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“Years ago I saw this quote from Benjamin Franklin and I have it on a little piece of paper in my office,” said Tom DeLellis, owner of Conestoga Business Solutions at 220 Pitney Road in Lancaster. “It reads, ‘When you’re finished changing you’re finished.’ Pretty simple quote.”

Two years ago at the annual holiday party, DeLellis’ employees gave him a $10 paperweight with Franklin’s quote on it. It was fitting. After all, they’re in the paper business, helping companies manage their printing while saving them money.

“When [the employees] gave me a paperweight imprinted with that on it, I felt like my message was getting through,” said DeLellis.

His message hinged on adapting to meet customers’ ever-changing needs, encouraging employees to move out of their comfort zone and putting innovation at the heart of the company.

DeLellis had been clamoring about change since he took over the business in ’00. Conestoga Copiers had been in existence since 1975 but the market was evolving. Gone were days when people just needed photocopiers. Instead they needed ways to send, store and retrieve information and Conestoga Copiers needed to align itself with the industry’s change trajectory. The company started off as a copier reseller and service organization. It was the backend distribution process. Service in the early days was important because copiers broke down a great deal. Initially the service they provided kept the business going. However, by the mid 1980s the copier industry was maturing and the personal computing industry was in its infancy. The organization dismantled the old businesses model and adapted to the new world around them. And so it evolved into Conestoga Business Solutions.

Conestoga Business Solutions recognized that customers’ needs evolved but that’s just part of any business.

“During the last 10 years in particular we have seen a lot of change,” said DeLellis who became part of Conestoga in 1992. “The document has transformed into more of an electronic format and managing that format for our clients has become our number one focus. The paper document hasn’t gone away, it’s just changed dramatically.”

Yes there are still people who like to hold a paper copy, but those people—their former market—are no longer as prevalent. Now their target market needs help managing document workflow. Since every business comes down to serving a need, DeLellis had a choice: adapt or die.

“If we hadn’t changed our company’s direction we wouldn’t have survived,” said DeLellis. “As with any company, when technology changes you’ve got to adapt to better serve your client.”

This is challenging for all businesses from Fortune 500s to small family run shops. That’s because people are often resistant to change. They fear it, fight it, and may even sabotage the solution, even if they think the move forward is positive.

Luckily for DeLellis, his employees—some of whom have been with the company 25 years—have been flexible to learn document workflow and print management software so that they could evolve with the changing environment. DeLellis encourages employee growth through training. 

He learned to nurture talent because he realized that it’s natural for employees to want to stay in their place of ease, yet for DeLellis, as an owner and a manager, it’s critical to get them to move out of their comfort zone. Thus employees have changed from copier fixers to customer consultants.

“We motivated them and we encouraged the change so that we wouldn’t be the same company,” said DeLellis.

In addition to training present employees as the company grew he reached out to people with software-based education in lieu of looking for new employees with a service-based background. He started looking for people who could not only repair a problem but who could also become deeply entrenched in the software side of the business.

DeLellis has had to get used to changing, because the industry never remains the same.

“Offices aren’t what they used to be. Employees rarely sit at a desk all day,” said DeLellis. “Mobile has changed what our clients do and in turn what we do and document workflow has changed along with that. Our customers and employees look for documents not only when they’re in the office but also when they’re at home and in the car. With our system they can retrieve it once it’s stored in document management software.”

Conestoga Business Solutions offers a few brands chiefly Equitrac, a print management and cost recovery solution that enables businesses to cut their cost and environmental impact. The program’s accounting software and helps clients manage their printing activity and costs. And in terms of document workflow software they market DigiDocFlow and DocuClass, which bring the power of scanning, storing, and retrieval to everyone.

DeLellis had to put innovation at the heart of his culture and he reinforced the message that the company needed nimbleness to move through the times. He’s created a safe space for innovation at his company by giving employees the ability to experiment and the ability to fail.

“If they’re not learning and not reaching out to a higher level of knowledge then they’ll never know what their capabilities are,” said DeLellis. “Sometimes they won’t get it on the first go around or the second go around of a particular service or software. Sometimes they fail early on but we urge them to continue and concentrate and commit themselves to the task at hand. If they fail it’s only the beginning of the learning process.”

He makes his employees feel comfortable taking calculated risks by giving them the ability to make decisions on the spot without having to check with upper management.

It was difficult for DeLellis to surrender control because he was putting his entire company’s fate in jeopardy based on his employees’ decisions. In time he learned to pick the right people for the job so that he knew he could trust their decisions.

“If you don’t have the confidence in those people you’re never going to relinquish control,” said DeLellis. “Our goal is to keep our customers happy and our employees never lose sight of that. They know they have to serve them as a strong local business. Because … of that, I continue to allow them to make decisions.”

In order to sanction them DeLellis relies on financial incentives for those in sales and service and as a whole, DeLellis makes sure to have lots of gatherings, family events, and trips to make the company more united.

“I hope they mean a lot to my employees because they mean a lot to me as an owner,” said DeLellis.

These actions help attract and retain talent by showing employees that they’re doing the right things organizationally. Employees have a good feeling that they’re working well and for a purpose for a locally owned operation.

“In terms of attracting new employees, we’re always looking for people who fit into our culture. Sometimes that’s a hit or miss proposition but if we can find client-focused people then they adapt to the culture pretty quickly by seeing what drives the company forward and modeling the actions of other employees,” said DeLellis.

In the end, by meeting the changing needs of customers, pushing employees past their comfort zone, and putting innovation at the heart of the company, Conestoga Business Solutions has managed to thrive by reinventing a business model that would have otherwise perished because of yesteryear’s business practices.

Conestoga Business Solutions refuses to stop changing, and thus the company won’t become obsolete.

 

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