What a difference a year can make in the office supplies industry

On Friday 28 April, Stylus Stationers’ Nick and Kathy Bugden celebrated their first anniversary as a partner with Office Power. Nick marked the occasion with an exciting short-break, taking Friday off to kick-start the long Bank Holiday weekend sailing from Chichester to Beaulieu and back. All the time, he stayed in touch with and in control of the business from an iPad he took with him on the trip.

One of the UK’s leading independent office supplies dealers, Stylus is based in south east London and was founded by Kathy Bugden in 1984. Before joining Office Power, Kathy and Nick found themselves constantly fire-fighting: instead of running the business, the business was running them.

“We approached Office Power because it’s different. They support dealers to achieve their strategic goals and within months we felt like we were back in control. By removing the unnecessary burden of managing menial tasks, we made more time for ourselves and more time to run and grow the business. With the flexible Office Power system that allows us to run the entire business from one platform, we can even manage the business from an iPad on holiday,” said Nick.

One year on and Nick has penned his top 11 highlights from being an Office Power partner:

1. We now have a best-in-class website creating a good impression of our company and giving our customers a great purchasing experience.
2. Office Power’s powerful dealer portal puts us firmly in control of our business.
3. We spend significantly less time “fighting fires” and have significantly more time to spend looking after our customers.
4. We have benefitted from a vast reduction in overheads, which has led to Stylus becoming a much more profitable business. Our profitability has increased by over 300%.
5. We have a better insight into and more control over margins using Office Power’s reports.
6. We enjoy access to – and the benefits of – dedicated customer care, accounts and IT teams.
7. Our information and systems are never out of date – we have a platform that evolves to meet our changing business needs.
8. A move away from legacy systems that were getting increasing difficult to support.
9. Highly professional customer account-management support from the Office Power team for our larger customers.
10. The perfect opportunity to de-clutter and reorganise our business after 32 years of trading.
11. No long daily commutes to and from the office giving us over two hours of our lives back each working day and a much-improved life-work balance.

To find out more about Office Power please e-mail us at info@officepower.net