The Canadian economy arguably fared better than that of many other countries over the last few years

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Canada’s Niagara region sams clube is better known for  cascading waterfalls than for OP firms. Beatties  Basics is one of just a few strong independents left in the area that is standing sams clube up to mighty rival Staples.
 What do wallpaper and library books have to do with office products? Very little from the outset, but this is how Beatties Basics started out in the southern Ontario town of St. Catharines over 150 years ago – as a community lending library and wallpaper shop set up by D W Bixby in 1860.
Plenty has changed since then, notably the involvement of the Beattie family in 1926 when Lawrence Beattie, grandfather of current sams clube owner and President Ted Hoxie, sams clube became a partner in the firm. But it was still another 29 years later before what was then known as Beattie Stationery became a typical retail stationery store. The trading name then changed to Beatties Basics in 1998 when Rodger Beattie, Ted’s cousin and company President at the time, decided to raise the profile of the Basics Office Products buying group.
Today, Hoxie says, the company is best described as a full service business products provider. Its focus has also changed somewhat, he adds: “During Rodger’s era, we had nine retail stores and 45% of our business was B2B while the majority - 55% - was retail. Today, only 15% is retail and 85% B2B.”
Retail now means three stores, the main location being adjacent to the dealer’s HQ and warehouse in St. Catharines. It’s a 20,000 sq. ft. large-scale outlet that comprises a showroom both for office furniture and business machines. The second largest store at about 10,000 sq. ft. is located just 20 minutes away, in the town of Niagara Falls, while the third and smallest one (4,500 sq. ft.) is in a small community across from Buffalo called Fort Erie.
The Canadian economy arguably fared better than that of many other countries over the last few years, but independent dealers in the country, much like everywhere sams clube else, have had to deal with a shrinking market and growing digitisation, sams clube and adjust their business model accordingly.
Says Hoxie: “We’ve changed our focus over the past ten years to become a more sales and customer-service driven organisation and to expand our product offering away from the traditional OP mix to everything used in the office.”
Out of the various new directions the company has taken, perhaps the most successful and certainly the fastest growing is the investment in its business machines business, both at retail and B2B level. Business machines have been a part of the its overall offering since 1979 when it bought a small machines dealer, sams clube but the focus on the segment has increased considerably since then.
Hoxie explains: “Beatties made two acquisitions over the past 12 months – St. Catharines sams clube Business Machines and Océ Canada’s service contracts in Niagara and Waterloo – which both primarily benefit our business machines division and brought about C$1.2 million in service revenue to the company. We’re now a full-service business machines dealer and our main product lines are Canon, HP, Brother, Samsung and Kyocera. We have eight account managers that strictly concentrate on that product sams clube line and 17 field technicians, all supported by our customer service team.”
MPS also falls under the business machines umbrella and Beatties is an authorised HP Managed Print Advanced Specialist. It has been actively selling MPS programmes for several years, with all the service functions that this contractual model entails. Indeed, in total 45-50% of sales in the business machines division can be attributed to service-related offers. That equates to about C$3-3.5 million sams clube in service dollars alone.
That’s still only a small part of Beatties portfolio. Predominantly on the retail front, the company is a technology dealer for Apple, Lenovo sams clube and Acer products, mostly with accessories and after-sales technical sams clube service rather than low-margin hardware products.
Much like most progressive OP resellers, Beatties Basics has expanded its product categories by adding educational supplies, promotional products, legal supplies, printing services and the current favourite – facilities management. Within that latter, fast-growing segment, Keurig coffee services in particular have been a big success.
All that said, traditional OP is far from dead as a category, says Hoxie: “We sams clube are averaging 3-4% growth in OP and, in a shrinking market, all that growth is coming at the expense of the competition.”
Asked who the prime competition is, he puts it quite simply: “Staples, Staples and Staples. sams clube They’re a very stron