Twenty-five years,
and one question.

For twenty years inside the Graphics Communications Business at Xerox, — I trained sales forces and built recurring revenue systems for commercial printers, sign makers, and direct mail companies. The job was to help them transition from selling production runs to selling the value of personalized marketingand sales campaigns.

Which meant standing between very expensive devices and the business owners who had to justify buying into a new business model. Do that a few times and you stop talking about the devices and click charges, much to the chagrin of my managers. I had to start proving what the new business model was actually worth to thousands of customers— and then had to to prove it, in real time, with their numbers. Numbers they could take to the bank.

A framework came out of that. It has a name - which was actually a guided conversation that changed the business paradigm for good.

Five questions, asked in order. The first four are what the current situation is. The fifth is the one that really mattered.

The deliverable was never just the Executive Summary. It was a single page — a simple P&L (Profit & Loss Model), built from the owner’s own data, during a short conversation,revealing a number they had never seen, nor even considered.

My framework was formally published as the MAGIC Model Profitability Worksheet and distributed to commercial printers and production printing facilities worldwide. Not a marketing piece — but a working tool, with the math it needed to balance 'costs' with new opportunities.

That line is the whole methodology in one sentence. A number a business owner can defend to a stranger who controls their money is a number that has done its job.

Delivered across North America, New Zealand, and Australia — at Premier Partner events, training rooms and in meetings didn’t talk about production printers and presses. It showed the audience, and our customers a different way to think about what their own business was worth.

The competitors at tradeshows and other venues were selling features. The MAGIC Model was showing numbers that represent the value of a great idea - that the right message at the right time to the right person was far more valuable than a 10,000 piece print run of the same postcard. That’s not a sales technique. It’s just what happens when you do the math with someone instead of at them.

A few of the published campaign results — show real results, not just wishful thinking.

Different industries, different products, one method. Which is the claim this whole company rests on: the math doesn’t care what you sell.

The methodology kept running into the same wall: a great conversation with a number at the end of it still needs a system underneath it to capture what that number represents. So the argument got written down — 1to1Create, a white paper I co-authored, made the case that well-timed, relationship-driven communication creates real revenue, but only on a platform built for the relationship rather than for the hardware sale.

No such online platform existed at the time. That meant that this framework was actually a forecast of things to come, and it was right about everything except the timing. It took two decades for the infrastructure to show up.

Nothing about the method changed. What changed is who can afford it. The enterprise clients always had this. The farm at the end of the road, and the local business owner never did — not because the math was different, but because the price of the system was cost prohibitive.

The keynote was called Conversations for Possibility. It’s the same conversation. The scale is now smaller, and the people in it matter more.

Everything else moved — the industry, the technology, the business model. These didn’t.