Avoidance Tactics

New document imaging companies, or existing document management companies that are adding scanning as an additional service, must do certain things to ensure their success. If they do not do so, they could possibly guarantee their failure.

Based on my experience as the dean of Scanning School and as the CEO of CopyScan, a company that has been selling document scanning and imaging since 1995, I've compiled a list of five of the most common mistakes to avoid when starting a document imaging service.
 

1. Failing to Formulate a Plan
If you are establishing a new business, it's absolutely crucial to map out your goals for your business and to create a business plan with information on everything from revenue projections and expenses to individual responsibilities.

If you are an existing company providing document shredding or records storage, you need to remember to treat document scanning and imaging as a new division of your company. It must be treated as its own profit center and have its own manager and dedicated staff with its own focus.

If you are already storing records, offering a scan-on-demand service is a great way to begin your document scanning and imaging business. But you can't stop there. Many records storage businesses think they are in the document scanning and imaging business because they can scan files for their customers; however, they don't put the systems in place that enable them to truly get into imaging as a stand-alone service.

Unless you are set up to market document scanning and imaging services on their own and not just as a convenient add-on service for existing storage customers, your revenue will be severely limited. Additionally, if you don't correctly establish management and supervision protocols for your document scanning operation, you may be in for some expensive mistakes and some unprofitable projects.
 

2. Not Understanding the Metrics
Many times, new scanning companies have put the cart before the horse, purchasing equipment without knowing the kinds and types of scanners they actually needed. Scanning equipment is not all the same.

In addition to getting the right scanner to meet their needs, many companies new to the imaging business may not know how to set up their operations and production centers for maximum productivity and efficiency. Many also may forget to create space for the quality control department.

Before you can select the right document scanning equipment for your operation, you need to assess the services your company will offer. Business owners also need to refer to their growth plans, which will help them to buy the right equipment that provides room for growth but does not represent an overinvestment.

The physical layout and work flow of an imaging operation's production department are crucial to getting good productivity.

It is crucial to hire the right people with the right skills. Productivity standards also must be set, so employees understand the output requirements they have for different types of work. Constant measurement of work output is essential, so production workers can get management feedback on their performance.

Constant measurement and benchmarking is not only required for the management of employees, it is required for proper job pricing. The only way to price jobs correctly and to prevent yourself from losing your shirt on document scanning projects is to know all of the steps required in the job work flow and how long each step will take. If your company has a good productivity standards and benchmarks based on project type, condition of the documents and the indexing and add-ons requested by the customer, you will know exactly what the project costs will be and be able to price the project profitably.
 

3. Choosing the Wrong Software
Another important item that can get missed when it comes to imaging is choosing the right scanning software. This is a hugely important item when entering the document scanning and imaging business. Such software should be user friendly in addition to saving images in any format that customers may need. In addition, software should create PDF (portable document format) or TIFF (tagged image file format) files as well as searchable PDFs or OCR (optical character recognition) text files, depending on customers' needs and the number the images. The software also should be able to export these files in the way required by customers' software.

The big mistake can be to get free or cheap software for startups or to use software designed for records storage facilities. Starting with records storage software can be OK, as long as an imaging services provider understands that it could create limitations when working on projects of significant size. Unless the purpose of the document scanning is entirely for electronic archival, which is rarely the case (It's near impossible to compete with hard copy storage.), customers will expect full access to their files so that they can use them.

Some PC or server-based software requires your customers to own their own copies of the software that your company used to create the images of their documents. Most cloud-based software scans documents to the cloud and requires an imaging company's customers to subscribe to the same software. There's nothing wrong with that as long as your customer wants to subscribe. However, a lot of customers have their own content management systems internally and they just want the image files. You may lose sales to that type of customer and limit the growth of your business if your software is of this type.

Sometimes the files need to be immediately shared with other parties, such as in a lawsuit, which means that all of the parties involved will have to subscribe to the imaging company's software system. When a document production order is given in a lawsuit, the party requesting the documents may not be interested in buying software to access the files, and the judge likely will agree with that. Your company may lose sales if you can't easily give customers their files.

Many customers may get angry and feel like a company is holding their files hostage. If they already paid a company to scan their documents, they may feel like the files should be theirs to do with as they please. As an imaging services provider, you might get away with it once, but clients might give future work away to another scanning company if your company continues to use such software.

The other problem imaging companies can run into with some scanning software is that the metadata can't be exported with the files. Again, the customer would need to have the same software that you have or they won't be able to find, access and use their files.
 

4. Failing to Learn Consultative Selling
Of course, marketing is crucial. The easiest way to get started is to cross-market with your company's shredding or records storage services. However, business owners may leave a lot of business untapped if they stop there.

Companies need to create a specific marketing campaign to generate leads for document scanning sales. People searching for document scanning services may not think to look to a document storage or to a shredding company for that service unless those companies specifically market that service.

It is vital to a company's success to understand how customers in different markets use their image files. Document imaging sales is entirely consultative selling. If you don't understand how your customers use these files (or how they could use these files) and how they conduct their day-to-day work with the files, you can't even begin to have a conversation with them about document scanning and imaging.

Imaging service providers have to understand each market and the customers in each market and they have to speak their language. Imaging companies also need to understand enough about their clients' work flows and their daily pains to be able to offer solutions. If you can't offer solutions, you won't get sales or you may have dissatisfied customers.

5. Not Learning from other Companies' Mistakes
There's much more to document scanning and imaging than meets the eye. Getting started without being armed with the right tools, methods and guidance may be a recipe for expensive mistakes.

The good news is that many companies offer instruction on establishing imaging services. Scanning School is run by CopyScan, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based company that has been selling document scanning and Imaging since 1995. Students can learn all of the basics of document scanning and imaging, plus operations and management of the document scanning production process. Best of all, you'll learn the markets, how to speak their language and how to expertly sell document scanning and imaging services.

The author is dean of Scanning School and CEO of CopyScan and RecordShred. He can be contacted through www.ScanningSchool.com or by calling 954-463-9394.