. You have to touch it, go up to it with a screwdriver. It’s highly specialized. We will be a highly specialized industrial and production print business.”
Building on the company’s earliest successes with offset presses, SumnerOne expanded into light production and large format, initially choosing technology from two of the industry’s top providers in this segment, Canon and Konica Minolta.
“Our ambition going forward is that our world comes full circle, and we ride that long wave of ink as offset converts to digital,” said Edmund.
As SumnerOne developed its growth strategy, the first step was bringing the people up who could support larger and more complex production opportunities. SumnerOne elected to invest in training its service teams, building out their capabilities and certifications, as well as cross-training across its service organization. According to Edmund, the company has also hired a handful of individuals with strong consultative analyst-level capabilities, who act as overlays to the sales team on production assessments and proposals.
“There’s a clear difference in skillset between the production sales specialist and the analyst role,” said Edmund. “You need both.”
With a solid foundation of training, SumnerOne looked to its existing partners for best-of-breed products and then broadened its scope to include technology from new ones.
“In three segments, we’ve expanded our product line beyond Canon and Konica Minolta models, continually exploring and putting the new technology through its paces,” said Edmund. “We’ve also advanced ‘up’ a segment into the higher-cost models. The simple growth math is that by stepping up a segment, we are in more six- and seven-figure opportunities.”
According to Edmund, SumnerOne has experienced success with Canon Océ and has brought on the HP large-format latex devices.
“The HP’s are phenomenal,” said Edmund. “We will also move into the full hybrids/flatbeds to have a bite at six-figure deals in wide format.”
For black and white and color production, SumnerOne has tapped the Konica Minolta AccurioPress, as well as Canon’s Titan. Xerox’s products have also been added.
“A bold step for us has been bringing on the Xerox Iridesse, with the fifth toner slot that allows you to do clear, gold, and silver at a disruptive price point (ballpark, $250,000) relative to a lot of traditional embossing devices.”
As the digital conversion evolves, SumnerOne is looking at what Edmund dubs “big boy inkjets,” which he believes will equate to attractive growth in this segment over the next many years.
Family Business, Private Investment
As the industry continues to consolidate, especially with the infusion of private-equity, Liz and Edmund are firmly committed to keeping SumnerOne a privately owned family business. Though they are exploring new areas of business like industrial and production print, the firm remains firmly committed to many of its existing lines to maintain revenue and, over the past few years, fund the expansion of its geographic footprint. At the company’s core, A3 and A4 are still dominant revenue drivers, but so is SumnerOne’s leasing business.
Above: CJ Cannata enjoyed spending substantial time conversing with Liz and Edmund Sumner’s father and business partner, Sumner One CEO Ed Sumner (second from left).
“A big differentiator is that we are self-funding all of our growth, meaning all the activity in buying companies and expanding, whereas a lot of companies have gone to the private-equity well,” said Liz. “They have funded their acquisitions and expansions by selling first to private equity, but we’re doing it all on our own dime. One of the ways we’ve been able to do this is we’ve had our own leasing company for the past 50 years.”
According to Edmund, the leasing company started with a handshake loan between his father Ed and a customer. It was a way to get customers up and going, making money, and in turn, making money for SumnerOne.
“The leasing company fundamentally was started and maintained because we give a better customer experience,” said Ed. “We’ve dealt with other leasing companies, and they would nickel and dime our customers, they would charge them 10% late fees, they wouldn’t be good communicators on the phone. You’re giving away a huge piece of the customer experience with a third party.”
SumnerOne’s leasing branch has allowed the dealership not only to maintain flexibility with its customers but also to fund its expansion within the I-70 corridor of the Midwest.
Over the past several years, SumnerOne has grown its footprint exponentially with a series of acquisitions. Deals have ranged from small, local dealerships to ones with a larger regional presence. With the company’s larger acquisitions, including Southwest Missouri’s Corporate Business Systems (CBS) in 2017 and Oklahoma’s Drake Systems in 2018, SumnerOne recognized qualities that would tee up well with its own market views and guiding business philosophies, service infrastructures, and similar growth trajectories. With each acquisition, however, the overarching priority certainly for both SumnerOne and the acquired dealerships has been the well-being of the employees of the acquired companies and their customers.
“In nearly every acquisition, we’ve left the management team in place,” said Liz. “We haven’t taken out top management, we haven’t taken out admin. Our philosophy on strategic growth has been, we build out our footprint, we gain regional power, but before we make any changes, we have to make sure the integrity of our customer experience is there.”
For Liz and Edmund, all strategic decisions revolve around what’s best for the customer, and then, what’s best for SumnerOne.
“The flip side of that, and this is one of my father’s favorite lines, is that at the same time, we are highly focused on where we can create synergies and efficiencies. We want to maintain local customer experience, local presence, local touch, but only up to a point where we’re not asking customers to pay for our inefficiencies.”
As SumnerOne looks ahead to the future, both Edmund and Liz are all in. While Edmund stokes sales across the Midwest, Liz is increasingly present at numerous industry events, acting as the primary representative for the company on a national level, networking, researching, and bringing her experiences and knowledge back to the family business. Alongside their parents Ed and Mary, and COO Kevin Laury, they believe in the future of this industry, and they are confident SumnerOne will thrive as a family business and celebrate 100 years, a rare feat for any business.
Sidebar 1: Partner Accolades
We asked SumnerOne’s partners for their impressions of working with this thriving dealership. Here’s what some of them had to say.
“SumnerOne is a key member of the Canon dealer group. Their dedication to providing customers with innovative solutions and top-notch customer care is impressive. We look forward to their continued success.” Sam Yoshida, executive vice president and general manager, Canon
U.S.A.”We love to see true succession planning at our top dealers, the blend of generations can only bring a better company for their employees, their customers and certainly their vendors. Sumner is a strong Konica Minolta partner in so many ways, we truly enjoy working with the entire family and their talented team!” Laura Blackmer, senior vice president, channel sales, Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A.
“I am very proud, as president of Kyocera, to have partners of the highest quality like the SumnerOne organization. The vision of strategic growth set forth by Ed Sumner is transitioning to the capable hands of the next generation…Liz and Edmund. Kyocera is very excited to be a partner in this expansion and looks forward to sharing the continuation of this organization’s growth well into the future.” Oscar Sanchez, president & CEO, Kyocera Document Solutions America
Sidebar 2: Return Engagement
Circled in red: Sharon Tosto Esker (left), CJ Cannata (middle), and Liz Sumner (right) during rehearsal with fellow Traveling Treasure Trunk troupe members at Tufts University in 1995.
Liz Sumner, Sharon Tosto Esker (our feature and stories editor, correspondent, and author of this month’s SumnerOne feature), and I all attended Tufts University together and were members of the school’s children’s theater troupe called The Traveling Treasure Trunk, or “Trunk” as it was affectionately known. We performed both original plays and adaptations of children’s stories to entertain and comfort young audiences at hospitals and shelters across the Boston Metropolitan Area. We also performed at local schools to raise money for various charities – and we had a blast doing it! Years later, the three of us had chance to collaborate in a new meaningful and rewarding manner on this story. I always had a great deal of affection and respect for Liz and was sorry that we lost touch shortly after graduation. To my pleasant surprise, the industry (perhaps along with the universe) offered us an opportunity to rekindle our friendship when Liz and I ran into each other a few years ago at a CDA meeting. I’m so pleased to say we are enjoying getting to know each other again and our “new” old friendship – while navigating our way through the industry as next-generation leaders. – CJ Cannata
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