This year we’ve upped our head count and selected seven “super heroes” of the office technology channel as The Cannata Report’s 2025 Young Influencers. We couldn’t select PDS’s Ben Philpot and not include his brother, Korey. The Philpots, like all of our Young Influencers, are creating a better tomorrow for the office technology channel.
In order of seniority, we present our 2025 Young Influencers:
Kevin Brophy, age 37
Sales Manager at Fujifilm (Charlotte, North Carolina)
Hobby: Harley-Davidson motorcycles
Kevin Brophy did “a little bit of everything” before landing at Fujifilm as a sales manager. He trained as a mechanic right out of high school and worked for General Motors, he worked in construction, he got a degree in criminal justice. He might be a police officer right now if his appendix hadn’t exploded right before he was supposed to take his officer exam. Brophy found a job driving a truck for a hardwood floor distributor, then leveraged his mechanic skills into doing repairs for the machinery they used, which quickly evolved into him running an entire repair shop with some renown within the hardwood flooring industry.
“This was up in New Jersey, and I had people sending me their equipment from all over the U.S., Australia, Germany. I was a very well-known mechanic,” he said. He even ran a popular YouTube channel about hardwood flooring machine repairs and was named a Top Forty under Forty influencer for the industry.
Brophy was so well-known that he received an emergency request from a flooring manufacturer to come onsite as a consultant about some internal issues they were having. That consulting gig turned into a job as a sales representative for them, which took Brophy through the next five years of his life. By the end of that time, he had a lot of sales experience under his belt and began looking for a bigger challenge, which is what brought him to Fujifilm.
“At first I was like, well, I know nothing about the printing industry, so I doubt this is going to be a fit for me,” he said. “I come to find out there are a lot of similarities. You deal with a lot of colors for stains and things like that. You deal with pigments, you deal with coatings, aqueous coatings, UV coatings, all kinds of things like that.”
The number of parallels between the two industries shocked him. He found he was able to adapt quickly and learn his new field easily, especially with his background as a mechanic giving him a natural understanding of machinery. It helped that he was a quick study, with an endless appetite for information from any possible source. He sought out experts, read newsletters, and approached his new job like he was getting a college degree in working at Fujifilm.
“I’m guilty of taking my work home with me,” he said. “I like to do a lot of reading on things, and I like to be present and involved. I try to wake up empty every day, in the sense that I try not to go to bed without learning something new every single day.”
Even though his prior experience proved more useful than he would have expected, Brophy still had a huge mountain to climb if he ever wanted to get up to speed on his new industry. “When you throw yourself into a position like I have, where you go into an industry you feel you know nothing about, there’s a lot of days that’s very easy to find something new to learn.”
Brophy took advantage of mentorship opportunities that came his way, embracing the guidance of Fujifilm veterans like Tony Aquino, Fred Hankel, and Steve Sadowski.
“All the people that have been here for years have the knowledge and the expertise, and I hold all those people in very high regard, from customer service to our credit department to my counterparts in sales management, my regional manager, his boss, everybody,” he said.
One of the biggest adjustments Brophy had to make was transitioning from a relatively small firm to the massive multinational that is Fujifilm. “It was completely different and very scary, very intimidating,” he admitted, “but I feel very lucky. I have a really good home here at Fujifilm. They genuinely care about their employees. I couldn’t ask for a better employer.”
One of the hallmarks of a supportive, employee-focused company is long tenures, and Brophy someday hopes to join the ranks of colleagues who have achieved multi-decade careers with the company. “Everybody has the same goal, the same mission, and I really enjoy being a part of that,” he said. “If Fujifilm will allow me to retire with them that’s absolutely what I will do.”
In terms of goal setting, Brophy likes to maintain a healthy balance, using small daily goals to keep his productivity up and longer-term goals to maintain focus on the big picture. “Every morning, I wake up and start by making a list and going through my list from the previous day to see if I didn’t finish some of the things I wanted to do. At the end of the week, I do a brief weekly goal-setting thing, and then on a quarterly or yearly basis I do the five- and ten-year goals, the lifelong goals,” said the senior member of our 2025 Young Influencers team.
