In our latest installment of What’s Hot & What’s Not we speak with Jerry and Becky Blaine of LDI Color Toolbox in Jericho, NY, the subject of our May CR-CONNECT Dealer Tour. Jerry and Becky discuss what product segments are currently doing well for LDI and which ones they’d like to see do better.
CR: What’s hot at LDI Color Toolbox?
Jerry: The managed IT business is definitely working. We continue to add to that. Onboarding customers is a big deal. It takes a lot of manpower to be able to do that. The unified communications end of the business has been growing dramatically over the last several months. And we’re getting bigger and better customers—bigger meaning more people and better meaning more services that are attached to the unified communications.
On the IT side ,we’re doing teams integration now for customers that are moving in that direction attaching the various service and product components that are available. We’ve been in the video and the Zoom business for a long time. We were one of the very first Zoom distributors in New York. Now we have about half a dozen video conferencing products that we can offer to our customers We’ve been in the Pro AV business for a long time. That’s also a part of an integrated solution that we’re offering.
Becky: We are finding that many of our clients are moving or downsizing. They are very much in need of the services that we’ve been talking about, and many of them unfortunately didn’t know that we provided these services pre-pandemic.
CR: What’s not?
Jerry: The only part of the business that is off, unfortunately, is the main part of the business [print]. We’ve always been marketing to larger customers with sophisticated needs on print. We’ve got a very large production print practice, but it’s not really geared towards 90% of the commercial print market. What we do is educate our customers in what they can do, so that they don’t have to use outside sources to get their work done. And also, give them the opportunity with the great graphics knowledge that we have to produce in-house the kinds of things that literally cost a fortune. The problem now, is that there are no graphic artists working for these customers. They’re not producing any print work for anybody, because nobody’s in their offices. So that part of the business has really slowed down. We’re hoping, obviously with the back-to-work movement, for it to pick up in the fall.
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