office_flow

Return to School, New Additions, and More

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Officeflow Team

TOM McCARTHY

Director

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AND BREATHE……

What a month September turned out to be.

We have to start with the “return to school”. September always ends up being a busy month for Officeflow. Our continued growth in the education sector means for a quiet August and a busy September in service. Added to this the fact we added 2 large high schools in September with more of our fantastic Develop equipment and a large primary school with 2 of our 100 Epson devices, it was always going to be bust wasn’t it 😊

Kudos to our fantastic service team who continue to support our hugely valued customers with a positive attitude and a friendly smile.

Plenty of new boxes sold and the pre installation work of a 20-machine account ready to be installed in a weeks’ time.

Just back from a long weekend in Portugal thanks to Dsales as a reward for being there number 1 dealer for both spend and boxes sold for a 2nd year running. Some lovely food, great company, a few (too many) bottles of wine and spoilt a good walk on a beautiful golf course 🤣 – All in all a very successful trip and something to strive towards for next year!

We’ve a big focus on the lead up to Christmas now to ensure we stay on target for budget for this year.

One final note from me, we are actively recruiting again with the below positions available if you should know anyone suitable:

  • Trainee Sales Executive
  • Trainee service engineer
  • Field service engineer
  • Installations / connectivity engineer

Tom McCarthy – Director

Summer Holidays Are Here

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Officeflow night out

JAMES McCRAITH

Managing Director

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And like that Holiday season is upon us!

August is always a busy month as we have the scheduled work for our education clients to complete before the kids return. I’m pleased to say this August carries on in the same vein with two new high school roll out in the centre of Norwich this week and a primary federation in West Norfolk next week.

Sales has got off to a good start across both offices. However, a standout deal for me for lots of reason is a new business, multi-device, multi-site order for a large corporate in Essex. Business that has been won and is managed by our Chelmsford office sales team.

The client has opted for an Epson print solution that provides an ‘Insetting’ approach to help contribute to their sustainability policies and values. The Epson is a great fit for the customer as not only are the devices very capable MFD’s they also provide a massive reduction in energy usage which is ultimately another small step taken to help in the environment and reduce carbon footprints.

It’s not all been hard work however, we recently managed to find time to get our summer team day booked which allowed us to all let off some steam together and celebrate the previous 6 months!

We went to Boom Battle Bar Norwich where everyone tried to master axe throwing (harder than it looks), beer-Pong and darts. Who knew Tracy in accounts is so good with a set of arrows as she totally cleared the floor with everyone in several games of killer! We then all enjoyed a Chinese at the Baby Buddha in Norwich to soak up the alcohol consumed during beer-pong with some dim-sum and crispy squid! Great fun had by all!

It’s now my turn to take some annual leave and I’m looking forward to spending some time with the Kids (and the wife – better say that or I’ll be in trouble) and finally getting some sun after the wettest July since records began and coming back early September to hit the ground running with what always seems like a ramp up in activity.

July Highlights: Growth, Diversification, and Summer Installations

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JAMES HARRIS

Service/Ops Director

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As we pass through July, we are able to again reflect on what has been an amazing month for officeflow as we continue to grow the business in size and also become more versed in some of the diversifications we have undertaken.

Further experience has been gained this month in our Audio-Visual offering as we complete the installation of an 86inch VESTEL IFX screen into a school sports hall ready for school assembly’s and evening yoga classes alike!

It was good to see both the student and teacher reaction to the screen placement and we are sure the Vestel will out-perform the projector it has replaced and keep the assembly’s entertained for many years to come!

It’s great to also have seen some warmer (if not a little wetter than we would like) weather and I’m sure we can all agree that this year the warmer weather has seemed to be a long time coming!

Funnily, photocopiers and printers fall into the category of devices that always work better in warmer conditions! This has in-turn led to a slight downturn in service calls giving the team a little extra time be involved in a wider variety of tasks as we ensure that our cross-pollination of skillsets remains healthy.

Print volume is looking good and from a service perspective to see print volumes holding high with a slight downturn in service calls I can only be pleased that fleet uptime is being kept to a maximum by our team of amazing engineers!

We’ve had a couple of things going on externally this month with myself and Stuart taking on RunNorwich and have also begun the initial sparks of some ideas around our fundraising challenge for next year to match this years amazingly successful Pier 2 Pier walk. Now that everything is closed I can finally confirm that collectively we have raised a staggering £7,221.84 (including giftaid) for the Motor Neurone Disease Association.

A massive and final Thank You again to everyone that supported us on our challenge.

Also, I am personally just back from taking some R+R having just enjoyed some time on Annual Leave in Turkey with the family and I’m now back at the desk refreshed for the busy summer ahead.

With school summer holidays looming, like most businesses that supply B2B services into education this means two things… staff holidays and a busy summer working in the education sector!

School holidays for officeflow mean we will be busy installing large numbers of interactive screens, photocopiers, printers and software solutions into many of the education trusts and schools we supply managed print services to.

We have also received the fantastic news of another large local high school in Norwich moving to officeflow for their print services and three more primary schools in west Norfolk joining us and also taking PaperCut to assist with their print management. However, there is something eerie about being in a totally empty school when installing hardware but it’s always the holidays that see’s contractors from electricians, decorators and ‘copier people’ doing what we do best in preparation for the start of the new term.

It’s also been a fantastic month in relation to our new Chelmsford office as we start to see machine requests coming through to the service department and we begin to install hardware into our more ‘southern’ areas.

To date this has been a healthy mix of devices from the Develop photocopiers to Epson heat-free copiers and printers and wide format devices.

In conclusion a healthy and warm month with everyone feeling buoyant and ready to hit holiday season head-on and install lots of new devices to lots of new customers.

Now where is that air-con button in the van….

Pier2Pier for Motor Neurone Disease

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officeflow pier2pier Walk

TOM McCARTHY

Director

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The month of May proved to be a very busy one for team officeflow for various reasons and perhaps the most important message we have portrayed personally to date.

Motor Neurone Disease (MND) is a charity that is extremely close to all of our hearts as some members of our team have and are experiencing this first hand. It was decided a few months back that we should be doing our bit to raise awareness and some money to support MNDA. It was something we wanted to get most of the team participating in and as I am sure many of you have seen over our social media platforms we decided to walk Pier2Pier. This was a 34 mile walk from Great Yarmouth Pier to Cromer Pier. 11 hours, 70,000+ steps later and some sore heads and legs we made it and delighted to report we raised an incredible £6,180.58!! Thank you so much to every single person that supported us along the way and Yare Shipping Services for providing the fuel in the way of bottled water and plenty of KitKats to keep us going.

Operations at officeflow HQ also kept us extremely busy in the month of May with the official launch of our new Chelmsford Office which in turn meant we welcomed 2 new fantastic sales account managers to the family. Stacey Pooley and James Millard join us having vast amounts of experience within the industry and are here and ready to support managed print services for many customers in and around the Chelmsford area. This is a fantastic move for Officeflow and the next large step in the right direction of achieving our Vision & Missions.

The official opening of our new Chelmsford office has also helped us achieve our second-best month to date with some fantastic new customers on board including the role out of a 35-machine account, a nice one for our fantastic team of engineers to get their teeth in to. In a month where we were treated to a large number of 4-day weeks due to the bank holidays achieving the figures we have is testament to the team, although I think a 4 day week is something we could all get a bit too used to 🤣

Jamie Marshall celebrated his birthday in the month of May so a massive happy birthday to him!

Overall, we come into June in high spirits as a team, with plenty to look forwards to. It seems summer might finally be with us so plenty to be cheerful about.

Tom McCarthy – Director