Brother UK is targeting to onboard 100 new partners in the office automation (OA) channel. Managing Director Phil Jones spoke to Michelle Ryder about the company’s channel-centric strategy and its commitment to helping partners maximise value with every customer, and not leave money on the table.
Businesses today are navigating unchartered waters. Phil Jones cites UK flexible working law updates, the potential impact of tariffs on businesses with USA interests and the ripple effects on global supply chains, as well as the continued decline in print volumes, as some of the key issues creating uncertainty within resellers’ customers’ businesses. “It’s clear that the OA community just like other parts of the information technology channel are dealing with customers’ uncertainty.
Businesses don’t know how the flexible working legislation is going to play out – is their whole company going to move to compressed hours, is somebody who’s working on a three-two hybrid basis going to move to a two-three, or if everyone’s got to come back to the office, they could potentially lose up to 8% of their workforce. Consequently, customers are in a holding pattern and we’re seeing evidence of that through MPS agreements being extended, rather than new ones signed,” he said. worth braving the commute and coming into.
After we adopted a hybrid working model at our Manchester HQ, we completely redesigned the space, adding break-out spaces, lounge areas, booths, and Teams-enabled meeting rooms. That was essential to support collaborative working and social interaction. This led to us having to completely re-evaluate all our workplace technology including workgroup printing and a more balanced deployment of devices.”
A comprehensive offering Brother has a comprehensive offering from its EcoPro ink and toner subscription service which can cater to a single user looking for a printer and inks delivered as and when they need it, through to its channel-delivered MPS offering which comprises three distinct packages: MPS Essential, Professional and Enterprise.
With MPS Essential, businesses choose the printing subscription that suits them, and Brother will automatically deliver new genuine ink and toner and fix the device if needed. MPS Professional caters to the mid‑market – 50 -250 employees – with higher volume print requirements.
Benefits include tailored user interfaces on machines, additional weekend and bank holiday maintenance Jones pointed to several other factors directly correlated to the pandemic including the deceleration in print volumes and the acceleration of digitisation at a rate which wasn’t predicted, which have added further complexity. “A lot of vendors who specialise primarily in large departmental copier devices have clearly felt the brunt of that; people aren’t in the office five days a week like they used to be, print volumes have dropped as a result and many high-volume departmental A3 devices are sitting underutilised in half empty offices,” he said.
The workplace is changing Jones continued: “Business leaders are working out whether to downsize real estate, reconfigure their tech stack including printers, and if they need to redesign workspaces. Everyone doesn’t really know what to do right now and we’ve got to link all those things. “It’s not just that the print sector is changing, the print sector is changing as a result of workplace conventions changing, including the advent of artificial intelligence emerging as a known unknown in terms of impact to working practices. “The fact is that post-pandemic employers have got to make the office demonstrations.
MPS Enterprise is the vendor’s fully bespoke offering for resellers servicing large corporates with complex printing needs spanning multiple locations. Benefits include specialist pre-sales consultancy for customers and ongoing optimisation of the service through a dedicated Brother account manager. “Notably, 100% of the ink and toner cartridges can be returned for recycling or remanufactured at our recycling technology centre in Ruabon, North Wales, meaning that zero waste goes to landfill and with our MPS offering we provide full data on recycling and remanufacturing to support companies’ reporting on sustainability – it’s a full turnkey end-to-end solution,” Jones explained.
Balanced deployment Brother advocates balanced deployment – looking at where people are printing, how they are printing and what their needs are in this new, digitised world. “That approach provides the information needed to remove or redeploy devices into spaces where they are most needed and make the print infrastructure more practical for people,” he added. Jones argues that the channel needs to steer those conversations with their customers.
He continued: “This recruitment drive is going really well – we’ve signed up 29 new partners already – so what we’re saying is obviously landing well within the OA community. “Rather than avoiding the issue that they have a big device in-situ and they’re worried they will lose a customer, because they haven’t got an alternative to offer, what we’re discovering is that partners are interested in talking to us about how our offering can enable them to open up the conversation about how they can help customers to navigate the changes in work practices and the resultant technology impacts.”
Channel support Brother has an active partner base that sells transactionally. It sells 1000s of printers every month. The vendor is the number one brand in SoHo laser printing and in the SMB sector it is the number two brand. Jones said: “What we’ve realised on this journey is that there are a number of OA dealers that are effectively spun out from what we could describe as low-touch dealers i.e. ones with their own service and support infrastructure.
They are great salespeople but don’t necessarily have the back-end infrastructure to do everything when it comes to managed print services. “We call these high-touch partners, and we have a team here whose job it is to support them, helping them with portal familiarisation, with contracts and managing their contracts with Brother effectively.
We also have an end-user team that can help them go and win business, one of the team will go with them to a customer site to talk about a walk-in take over agreement for example.” Maximising business value He continued: “There’s going to have to be some challenging conversations between resellers and their customers. The question is where are we in that conversation, and where are our partners? “Brother is a channel-centric company and what we do is provide our partners with a comprehensive product portfolio to meet diverse customer needs.
So, if they feel they have a customer at risk, they have an alternative and an opportunity to mitigate some of the uncertainty that they are facing around their future. “This recruitment drive isn’t about us saying: we have a channel partner programme, and we can give you x% rebate on x sales and some marketing development funds.
This is a much more material conversation, which has potentially far-reaching consequences for the channel and for the business valuations of these channel partners in their future.” Jones points out that at some point a dealer principal will be looking to sell and will want to ensure they get maximum value for their business. “This is not just a conversation about our programme, it’s a conversation about what can you do to ensure that you have maximum value for your business with the maximum recurring revenues possible – because the more recurring revenue, the higher your multiple will be when you come to exit,” he said.
Don’t leave money on the table Given all the changes that are happening in the print industry, Jones says that resellers need to make sure they are staying relevant to their key customers and in full partnership mode with them, and that they don’t leave money on the table. “What I mean by that is Brother also has other devices in its portfolio, like our specialised printing solutions and our labelling devices.
These are other things that they can be selling. A good example of this is we had one large customer enterprise who has also deployed our labelling devices in their warehouses, and we have a single application that allows them to manage the whole fleet.” Jones adds that print is still a huge market with billions of pages printed every year. “Resellers are either looking for a new revenue stream or contractually securing what they already have, and our partner recruitment programme is really an outcome of all of those things.
Everybody understands that this will not be a growing market, and it will slowly decline given the generational changes within workplaces. However, print is not dead – it’s declining, but it definitely is not dead. “Our strategy is to work with partners to make sure that they’re maximising value with every customer that they have right now, and that they’re not leaving money on the table. That is how they will optimise their value on exit,” he concluded.
Click here to register to attend the Brother MPS Partner day on the 23rd of October 2025