One goal Fujifilm has made it easy to achieve is a better work-life balance. “I didn’t have that at my last position,” he said. “It was go go go, twenty-four seven, nights, weekends, doesn’t matter.” Now his weekends can be for spending time with his family, recovering from the week and preparing for the next one, rather than having to stay chained to his phone.
Brophy has a wife and three children and spends a lot of his time outside of work coaching his son’s baseball team or playing football with him. “He plays basically every sport,” Brophy laughed. Between that and his daughter’s gymnastics, a lot of his weekend time is spoken for, but he still makes time to catch a Notre Dame football game when he can. He also enjoys riding his Harley-Davidson but tries out a variety of bikes owned by his friends as well. “If it has two wheels, I’ll ride it.”
The 2025 Young Influencers
Mike Maccabe, age 36
Western Region Director of Sales at Toshiba (Lake Forest, California)
Hobby: Golf
Mike Maccabe got started on his career even before he graduated from Cal State Fullerton. He worked a variety of sales jobs, including commercial and multi-family real estate. He found success in that field, but he knew he could be doing more to grow his skills. Maccabe realized he was attracted to the ever-changing developments and high potential of technology sales, so nine years ago he followed a referral to Toshiba, where he’s been ever since. [Editor’s note: Mike is the son of Scott Maccabe, former president, CEO & chairman Toshiba America Business Solutions.]
“Real estate doesn’t change that much over time,” said Maccabe. “You’re selling the same thing all the time to the same types of people. This offered a different perspective, and an opportunity to get into an organization with a great brand story that has great products.”
He started as a business development manager, Toshiba’s version of an enterprise account executive. He adapted to the long sale cycles of that corner of the industry, a big change from the high volume, fast turnaround pace he’d known in real estate. In enterprise sales, he learned relationships build slowly and center on long-term thinking. He realized he couldn’t make progress on sales at this scale without developing a deep understanding of each client’s business, territory, and customer profiles. To offer truly useful, compelling solutions he had to know the company as well as someone who worked there, if not better.
“You may make a connection with someone, a prospective client, and work with them over eighteen months before you’ve had a peek behind the curtain and can start putting together an implementation plan and actually close the deal,” he said.
Adopting a new industry meant Maccabe had to put his networking skills into high gear. He developed relationships both internally at Toshiba, growing from the company’s mentorship-focused approach to developing talent, and externally among the dealers and other business leaders he met out in the field. “The first two years that’s kind of all I was doing,” he said. “Talking to people and trying to sell copiers to enterprises.”
Maccabe found that the key to building relationships with dealers was to approach them like a partner, aiming to identify business needs and offer support, rather than jumping in with a hard sell. “My line always was hey, I’m the person your business doesn’t have to pay for. My job is to help you sell our product and make you more money,” he said. He found a similar tactic worked well in enterprise sales, focusing on transparency and authenticity and helping clients understand their needs, even if Toshiba didn’t ultimately end up being the best fit for them.
For the past two years, Maccabe has been Toshiba’s Western region director of sales, supporting a territory that covers nearly half the United States. It’s a role that isn’t possible to take on without strong support from his team in the field and regular contact with all his clients, no matter how far away they might be, upholding Toshiba’s company culture in every connection. He took the same slow-burn, deep relationship-building approach to his own team, aligning their values and sharing knowledge in both directions so any member of the team could function as an extension of that hard-won relationship with the client.
“A large part of my responsibility is to ensure that we have that culture, both as a team and individually, within each district or region,” he said. “And being able to rely on other team members within the organization to communicate that message.”
Most of Maccabe’s team were in place when he started in his current position, with many of them having been his peers when he was a regional sales manager for national accounts. This could have created friction, especially if egos got involved, but the collaborative culture Toshiba fosters was invaluable, with everyone on his team buying in to the goal of honest communication and mutual respect.
