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Three dynamic dealers share their strategic outlook for the future.
Above: Chelsey Bode, Melissa Confalone, and Liz Sumner.
In an ever-changing landscape of innovative technology and customer demands, this year’s three Women Influencers represent our industry’s next-generation leaders, who not only have the vision and conviction to propel their respective dealerships into the future but are also inspiring their companies with energy and enthusiasm to achieve ambitious growth for the long term.
Pearson-Kelly Technology’s Chelsey Bode, Fraser Advanced Information Systems’ Melissa Confalone, and SumnerOne’s Liz Sumner have risen to top leadership positions of legacy dealerships, inheriting businesses built by savvy entrepreneurs who have bobbed and weaved through countless industry changes to establish their companies as invaluable partners to businesses in the communities they serve. Stepping into their roles, these three women influencers have a firm understanding of where the industry is today, the challenges it faces in the future, and the path to success.
“Vision to me means there’s a plan,” said Confalone, who became president of Fraser Advanced Information Systems in January 2023, with nearly three decades of industry experience. “The key drivers of success are first people and talent. Second, I believe it’s vital to have a vision and a plan, and right now, we have solid plans for growth over the next five years. Third, it’s the adoption of new technology to run the business. If we have talented people and they all know what the vision and plan are, and we augment it with automation and tools that help us run our back end to get our talented people to run after our five-year plan faster, then these three factors will help us grow our business 150% over the next five years.”
Confalone, as well as Bode and Sumner, acknowledge that print clicks are declining, but none of these insightful women influencers believe that data point is signaling an overarching decline in opportunity to remain successful.
“The whole print is down, paperless—that’s not the story,” said Confalone, who has observed that the percentage of print has more or less stabilized and it’s not dipping any lower. She has a firm understanding of how people are printing, where they are printing, and which verticals they’re printing and not printing in.
“There’s still lots of print out there, print trends are down, but if you’re a successful, growing business and have a strategic way to go after new business, your numbers will trend upward. We’re bolting on services to the copier side and growing the IT side.”
While evolving technology and services remain potent drivers for long-term growth, each of our Women Influencers is investing in their people, working diligently to compensate them appropriately to drive sales and incentivize them to provide guidance through service to their customers. Like most dealerships, they are worried about the shortage of talent, so retaining their people, as well as recruiting new talent, remains a key component of their vision of success.
“Technology will continue to be a bigger, more integral part of all businesses,” said Bode, who became the sole owner and chief executive officer of Pearson-Kelly Technology in October 2021.
“With everything moving to the cloud, I think there’s some concern that they won’t need IT services the way they do today because everything is moving to a hosted model. I see some of that, but I still think there’s going to be a big play for the utilization and integration piece. We see so many people who don’t understand what they are buying and why. I believe that human component, that consulting piece of it, is the gap we can work with. We want to help our customers execute their vision.”
As our Women Influencers look to the future, they want their dealerships to be indispensable for their customers. By developing their own unique plans to nurture their people, invest strategically in new offerings that help solve pain points, and foster strong relationships internally and externally, they see a long future ahead for themselves, their companies, and the industry.
“We are relentlessly trying to provide an experience that is really valuable,” said Sumner, who became managing director of SumnerOne in 2016, alongside her brother Edmund Sumner. “We’re aiming for a customer experience that cannot be substituted or copied, then that trickles back to all aspects of our vision. And our vision is actually built around customer retention because that is the most important signifier that we are valued, that we’re in a long-term relationship with our customers.”
Women Influencer | Chelsey Bode, owner and CEO, Pearson-Kelly Technology: Structuring for Success
Clear, transparent, and specific—this is how Chelsey Bode, chief executive officer of Springfield, Missouri’s Pearson-Kelly Technology, is leading her dealership into the future.
“We want to be intentional with who we are and what we are going to hold ourselves accountable to,” said Bode. “We make sure we are living our core values, and that they’re not just something fancy we put on our walls.”
