Meet Phillis Real Estate
Company
Alex Phillis is the founder of Phillis Real Estate, an independent real estate agency in North Gold Coast, Queensland, specialised in luxury properties. Alex started his company in 2017 and decided to use digital channels as a key differentiator, leveraging social media, video and high-quality images that would appeal to property buyers. Letterbox drops, brochures and other physical marketing collateral, however, have also been a key component to his business from the start. “We can’t go completely digital in our marketing; the market is nowhere near ready for that, so we needed a mix,” he says.
Product
, Data Capture & Extraction
Key learnings for channel partners
- Flexibility. Understand end-customer pain points, be flexible and adjust to the changing market conditions. Consider charging for toner usage as an alternative to a fixed charge.
- The reality. Today, only 2% of all paper sold in Australia is of A3 size. This shows that the vast majority of the market does not need A3 machines. Talk to your customers about switching to A4 and show them how this would be in their best interest.
- factcheck: A4 machines can print three times as many pages between service calls compared to an A3. Customers are gladly surprised at the efficiency gains from using these smaller machines. Source: BEI Services, Nexera October 2020.
- Communicate. Talk to your clients about the tax benefits of buying office equipment outright.
For Phillis Real Estate, success means handling a lot of documents, from promotional flyers, contract proposals and signed documents. Alex Phillis, the founder of the business, had previously engaged with a printer reseller who signed him for a 5-year contract on a second-hand A3 machine. He was also charged a minimum volume per month regardless of the use of the printer. As the pandemic hit, the problems of this arrangement were exposed.
Firstly, all real estate contracts are in A4, so there was no need for an A3 machine. Secondly, given that most of the team was working remotely, the large A3 printer sat in the office with a much lower use, costing the company money. Having this machine became very expensive.
Alex Phillis Founder, Phillis Real EstateI’m really happy with our new A4 Lexmark machine. It’s smaller compared to the previous A3 printer that we had, and yet this one is so much faster
Adrian Smith from OfficeFix, a Lexmark Authorised Channel partner, approached Alex Phillis and offered to assess the situation of his company, Phillis Real Estate. Adrian realised that 98% of the company’s printing volume was done in A4 with an average of 3,000 A4 pages per month. He offered help to provide a better deal for the company that would be flexible enough under any market conditions.
OfficeFix offered a different charge model, where Alex’s company would only be billed for the use of toner. On top of this, Alex decided to buy the A4 machine outright – a Lexmark A4 XC8160– using the accelerated asset depreciation benefit introduced by the Australian Federal Government earlier this year as one of the measures to support small businesses through the COVID-19 emergency.