“The good thing about that is that we’ve all worked together previously and know the ins and outs of how each other works and where our strengths are, where each of our weaknesses are, and where we can fill the gaps and to make sure that we’re delivering the best possible solution for our partners,” he said.
Transitioning from colleague to manager was not without its challenges, especially since some of his new reports were more tenured than him, but Maccabe approached this new phase of his career with an open mind.
“I can give credit to our team members that they all came into it very open-minded as well,” said Maccabe. “We understood that this is my responsibility and I’m going to have to lean heavily on the experience and mentors on the team who can give me an understanding of what the industry is doing in their territory.”
In return, Maccabe’s team knows they can rely on him for a fresher perspective as someone with an eye on innovations and removing roadblocks. He’s aware that as a young person in a mature industry, it’s easy to value your own perspective over the insights and experience of veteran colleagues, but he would urge any young person starting out in sales to reconsider that and keep an open mind.
“You may have a new idea, you may have a certain willingness to challenge the established norms, but you have to be cognizant and aware of what your other colleagues may offer to you,” he said.
Finding mentors who have a deeper understanding of the industry and are willing to share their experience and insights is invaluable, especially for someone who wants to rise quickly like he did. There’s no benefit to locking yourself into one approach right at the start of your career, especially in an industry that evolves at such a fast pace.
“If I had to summarize it in just one word, you have to be adaptable.”
Jessica Johnson, age 35
Sales Support Specialist Manager at U.S. Bank (Marshall, Minnesota)
Hobbies: Golf, corn/soybean farming
Major office equipment is often a significant expenditure, one that most customers end up using some kind of financing to purchase. While there are a lot of ways to finance a deal, many dealers offer a streamlined option by connecting their clients with a bank that’s familiar with the office equipment market. That’s where Jessica Johnson comes in.
After graduating from Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, with a degree in healthcare administration in 2012, Johnson worked in hospitals in the Boston area and pursued a master’s degree. Then life threw a curveball. She married into a multi-generational farming family and moved to small-town Marshall, Minnesota, to start a new life.
U.S. Bank was a major employer in the area and Johnson found that her administrative skills transferred well to banking. While getting to know the industry as a client support representative, she received a lot of guidance from her management team on what she needed to do to move up.
“They really instilled the importance of networking,” she recalled, “especially since I wasn’t from the area. A lot of people in Marshall are related. It’s a smaller town, so everybody kind of knows everybody.”
U.S. Bank was doing a lot of business supporting large office equipment sales, and when they decided to create a department devoted specifically to those deals, Johnson was tapped to be a manager.
“It really was created to identify some inefficiencies before funding events for office equipment contracts, just to give our clients a really seamless experience from when they’re turning in their document packages to when the deals are funding,” Johnson said.
It’s a part of the market typified by long tenures on both sides of the desks, with many repeat clients who have decades-long relationships with the bank. With the size and duration of deals like this, it can’t just be a service-provider relationship, but a trusted partnership.
“I still stay in touch with several clients that I supported back in 2016,” said Johnson. “Relationships with our clients are very critical. The trust and relationships we have continue to be a driving factor for why our clients continue to do business with us.”
Johnson prizes her adaptability, honed in the high-impact days in healthcare, and likes to take a “50,000-foot view” of the work landscape to make sure she’s keeping everything in perspective. Having a big-picture view actually makes it easier to zoom in and focus on the small, interpersonal details that make her team’s relationships with clients so solid.
“Equipment finance is a critical component for all businesses, from small churches to those huge, large hospitals where we’re printing off wristbands and lab racks and everything in between,” she said. “Office equipment is really essential for daily operations and each interaction with the client or end user really gives us that opportunity to shine.”
Getting to know her dealer clients has meant learning a lot of things she never expected to know about office equipment, particularly when she tags along on sales trips to see the dealerships and the equipment they sell in person.