At Pearson-Kelly, those core values are straightforward: always be accountable; stay hungry; be transparent; have people smarts; and be a positive influencer. Since joining the company in 2007 as its sixth employee, Bode has exemplified these values, and she continues to believe they are the foundation of Pearson-Kelly’s success, past, present, and future.
When Bode signed on to Pearson-Kelly, her father Mike Kelly, was at the helm, trying to launch the dealership after his success at Modern Business Systems, which subsequently became an IKON business. With a B.S. in merchandising and marketing from Missouri State University, she began in an outside sales role, helping to establish Pearson-Kelly Technology’s customer-driven brand by building out the company’s customer base one client at a time.
She also dug in to bolster the company’s web presence, ensuring the company’s brand was communicated with no advertising budget initially, and taking advantage of free networking opportunities through community and Chamber of Commerce events in the Springfield, Missouri, area.
After two years of grinding, but ultimately fulfilling work, Bode and the Pearson-Kelly team began to see their revenue take off. “As larger organizations began taking a chance on us, and as we were able to recruit better talent to join our team because we were big enough to have a team, it just became very exciting,” said Bode.
In 2011, Bode was promoted to vice president. In 2016, after developing a solid succession plan with her father to navigate the company through any potential deaths or life transitions, Bode began buying into Pearson-Kelly Technology. In April 2018, she was elevated to president.
In 2019, Pearson-Kelly Technology posted its biggest growth year to date. While that growth was thrilling, Bode said the company wasn’t necessarily structurally prepared to handle that pace of expansion. The early days of the pandemic gave her breathing room to pause, take stock of the business, and consider making some big adjustments to the organizational chart and her team’s responsibilities to accommodate this pace of growth.
Once Bode and her team recognized the dealership had outgrown its previous organizational structure, she brought in a consultant to help the team move forward, using the Entrepreneurial Operating System, a program that helps leaders and teams clarify roles, responsibilities, values, and vision.
Bode was able to develop a clear picture of the difference between a visionary role versus being an integrator, the person or people who carry the vision out across the dealership and into the market. She also took the time to evaluate what she was personally bringing to the table and what was getting in the way of executing the dealership’s vision.
“Rapid growth and recognizing we needed some type of [organizational] operating system that was different than we had done in the past were the biggest game changers,” said Bode. “From there, we started getting the right people in the right seats and began restructuring our accountability chart—which is our organizational chart—in 2020.”
Part of moving forward was the full transition of the dealership into Bode’s hands. While she had begun buying shares of Pearson-Kelly in 2016, her father still maintained a stake in the business. He was looking to protect his investment, while Bode wanted to take chances and leverage new opportunities that were presenting themselves as the pandemic evolved, including IT and a hosted phone division as print pulled back. In 2021, Kelly decided he was ready to sell his remaining stake in the dealership, propelling Bode to sole owner and CEO in October 2021.
Creating a Clear Path
As Bode stepped into her CEO role, she promoted Lee Flood, a longtime member of the Pearson-Kelly Technology team, to president. This was a critical move to allow Bode the time and space to focus on determining the path and vision for the dealership.
Flood is responsible for the day-to-day operations of Pearson-Kelly, running all the division leadership meetings, which has freed Bode to focus on evaluating opportunities and determining the company’s direction. “It’s allowing us to go further faster,” said Bode.
To keep her pipeline of ideas full, Bode consistently talks to and networks with other leaders across the copier industry. She recently became chair of the Managed Technology Association, a sub-group of the Copier Dealers Association, allowing her the opportunity to engage with peers, bounce ideas off other people, and make connections that are outside Pearson-Kelly Technology’s competitive territory.
“Realistically, I’m trying to have at least 10 of these types of [idea-generating] conversations a quarter,” said Bode.
Through this process, Bode is constantly uncovering opportunities for the dealership to explore and evaluate. Out of about 20 ideas, she says maybe one would work. Along with Flood, she continues to learn and determine how the company can work better together.
