Fall Colors RetreatBTA Southeast hosts event in Asheville, N.C.

BTA Southeast hosted its annual Fall Colors Retreat Oct. 18-19 at the Renaissance Asheville Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina. The event featured a key-

note address, “Great Balls of Fire! Staying Motivated — No Matter What!” led by Denise Ryan of FireStar Speaking.

The event also featured two additional educational ses-sions. “Build, Buy or Partner?” was a two-part session led by Hannah Erb, account manager at Collabrance LLC. Erb focused on getting into managed IT services, walk-ing attendees through the pros and cons of each option (building, buying or partnering). Tim and Blake Renegar of Kelly Office Solutions, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, also spoke during Erb’s sessions, giving the dealer per-spective on moving into managed IT services. “Economic Outlook,” led by Tim Quinlan, director and senior econo-mist at Wells Fargo Securities, looked at international, na-tional and regional economic trends.

A highlight of the Fall Colors Retreat was the round-table discussions with exhibitors. These roundtables gave attendees time to hear more about the exhibitors’ prod-ucts and services in small groups.

On Oct. 18, attendees traveled to the Broadway Arts Building for an evening celebrating the food and culture of the city. They enjoyed a dinner of Asheville specialities and local buskers — street entertainers that included an acoustic guitarist reminiscent of James Taylor; an Ameri-can jazz group, the Big Dawg Slingshots; and the Skinny Beats Drummers, who gave an overview of drum lan-guage — provided the evening’s entertainment.

The Fall Colors Retreat exhibiting sponsors: Epson, ESP AMETEK, FP Mailing Solutions, GreatAmerica Financial Services Corp., Imaging Solutions Direct, LD Products, LEAF, LMI Solutions, Muratec, NA Trading and Technol-ogy, OKI Data Americas, Panasonic Scanners, Print Audit, Static Control, Supplies Network, SYNNEX, TIAA Bank, Wells Fargo and Xerox (breaks sponsor). nBrent Hoskins, executive director of the Business Technology

Association, is editor of Office Technology magazine. He can be reached at (816) 303-4040 or brent@bta.org.

Clockwise from top: The Fall Colors Retreat featured a key-note address, two educational sessions and roundtable dis-cussions with exhibitors; Ryan presents her keynote address; attendees participate in a group activity during the keynote; and 2018-19 BTA Southeast President Michael Hicks serves as the event’s emcee.

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by: Brent Hoskins, Office Technology Magazine

Renegar: MNS Q&AOne of the educational sessions at the Fall Colors Retreat

was a two-part session, “Build, Buy or Partner?” presented by Hannah Erb, an account manager for Collabrance LLC. Erb’s focus, in part, was on addressing the pros and cons of building, buying or partnering in the development of a managed network services (MNS) operation. In her second session, Erb invited Blake Renegar, director of MNS at Kelly Office Solutions, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to the podium. The dealership partners with Collabrance. Audience members were presented an opportunity to ask him questions about Kelly’s MNS operation. Following are several of the ques-tions and excerpts of his responses. Question: How long have you been selling MNS? Renegar: “We’ve been doing it as a company for about three-and-a-half years, since about 2015, and I started it. I started brand new out of school and we just hit the ground running with it. We’re still learning every day. It’s definitely a learning process for us.” Question: How long did it take you to be successful when you first started? Renegar: “As copier dealers, we’re at a little bit of an advan-tage because we have a big customer base that buys office equip-ment from us. So, we can target that base; it’s a warm call under that circumstance, but you’ve got to find the right prospect within your customer base that wants this type of service. It took 90 to 100 days for me to close our first deal, our first all-in package.” Question: How did your relationship with Collabrance play out with that first sale? Renegar: “They worked hand in hand with us, from start to finish. When we have a prospect we think is going to be a good fit, we’ll have a meeting [with Collabrance via conference call]. Then, from a sales perspective, we work together step by step in putting the deal together, putting the proposal together and getting things situated.” Question: Does your MNS engineer go into presales meet-ings with you? Renegar: “At first, it will typically just be me, and that’s where I meet the client and see if we’re a good fit. Before we put a proposal together, we do a network assessment, which is where we go in and have the engineer look at the environment from top to bottom; he is absolutely essential in that step of the process. That’s where we look at how the clock is ticking in the environ-ment, how the customer has that environment set up ... Then we work with the engineer to put a proposal together along with the Collabrance folks. So yes, he’s heavily involved on the front end.” Question: Does your dealership get its MNS assessment questions from Collabrance? Renegar: “Yes. They do a great job providing documentation when we’re going in and doing the assessment. We have a checklist we go down. There’s one for the engineer; he has his own check-list. I have my own checklist, and we go through that. They did a great job teaching what to look for and what questions to ask.” Question: Do most of your clients have a server in-house or are they in the cloud? Renegar: “Most of our clients have servers in-house. We pre-fer that. We push for that. We like to be able to put our hands on it. If something is going on, I like to be able to send an engineer out; he can touch it and deal with it, and not have to deal with the vendor that is hosting it in the cloud.” n

— Brent Hoskins

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Above left: Attendees enjoy dinner at the Broadway Arts Build-ing on Oct. 18. Above right: The Skinny Beats Drummers form a drum circle after dinner, inviting attendees to participate.

Clockwise from top left: Erb; Quinlan; Tim Renegar; Mike Garofola (left) and Jim Hawkins (center) of OKI Data Americas meet with Jeff Eaves of Appalachia Business Communications of Kingsport Inc., Gray, Tennessee, during the roundtable dis-cussions; and Blake Renegar.