“It just blows my mind, the printing technology and just how complex some of these printers and copiers are,” said Johnson. “I don’t think the general public understands everything that goes into these machines. Some of them are almost as big as a car.”
While the office equipment industry is still relatively new for Johnson, some of her more tenured team members have been in the game for over a decade. This was a great advantage as the team first came together, since Johnson knew she could rely on everyone’s expertise, their familiarity with each other, and their relationships with clients.
“I’m fortunate that the team is very efficient, they’re very effective, very self-motivated. I don’t need to micromanage, but I’m very confident that my team will involve me when needed. It’s a very well-oiled machine,” she said.
U.S. Bank prioritizes mentorship as an essential part of the training process, going so far as to formally assign a mentor to anyone starting a new role. While Johnson’s original mentor retired recently, she carries the lessons she learned from that relationship into her current efforts to mentor her own team. “I was very fortunate that both of my managers really wanted to help me grow and would look for opportunities,” she said. “They were open to me taking different advancements and trying to further my career.”
As someone on the younger side of the field, Johnson appreciates how her flexible mindset helps her get up to speed with the fast-paced and complex world of finance. “Equipment finance is really the intersection of a lot of different places,” she said. “It’s the intersection of finance, technology, a wide variety of industries. It’s continuously changing.”
Now, with the new specialized team, Johnson is able to innovate and serve U.S. Bank’s clients better by maximizing efficiency, which, as it so often does, frequently boils down to identifying redundant effort and streamlining it. Finance packages used to go through multiple rounds of review with departments that weren’t necessarily in sync, but now her department handles the vetting and unburdens other departments so they can just trust that the right things are in place instead of vetting it all over again.
“There’s a consistency with the team. You know what’s needed and what’s expected,” she said. “Once my team has the document reviewed and it goes to funding, the funding team is able to take it from my team instead of having to review it. It’s assumed it’s a fundable deal if it’s coming from my team.”
No one could have guessed that a degree in hospital administration on the East Coast would land Johnson in a small town in the upper Midwest working on high-dollar business deals, but it’s turned out to be a great fit. “Like probably many people, I didn’t graduate from college thinking I would go into equipment finance, but I am sure happy that I have ended up here.”
Justin Rebhun, age 33
President of FTG Texas, a Flex Technology Group Company (Houston, Texas)
Hobbies: Golf, skiing, working out, traveling (120+ flights last year), trying new restaurants; wine and tequila connoisseur.
Justin Rebhun studied pre-med at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, but he was really there to pursue his true passion, baseball. “My dream was always just to be on the Mets. When I realized that wasn’t going to come to fruition when I graduated, I realized there’s not much you can do with a biology degree if you don’t go post-grad.”
The idea of more school didn’t appeal to him, at least not as a first choice. He decided to give himself a year to find something else and followed a friend’s referral to the payroll company ADP. To his pleasant surprise, a lot of the skills he’d developed as a college athlete proved useful in sales. He was already used to delayed gratification, he liked competition, and he had a strong work ethic.
“A lot of those things allowed me to be successful in that first year, so I decided to just go all in and see where it takes me,” he said. “It was the aha moment for me that effort can go a long way in sales.”
Rebhun became a student of his profession, applying himself to learning as much as he possibly could about how sales worked and what separated the good from the great. He didn’t want to be one of those people who was “okay just being okay.” He became, by his own admission, “obsessed” with personal development and skill-building, putting in long hours in his free time.
He was working at Fortune 500 companies and getting a lot of good experience, but the ceiling felt low. “One thing I noticed at these big businesses is that in order to move up, you have to have people die or retire,” he said. “I knew I wanted to advance my career at a quicker pace. I wanted to get into a company that was private equity backed and more results oriented.”
Rebhun’s search for a company with these qualities led him to Flo-Tech, an East Coast subsidiary of Flex Technology Group, where he started as an enterprise account executive. He ended up winning company-wide Rookie of the Year and, only a year after that, got the opportunity to move up to a director role overseeing the New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania markets.