One area she is focusing specifically on is Pearson-Kelly Technology’s IT division, which launched organically in 2018. In the beginning, the dealership contracted third-party services, for example, to scale with its help desk. Pearson-Kelly Technology has pulled these services back in house, as well as clearly defined the customer profile that she believes the dealership can best service with its offerings.
Now, with Pearson-Kelly Technology’s IT offering, rather than saying yes to every client and every modification, Bode is empowering her sales team to align with the “right” customers to fully service their needs with this singular service offering, and sometimes that means saying no to some clients and some requests. For example, if a client is looking to trim costs by cutting out certain security tools, then this potentially isn’t the right client for Pearson-Kelly Technology.
“It became very difficult to maintain morale when we were supporting all of these different types of clients, and it was hard to be successful doing that,” said Bode. “Our sales team now knows exactly who they’re hunting for and why. You would think this would have slowed growth a bit, but the more our team has matured and said no to certain client requests to stay aligned with what we offer, it’s actually built trust with our customers.”
Bode believes technology will continue to be an integral part of all business, but the human component in providing and servicing these new and innovative technologies will remain critical. She believes that for Pearson-Kelly Technology to continue growing at a fast pace, as it has over its nearly 20 years in business, a clear, concise, transparent plan for the future that is understood by everyone working in the organization from the top down and bottom up is imperative.
As CEO, Bode is committed to nurturing every employee, providing professional development and coaching, and investing in them to maintain a positive culture and work environment. “Ultimately speaking, the only thing people can’t copy in business is your people,” she said.
Pearson-Kelly Technology has a work-hard, play hard mentality that bolsters confidence and team comradery across the organization, which translates to a consistently positive experience for the dealership’s clients. Bode wants the company and its teams to grow alongside its customers.
“My dad’s generation believed that if you work hard, everything will work out,” said Bode. “My vision is that this strategy only works for so long. There has to be accountability and structure. We have to look at what we’re offering and understand why we are selling things. We are not just selling things to sell things. We want to make sure that anything we do from a standpoint of an offering, there’s a reason that makes sense and it’s solving problems, and our team can clearly articulate that in a way that clients understand what they are buying and why.”
Women Influencer | Melissa Confalone, president, Fraser Advanced Information Systems: Running to Win
Propelled by trust, passion, and a drive to win, Melissa Confalone has been running quickly at Pennsylvania-based Fraser Advanced Information Systems for over 20 years. Even when the world shut down to contain a global pandemic and most businesses screeched to a halt, she kept going, huddling with Bill Fraser and Jim Pierce, who were then the company’s president and chief operating officer, respectively, to review the business and emerge stronger when business returned to normal.
“When the pandemic hit, being part of the leadership team, it made us spend months analyzing the business—our people, our budgets, our expenses—things that when you’re flying high and selling a lot, you don’t always have the time to process,” said Confalone, who was then vice president of sales. “It got me more involved in the rest of the business. We were constantly analyzing copy-trend volumes, color clicks, and new business trends. We lined everything up so we could watch every aspect of the business.”
Confalone got her start in the industry in 1991, after graduating from Susquehanna University with a marketing degree and falling into role at Keystone Business Products, a Lanier dealer, selling plain paper faxes and copiers. It was here that Confalone learned the value of connecting with people to establish strong relationships, which would ultimately drive sales.
Building on her success at Keystone, she joined Fraser Advanced Information Systems in 1992 and earned the dealership’s Rookie of the Year award in her first year with the company. And again, Confalone credits the people and support she received from the company’s home office in Reading, Pennsylvania. She felt consistently supported by Fraser and Pierce, who were always listening to provide the best service possible to the company’s customers.
After seven years with Fraser, she left for a brief stint at IKON. There, she learned a different side of the business, including business planning, sales development, and management and coaching skills—all tools that she eventually brought back to Fraser Advanced Information Systems in 2002, where she rose through the ranks to vice president of sales in 2016.
