Some might say business at Uniscribe is done a bit backward. But Ronald Self, president and CEO, thinks it’s the company’s best advantage.

“We don’t start with the solution; we start with what is your challenge,” said Self. “What’s keeping you up at night, where’s the pain in the business, where do you see inefficiencies, where can we add more value? Then we bring expertise to those areas.”

In 2002, Self was enlisted by Uniscribe, a $100 million private company based in Wilton, Conn., to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses and its potential for growth in the legal document services industry. After extensive market research, Self proposed a progressive three- to five-year business plan that would help the company maximize its potential.

“I thought it was a great business,” said Self. “They had great people, they had a great client base, but they needed to change a number of things to be more successful. Once I completed the initial plan, they asked me to run the company.”

Fanning out
After officially joining the company in September 2002, Self put his plan for the company into action, beginning with purveying its services to larger, untapped markets.

“We had great expertise in the legal market,” explained Self, who noted that close to 85% of Uniscribe’s business was with law firms. “On one hand, that was a great strength. On the other hand, there was great opportunity for Uniscribe to grow in the corporate market with corporate law departments, corporate marketing departments, and places that have large-scale document management needs.”

Although Uniscribe offered customers a catalogue of expert document management services, including reprographics, digital services, and outsourcing services, those services weren’t presented in a comprehensive package. “I saw we had created a company that had three service offerings, but they weren’t pulled together around the client,” said Self. “They were run
as three different businesses.”

To prepare the company for the market crossover, its approach to how the services were offered needed an overhaul. “We broke down what I call the vertical silos and created a geographic focus around a common customer,” he said. “We [adopted] more of a consultative approach: talk to a client about the full range of their document management needs, and then bring them the solution that best fits what they are trying to do.”

From the ground up
The company’s structure also needed to be reorganized. “We had to break down the whole hierarchy, change the compensation systems, and change the way we measured success in our market,” Self said.

Rather than having someone leading each of those business segments, Self appointed a geographic general manager over all three parts of the business to deploy the resources properly, focus on potential opportunities for local growth, and channel those services to its clients.

“We also put the P&L measurements locally closer to the business,” he explained. “We took out many levels of organizational hierarchy so we could be much closer to our customers. We changed the way we were going to market in a lot of ways.”

Although the changes have only been in place since 2002, the program has been a great success. “2003 was the best year in the history of our company,” Self said. “We had growth in all three businesses, margin improvement in all three businesses, significant cost improvement across the company, and record profits last year.”

Quality conscious
Having entered a larger market, Uniscribe has several ongoing challenges to contend with, including distinguishing itself in a highly competitive market and continuing to grow with limited resources. “Managing capital at a time when you’re also trying to drive growth is a balancing act,” Self said.

One way Uniscribe differentiates itself is through quality control. In April 2003, Uniscribe implemented a quality assurance program called Quest, which was the first of its kind in the industry to measure transactional quality at the user level. Essentially, Quest is an online client feedback survey centering on Uniscribe’s quality of work, efficiency, and customer service. Thus far, the company has had a 30% response rate, totaling thousands of surveys per month. On a scale of 1 to 5, with meeting their expectations being a 3, the company’s average is 4.4.

If a client rates Uniscribe’s services at 3 or below, local management is notified, and within 24 hours they meet with the client, address the issue, and do whatever it takes to resolve it. “It’s been a great success,” said Self. “I think it’s been a rallying point for our people. It’s created a culture that says, ‘If we can’t measure it, we can’t fix it.’”

Cream of the crop
Uniscribe also focuses on recruiting the best employees around. “They are the ones who have to interface with the client, understand their needs, craft a solution, and then go back and build it locally,” Self said, underscoring the importance of quality employees to his business.

Uniscribe takes great care in selecting not only employees with talent but also those who share similar core values and will be a good fit culturally. Once on board, employees attend both online and live training classes at Uniscribe University, which trained more than 150 supervisors and managers last year. “We have strict criteria of training and certifying our managers on how to give feedback, coach and counsel, and select the right people to work in our environment,” Self said.

An intuitive approach to customer service, a redesign of the corporate structure, and a strong commitment to employee excellence are helping Uniscribe compete successfully in a tough market. Agility is the other important ingredient in the company’s success, said Self.

“One big advantage we have over the competition is that we’re lean, we’re nimble, we’re flexible, and we’re aggressive,” he said. “We can be decisive, take action, and implement things very quickly.”