“It was a big change for me, I went from being an individual contributor and kind of a control freak around my own processes to management,” he said. “I struggled for a little bit in that first role until I came to the realization that not everyone is me, that I had to treat everyone differently. It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing.”
He had success in the director role for two years and then got promoted to vice president of sales of all East Coast subsidiaries. Then, last June, Rebhun got called out to Texas to lead as president of FTG Texas.
“I credit Frank [Gaspari], our CEO, and our private equity firm. They’re very results based. They don’t care how old you are, where you are in the country. If you produce results, you’re going to have opportunities and that is why I’m here eight years later,” he said. “For a millennial, that’s like being in a company for 30 years.”
Beyond personal development, mentorship is what took Rebhun to the next level of his career. Not only finding the right mentors, but going into those relationships with a clear sense of what he wanted to get out of them.
“The president of our East Coast companies, John Bixby, has been a mentor to me. I’d been working for him for the last six years before getting into this opportunity. I was very vocal about my goals of where I wanted to go in this company,” he said.
Rebhun advises everyone to do the same as he did. “You need to be your biggest career advocate. People can’t read your mind about what you want to do. If you have big goals, make it known.”
He and Bixby talked weekly about what needed to be in place for a move upward. Rebhun sought advice on how he should position himself to be ready for his long-term goal, running one of Flex Technology Group’s businesses. He knew it would ultimately come down to work ethic and integrity.
“I’m a big believer in the little things matter, showing up and doing things the right way,” he said. “I’ve seen a million times where people step all over people to get what they need in the moment, and yeah, they get it done in the moment, but three years later they’re not going to want to help you, right?”
Hard work paid off, and suddenly the New Yorker had to leave the East Coast and his beloved Mets behind and venture into unknown territory: Texas.
“It was a culture shock for sure,” Rebhun laughed. “I moved here last July right before that hurricane hit, so that was my welcome to Houston and then it rained for like three weeks straight and I was like, oh man, what did I do?”
One of the biggest adjustments was the pace of living in Texas, and how people set their priorities in life. “In New York, it’s just go go go and work is usually priority one for everyone. I found that most people I interviewed in New York City were there to crush their career and that was their main priority, where in Texas it’s usually not priority number one, it’s family and faith and all these different things,” he said.
For anyone looking to make the same moves he did, Rebhun has advice:
“Be willing to learn and be coachable and have a good attitude. If you do those three things you’re going to beat eighty percent of people, and then you’re really only competing with the other twenty percent,” he said. “Work hard, produce results, be a good person, and good things will happen.”
Noah Maphis, age 29
Director of Marketing and Outreach at Cobb Technologies (Richmond, Virginia)
Hobby: Playing with her boxer dog, Frankie
When Noah Maphis was an undergrad at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, she struggled with something many students do: She couldn’t settle on a major. She was interested in so many things, but nothing had quite clicked. It wasn’t until her academic advisor sat her down and told her it was time to pick something that she realized what she’d really connected with the most during college was her time volunteering. “I knew when I graduated I wanted to work in nonprofit, but I didn’t have a plan.”
Maphis gave herself the summer after college to figure things out, planning to work some part-time jobs and explore possibilities. Opportunity came knocking where she never expected to go, Cobb Technologies, where her mother, Toni Gorveatt, has been president since 1993.
“It wasn’t my planned trajectory to follow in her footsteps by any means,” Maphis said, “I wasn’t even planning on having an office job.” But the opening, director of community outreach, was exactly what Maphis had been looking for. A way to work with people and help the community through Cobb’s nonprofit arm Imprint, known for the Putt it Forward charity golf tournament it hosts every spring.
“I was so nervous,” Maphis admitted. “I was like, I don’t think I’m prepared to do that. I’ve just graduated college and I have never been on the radar to step into the technology industry.”