While driving revenue was obviously a priority in leading the sales team, Confalone viewed developing and nurturing the people on her team as a key component of success. She worked tirelessly to ensure they had the tools and encouragement they needed to succeed, similar to how she was effectively supported in her first roles within the industry at both Keystone and Fraser.
By the time the pandemic hit, Confalone was an established member of Fraser Advanced Information Systems’s executive team, working hand-in-hand with Fraser and Pierce, as well as keeping her sales team motivated and engaged. The team of three began plotting the future of Fraser Advanced Information Systems and Confalone’s role in that future.
“There were long discussions about Bill’s vision for perpetuating the company,” said Confalone. “Bill is one of the most passionate, driven, wants-to-win people I’ve ever met in my life, and he has built this company from nothing. It has always been his vision to keep growing, winning, being successful, and building a machine internally to support our team and their families.”
By 2021, Pierce was preparing to retire by the end of the year, and Fraser was also looking to pass the baton to the dealership’s next president. Over the course of about 18 months, Fraser and Pierce brought Confalone into every decision being made for the dealership. According to Confalone, it was a true collaborative process that allowed her the valuable benefit of learning from two industry leaders and developing the knowledge and acumen to lead on her own.
“Bill has always run so fast and so hard, and either you run next to Bill or get left in the dust,” said Confalone. “I like to run, and Bill and I were always running after the same thing.”
In January 2023, Confalone became president of Fraser Advanced Information Systems, where she is now leading approximately 180 employees across five offices servicing Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey and Delaware.
Building on a Legacy
As Confalone stepped into her role as president, she brought in a vice president of finance and built out the company’s executive leadership team from three to seven. The team comprises Fraser’s leaders in operations, sales, human resources, services, and finance, and they work together to deeply understand how the company is operating on a day-to-day basis, as well as think proactively about where the dealership is heading and how to achieve those goals.
“Running this size company, it really is all about the people,” said Confalone. “If you don’t have great people who can execute and get things done, it’s like you’re in quicksand; I don’t care how much you can sell as a sales team. For me, it’s vital to have people on the team that I trust, so when we have meetings about action items, I know that team will go get it done and come back with feedback if there’s a roadblock. With our executive team, I know everyone’s running in the same direction.”
For Confalone, this executive team meets twice a month and is pivotal in allowing Fraser Advanced Information Systems to work more collaboratively and quickly. “What is our plan, what are we doing, and then, report back on what were the results. If the results are bad, it’s ok; what are we doing to change it? That’s the marching theme we have going,” she said.
Confalone spends her days constantly engaging with employees, as well as with the dealership’s clients. This face-to-face time is how Confalone keeps a beat on what is happening internally and externally.
“I’ve always loved the sales side of the business, and I’m still involved with many of our mid- to large-sized accounts simply because I think it’s so important—if I’m going to run this business—that I hear first-hand about what’s happening in the field. Plus, I’m constantly learning, which I love.”
Confalone has also put together a technology team of about eight people that meets once a month. “We discuss the stuff that kicks up throughout the month—whether it’s coming from clients or our manufacturers, software integration, anything on the technology side as it relates to print—and we vet out everything.”
The team evaluates the opportunities and challenges and then goes back to work with the appropriate team members to follow through on the next steps and to communicate back on progress. “It’s always about how these initiatives will either secure our clients or help us grow business and bring things to market to help them on their side of the business,” said Confalone.
Driving revenue in new ways came to the forefront during the pandemic, and this is where Confalone has spent much of the past two years analyzing and collecting data to make the dealership more efficient and profitable. When business turned upside down and prints fell off a cliff, Confalone dug in to understand not only revenue but also to make sure the company’s key performance indicators were really tight.
“We’re managing tiny things that add up to make a big, impactful difference,” said Confalone. “I’m used to selling big deals with big money. What I’ve learned on the back end of things, and across the board, chiseling away at the little things that make monthly recurring revenue can make massive impacts in the long run.”
