A conversation with Bill Wosilius about DEXTEK’s launch, strategic vision, and ambitious growth plans.
DEX Imaging is making a strategic move into the managed IT services space with the launch of DEXTEK, a new initiative designed to provide a comprehensive suite of services, including managed IT, cybersecurity, professional services, and cloud solutions. Bill Wosilius, president, technology solutions, DEX Imaging, a seasoned executive with deep expertise in managed IT and cybersecurity, leads this ambitious endeavor.
A key priority for DEXTEK is establishing a sales and service delivery model that extends beyond DEX Imaging’s existing print customer base, positioning the business for accelerated growth in the competitive IT services market. Wosilius is optimistic about DEXTEK’s potential, with the possibility of exceeding initial growth expectations if the first two markets prove successful. In this Q&A, he outlines DEXTEK’s strategic vision, market approach, and growth ambitions.
SC: I interviewed Dan Doyle Jr. last August, and he mentioned that DEX would be getting into managed IT. This is an area that DEX has historically shied away from. Now, it sounds like you’re all in.
Wosilius: Both Dans (Junior and Senior) have been very supportive of what we’re doing. It’s a logical extension of the print business. Every other print business on the planet is either doing this, has thought about doing this, or has tried to do it and failed. It’s time for DEX to get into that space. The commercial logic here is pretty simple. The buyer who buys print services is the same person who buys IT and cyber services. We’re already talking to those people. The commercial logic behind why a 20 to 500-employee-sized business would outsource IT is the same as why they would outsource managed print. It’s not as big of a pivot as many people would think.
SC: What’s your role in this initiative?
Wosilius: It’s mine to win or lose. In August last year, the Doyles called me and said, “We’d like you to run this and help us create a managed cybersecurity services business within DEX.” We wanted to leverage the DEX brand but differentiate ourselves slightly from the historical print business. There was already a little bit of this business inside DEX and nobody talked about it. When we bought Meritech in Cleveland and North American Office in Orlando, both businesses did a little bit of managed IT as part of their total business. That factored in the decision to launch this in Cleveland and Orlando. We don’t have to teach them how to spell IT. They get it.
SC: Looking at a company of DEX’s size and its reach in the various locations, how challenging will it be to roll out IT services regionwide to all these DEX locations? And it is all DEX locations, right?
Wosilius: Eventually, yeah. Part of the reason why we wanted to go market by market is it allows us to walk before we run, test out some things, test out the packaged offerings, and test the support model that we’re building. If we’re successful, which I expect, we’ll go faster than planned. Right now, the plan is for three markets in the first year. We just launched two. If this plays out the way I hope, we may go faster.
SC: As far as building that organization, what does that organization look like now, and where do you want it to be, say, a year from now?
Wosilius: Today, it’s fairly limited because we just started in those two markets (Cleveland and Orlando). A year from now, the business plan that we’ve built has us growing to another two markets. That’ll be four, and we’ll double in size. Most of that is in market resources. Depending on which geography we go to next, we plop a team of sales and sales engineers in that market, and then a small team of, we’re calling it field engineering. That centralized service delivery team can do 90 to 95% of what we need to do for clients. When we need to deploy somebody to the client site, we’ll have a small local team to do that, so we’re talking 50 to 75 people a year from now.
SC: Looking at the markets you will be rolling this out to each year, do you have that plan written in stone? Will the markets change year by year?
Wosilius: It will largely be a function of leadership in that market because it takes some strong leadership on the print side to change behaviors on the go-to-market piece.
SC: Regarding future DEX Imaging acquisitions, will having existing IT operations impact some of that decision-making?
Wosilius: It should. Again, there are a lot of print businesses that do managed IT. The ones with a more meaningful or sizable managed IT capability are more attractive, but we’re also looking for pure-play MSPs that are not in the print business.
SC: Look at all the services you’re offering, are those all DEXTEK, or are you partnering with anyone?
Wosilius: There will be some partner-provided services where it’s either a unique skillset or something that we don’t see frequently, and we’ll partner with experts on those, but the vast majority of it is DEX-branded. Case in point, one example of a partner-provided service, just because it’s so specialized and it’s really difficult to be good at, is cyber incident response. In the event of a breach, you parachute forensics investigators to figure out how the attacker got in, and how long they’ve been there. That is a unique specialty, and we plan on partnering with Arctic Wolf.
SC: Where will DEXTEK operations be headquartered?
Wosilius: The legacy businesses that we inherited had some people in Cleveland and Orlando. That’s the vast majority of where they are today. Having run a 400-person managed service provider at NexusTek, when I left there a little under a year ago, we had 350 people in 48 states. I plan on executing a similar model. Two reasons. One is you don’t want to be held captive in a given market. You want to take advantage of the best available talent nationwide. Two, in our business, you can do everything you need to remotely for the most part, so it opens up the entire United States from a talent perspective.
SC: What does “Incentivize IT” mean, which I see highlighted on your website?
Wosilius: Everybody generally gets “we monitor it, we measure it.” Those are part of the business. But “incentivize it” is, I am a big fan of this and have been my entire career, that you have to incentivize engineers to think differently than they traditionally think. They get enamored by tech. They love playing with toys. Incentivizing them to care about customer service, but it doesn’t have a quota, but every single person on the team, every single service delivery person, at least 50% of their variable compensation or bonus is tied to the measurement of customer satisfaction, which is different. All of our engineers can earn a bonus based on how happy we make customers. That’s the “incentivize IT.”
SC: If I talk to you a year from now, what do you expect to tell me about this first year of DEXTEK?
Wosilius: I hope we’re talking about how we are going way faster than we thought we would and we’re not just in three markets; we’re in eight. If we’ve done our job, which we will, I’ll be telling you, we went faster because people in markets that we have not rolled out yet are calling me asking, “When can you come to Dallas or Charlotte, or Miami, or wherever next?” With that, success drives team size growth, so the numbers I’m giving you are assuming all we do is hit the plan. If we beat plan, all bets are off.