The good news was the role kept Maphis too busy to have time for nerves for long. Between Putt it Forward and Cobb’s fall festival, Cobbtoberfest, there was always more to do and more to learn. “Year after year it just got easier for me,” she said. “As my role started to expand and I was having more conversations in areas outside of just the outreach, whether it was sales leadership or reps or recruiting, recognizing that what I was bringing to them had value gave me a lot of confidence.
As Maphis’s role grew she began to support the marketing department more and more, their goals often aligning with Imprint’s. When a company reorganization left the marketing department in need of a director, Maphis’s name came up in the conversation.
“I was helping the team recruit for that and then I ended up stepping into the role,” she said. “It was the first time that I had people reporting to me. I think building a team and hiring some folks and really being able to shape the department and figure out how we can align with the sales teams and HR for recruiting efforts has been really cool.”
Building a team was a new challenge for Maphis, and one where she knew she wanted to express Cobb’s corporate culture. “I wanted people who really valued the community we’ve built here,” she said. “We’re a work from work and home from home kind of place. We’re all here to do a job but we want to work to make it better.”
Finding people who shared that same vision was exciting for Maphis, but once her team was assembled, she found she had yet another hat to wear at work—mentor. She admits she set “huge goals” for herself, partly because of the examples she’d seen in other colleagues at Cobb Technologies.
“Someone said, ‘you are your employees’ dinner table talk,’ like when they go home and they’re with their friends or their families they’re talking about work and you’re a huge part of their day,” Maphis said. “Going into every day just trying to be mindful of that, it’s something you’re entrusted with. It’s a really big deal.”
Maphis found that the more answers she was called on to provide for her team, the more questions she asked herself. “How can I develop this person? How can I set them up to do a really great job, learn more, experience more, be successful in their careers in a really positive way?”
Cobb Technologies long has been a company built on female leadership, and Maphis learned a lot as a mentor and as a mentee when Cobb Technologies formed a new group focused on women’s empowerment. Maphis was able to learn from colleagues who had thirty, even forty years of experience. “I’m 29, so hearing how they balanced having a career and starting a family and then working and being a mom has been really cool for me,” she said. “If I need something or if I’m feeling stressed or overwhelmed, I can just kind of reach out to them and hear what their experience has been.”
This mentorship has helped Maphis a lot with goal setting, especially seeing how Cobb Technologies’ culture and vision can manifest in the long term. “Since I started at Cobb, there has been this thread: Cobb’s brand identity. We’re a really special company, and finding ways to relay that is always a goal for me.” Maphis has found that her department’s goals frequently align with those of other departments, especially sales. “I want to reach new people . . . and always tell them, ‘Your goals are my goals,’ and ask, ‘What can we do for the company to grow bigger and better?’
People are the key to any career advice Maphis would give to new grads. “Find your community, hitch your wagon to them, stay curious, ask questions, don’t be afraid to ask for help.” She advises finding things to say yes to, whether it’s a meeting with leadership or a skills seminar. Sometimes opportunities can pop up where you least expect them. After all, her own career “was definitely not in the plan, but I feel like that’s how a lot of life works for people.”
Korey Philpot, age 27, Major Account Executive at Precision Duplicating Solutions/PDS (London, Kentucky)
Hobby: Golf
Ben Philpot, age 24, Major Account Executive and Sales Manager at Precision Duplicating Solutions/ PDS (London, Kentucky)
Hobby: Running
Ben and Korey Philpot grew up in the copier industry, literally. Their parents, Earl and Reena Philpot, founded Precision Duplicating Solutions in the early 2000s and both sons spent their childhoods tagging along to service calls with their dad, listening to their mom make sales calls, and taking apart copiers (although putting them back together proved trickier).
The plan hadn’t necessarily been to turn the family business into a multi-generational one, but by the beginning of 2024 both Korey and Ben had found their way back home to PDS.
Korey Philpot graduated from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in 2020 with a degree in hospitality in tourism. He had initially intended to work in live events, but with a global pandemic happening the timing wasn’t great. He found a wide-ranging variety of jobs, from running golf tournaments to apprenticing as an electrician, but it was a role in software sales for Jockey Club Information Systems that really set him on the path to his role today.