Based on discussions and collaboration across the executive leadership and technology teams, as well as the constant communication with clients, Confalone is leading her team in constant evolution, including making changes to the dealership’s service offerings, moving toward services that can generate monthly recurring revenue such as subscriptions for software, as well as finding ways to automate certain processes and tasks to free employees up to working more closely with clients to problem-solve issues and develop their own careers within the company.
For a business the size of Fraser Advanced Information Systems, the dealership has opportunities across many different areas of the industry. However, Confalone relies heavily on the dealership’s established client base to strategically target to ensure the company is generating durable income.
“If you’re really in tune with your customers and we ask them all the right questions, it’s amazing what we hear from our client before we even start to run after it,” said Confalone.
IT services remain one of the most important areas of growth for Fraser Advanced Information Systems. Last year, Confalone hired a vice president of operations with specific expertise in this area. Through the company’s Watchkeep, Fraser Advanced Information Systems is able to offer its clients a full slate of IT services, marching toward providing all aspects of data, financial, and cloud security. From Confalone’s perspective, if Fraser Advanced Information Systems isn’t at the forefront of managed IT services, the company will miss out on print opportunities.
Trust, passion, and a drive to win—these are all qualities that Confalone embodies and conveys to Fraser Advanced Information Systems and its clients, and they are all qualities that the dealership’s founder Bill Fraser embedded in the organization. Each employee at Fraser Advanced Information Systems—from the bottom to the top of the organization—has a strong work ethic based on communication, working through challenges, evolving, and constantly looking to level up on a personal and professional basis.
“For years, we’ve talked about the importance of culture at Fraser,” said Confalone. “But I also like to talk about opportunity; people want to know what’s going to be in it for them in the next five or 10 years as we grow our company. We talk about organizational charts, promotions to management, and ways to make more money. We get feedback from our employees, and it’s not always about money. Some just want more responsibilities in something they’re interested in. We talk a lot about opportunities, and it helps to keep everyone more engaged.”
Women Influencer | Liz Sumner, Managing Partner, SumnerOne: Building on a Foundation
For Liz Sumner, managing director of SumnerOne, enabling an infrastructure of growth that supports people, processes, and technology is the key to creating a company that can endure. As one of the dealership’s third-generation leaders, alongside her brother, Edmund Sumner, Liz is focused on developing SumnerOne’s structure to continue the dealership’s nearly 70-year legacy in consistently providing an ever-improving customer experience.
SumnerOne was founded and run by Liz and Edmund’s grandfather Bud Sumner in 1955, and eventually, taken over by their own father Ed Sumner. Ed remains the company’s chairman, and their mother, Mary Sumner, presently serves as chief information officer and industry thought leader, as well as a professor at University of Oklahoma’s Price College of Business.
Liz returned to her family’s business in 2016, bringing a wealth of knowledge and experience, including a bachelor’s degree from Boston’s Tufts University and an MBA from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business. She subsequently spent 13 years at Philips, an international company that has been able to consistently transform 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.
Today, Liz works collaboratively with Edmund to lead SumnerOne’s growth and operations, homing in on organic growth in production print and IT services, as well as inorganic growth through potential acquisitions to enhance their customers’ experience. Over seven decades, the organization has grown from a small, family business to a dealership that employs roughly 350 people across 13 locations in five Midwestern states, with headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri.
“As a 70-year old company, there are internal walls, assumptions, ways of working, and habits that build up over time, and while we don’t want to kick those to the curb—we want to honor what’s great and core about them—there are some of those walls that don’t serve our identity and purpose as we try to move forward and how we can help our customers,” said Liz. “We’re trying to find the sweet spot between feeling like a family business and being a high-growth enterprise.”
One way SumnerOne is finding this sweet spot is with the guidance of its executive board, which comprises both family members—including Liz, Edmund, and their sister, Barbara, as well as parents Ed and Mary—and three external advisors, who bring professional expertise and a different lens to the business, including SumnerOne’s former chief operations officer Kevin Laury, a chief information officer of a publicly traded company and an established entrepreneur. The board also includes a member who specializes in consulting for privately held, family-run companies.