“Everything is heavily documented in the thoroughbred industry—genetics, racing records, breeding records. There are all these virtual reports you can buy on a website called Equineline.com, and they had software called the Horse Farm Management System that’s kind of like an ERP.”
While Korey was exploring software sales, the idea started to appeal to Ben too, then an undergrad at the University of Kentucky, also in Lexington.
“I got very burned out towards the end of my college career, so I was like, you know what? I’m going to step away from engineering for a while. Then I just kind of fell in love with sales and business so it’s been great. Very different, but I love it,” said Ben, the youngest member of our 2025 Young Influencers crew.
Now they are both major account executives, focusing on enterprise sales, a field that they found requires a very specific set of skills, very different than the entry-level sales approach that trades on volume.
“If you’re making hundreds of calls a day, you’re not really building those relationships. If I’m cold calling I try to stick to 25 good conversations a day,” said Korey. ” I want to build a meaningful relationship rather than just say hey, I’m here to sell you a copier and then get out the door.”
Ben has observed that big accounts have different priorities in sales conversations. “It’s important to them that you are just efficient, more than anything. Especially larger companies, the more you can take off their plate that they don’t have to worry about, the better,” he said.
While their youth might seem at first glance to be a disadvantage, their clients soon realize that their age isn’t the whole story.
“A lot of people, especially younger people my age, they just want someone to give them leads or they want to look at somebody’s name on LinkedIn or email somebody. But if you go out in person and you talk to people, it’s shocking how much information you can get just by having a real conversation in person,” said Korey.
“I know I may look young, but I promise I’ve been around this stuff my entire life. Always being around as a kid, I really have fifteen to twenty years of experience with copiers,” said Ben. “But I also use that as a benefit, like, I’m young and here’s what other people that are my age are saying about copiers. They’re printing in different kind of ways.”
Now that they’re managing sales teams of their own, both Ben and Korey have developed a sense for what it takes to succeed in their field and how to instill that in others.
Korey has found that his own experience as a student athlete gave him vital skills that he now looks for in new recruits. “A lot of high-level athletes will tell you they hate losing more than they love winning. I get way more upset when I lose a deal than when I win one,” he said. “When I’m looking at hiring people, I always like to at least hear that somebody has a background in athletics or played sports, even if it was just at the high school level.”
Ben looks for potential sales reps who are skilled at connecting people, with an intuitive sense of when to push them and when to pull back. He’s discovered along the way that it takes a diverse team to have people who can connect to everyone. “One of my sales guys I managed is very much an introvert, but he is still really good at connecting to other customers that I cannot connect with,” he said. “I like to talk to customers as much as possible but seeing him go about in a different way, it’s still great because he can still be effective.”
The small family business nature of Precision Duplication Solutions is also an advantage, especially in Appalachia where family ties run deep.
“Eastern Kentucky is one of my favorite places in the world, said Korey. “It’s a beautiful place with a lot of good people, a lot of very loyal people here. Everybody knows everybody in Eastern Kentucky. So when you land one of those accounts in a community, then it kind of eases the tension a little bit, especially in the smaller communities.”
“Our big thing is we’re a small company. We can be as flexible as you want us to be, way easier than a large corporation can. We’re able to come in and be like, hey, I can be as flexible as you want to in your payment terms, monthly, quarterly, yearly. Whatever you want this to look like, that’s what I’m here to do,” said Ben.
While it was a winding path to get where he is, Korey is happy he found an industry where he can really grow. “I think this industry still has a lot to give, and a lot of people don’t realize that,” he said. “I think a lot of people think copiers are dying, that people aren’t printing as much, but there’s so much more this industry has to offer.”
And for Ben? He’s right where he wants to be. “Joining my family business has been the best decision of my life,” said Ben. “Getting to work with my brother, my mom, my dad, and my wife every single day.”