The goal of the board is to create a stable and effective governing structure for the company, and steer and assist decisions for SumnerOne that are in the collective best interests of the company, its employees, and customers, which Liz views as a natural progression of a growing a family business into a high-growth enterprise. The board is also responsible for holding SumnerOne’s business leaders, including Liz and her brother Edmund, accountable for executing plans for growth.
Liz and Edmund work collaboratively, making all critical decisions together. Liz credits Edmund for being an incredibly talented representative to the dealership’s customers and he remains the company’s lead producer in terms of total sales revenue, demonstrating to SumnerOne’s team consistently what is possible. “We have complementary skills, and we really are co-operators acting and moving in the same direction,” said Liz. “We’re looking together toward the next 30 years, if not the next 100 years.”
Charting the Course
Over the course of its history, SumnerOne has evolved to offer a broad swath of products and services, including production and large-format print, managed print services, enterprise content management, an array of IT services, and its bread-and-butter multifunction printers and copiers. That said, Liz was quick to highlight SumnerOne’s emphasis on people and their experiences.
“Our north star is that we are not a product-centric organization,” said Liz. “The central part of our vision and mission is to deliver and improve the customer experience as a service-led organization, which stems from my father and grandfather.”
SumnerOne is relentlessly pursuing production print as one of its most valuable opportunities in marrying its service-led approach with powerful technology for customers. “If you’re looking for ways to replace revenue, if you imagine that your traditional office print revenue is in an inevitable decline, it represents the opportunity to deliver an up-level customer experience.”
Liz is working hard to be intentional and specific about where SumnerOne focuses its efforts, in addition to production, especially with the dealership’s SMB clients in mind. While many dealerships are striving to have their hands in every aspect of a customer’s business, Liz believes there is an inherent dissonance in that strategy.
“You can’t be all things to all people just to add incremental revenue,” she said. “That said, even though we are really excited and committed to production, we’re not divorcing ourselves from the reality that we have to provide adjacent solutions for our SMB customers.”
Looking at SumnerOne’s Midwest footprint, Liz continues to see many areas for the dealership to grow organically and geographically and in vertical markets. For example, the company has always been successful in the educational vertical, notably in the K-12 and higher-education segments.
SumnerOne has invested heavily in sales analytics to examine more deeply across the vertical, and by examining the vertical more closely, Liz and the SumnerOne team are able to zero in on more opportunities such as within secondary education, public and private institutions. “It shows that we don’t need to look under new and oddly shaped rocks,” Liz said. “There’s a lot we can do that we maybe haven’t been as cognizant of.”
Growth Through Acquisitions
Acquisitions are also on the table, and Liz says they are opening their lens again to opportunities that make sense. “I do think over the next decade one of the most-effective ways to grow is through acquisitions, especially when you really level with the challenges of a new, emerging line of business and try to scale that from dollar one.
Liz views SumnerOne as well positioned for acquisitions, given its family-business foundation. “From an acquisition standpoint, our value to somebody who is thinking about selling their business is distinctly different than what a private equity company can offer,” said Liz.
“Our industry has been built around a lot of entrepreneurs and families who have led with a set of values that aren’t about making money or having the biggest exit, but rather about their people and contributing to their local communities. Because we’re committed to those values, we have a strong proposition to founders that can connect their legacy to ours, preserving their legacy and showing they care about their employees and want them to be in good hands.”
Liz and the rest of SumnerOne remain solidly in a growth mindset, setting ambitious goals, and communicating these goals and vision to the family of employees at the dealership. Liz is constantly working to improve communication across the company, emphasizing SumnerOne’s core values, as well as celebrating employees and their success.
“We are looking toward the next 30 years, if not the next 100 years,” said Liz. “What do we need to do now to endure, and not just endure to 2026? I think we share that with other independent dealers, and that’s one thing I love about this industry.”
