VoIP
How Print IT companies are building recurring revenue without a telecoms team
Managed print margins are under pressure. That’s not a new observation, but it’s becoming an increasingly urgent one. The combination of declining print volumes, competitive pricing, and customers increasingly questioning the value of long-term hardware contracts means that businesses built purely around managed print are in a more difficult position than they were five years ago.
The businesses that are navigating this most successfully have one thing in common: they’ve found a way to build recurring revenue that doesn’t depend on print volumes continuing to grow.
One of the most natural paths is hosted voice services. Our research found that 26% of UK Print IT companies are already offering voice to their customers. Among companies with 50 or more staff, it’s over half. These businesses aren’t telecoms companies. Most of them started in exactly the same place you’re in now, expert in managed print, with a loyal customer base and a strong desire to make more from those relationships without taking on unnecessary risk or complexity.
So how are they doing it?
The model is simpler than you might think
The first objection we hear from Print IT businesses when the conversation turns to voice is a version of: “We don’t have anyone who knows telecoms.” It’s entirely understandable. Voice services feel technical. There’s terminology to learn, customer questions to field, and the looming prospect of being the person your customers call when something isn’t working.
The good news is that the businesses successfully adding voice revenue are not hiring telecoms engineers. They’re using a wholesale model that keeps the technical complexity where it belongs (with the platform provider) while the reseller focuses on what they’re already good at: the customer relationship.
In a well-structured reseller arrangement, you get a portal, you provision customers through it, and the platform handles everything underneath. Support, infrastructure, updates, resilience, none of that is your problem. You buy the service at a wholesale rate, mark it up, and bill your customer monthly. The margin is yours. The complexity isn’t.
The recurring revenue calculation
Let’s be specific about what this looks like commercially. A typical SME customer might have 20 users on a hosted phone system. As an illustration: at a wholesale cost of, say, £5–8 per user per month and a market retail price of £12–18 per user, there’s a meaningful margin on each seat, every month. Multiply that across a growing base of customers and the compounding effect of monthly recurring revenue starts to change the shape of your business.
Unlike a hardware sale, which generates revenue once and then disappears from your P&L, a voice customer generates revenue continuously. They renew. They add users as they grow. They upgrade as their needs change. A customer you win in year one is still contributing margin in year five.
This is the core commercial logic that’s driving Print IT businesses toward voice. It’s not about becoming a telecoms company. It’s about changing the shape of your revenue so that a larger percentage of it arrives predictably, every month, regardless of what’s happening with print volumes or hardware cycles.
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A customer you win in year one is still contributing margin in year five. That’s the shape of business that Print IT companies are building toward. |
What about the customers who already have phones?
A common hesitation is the assumption that customers already have a voice solution and won’t want to change. The reality is that many SME customers are either already looking at hosted alternatives or will need to make the move in the near future as legacy systems age out. As their managed print provider, you have an existing relationship, existing trust, and existing billing arrangements. The conversation about adding voice is much easier than it would be for someone starting from scratch.
The dealer option: even simpler than reselling
For businesses that want the recurring revenue without even the light operational overhead of a reseller arrangement, there’s a newer model worth knowing about. We are offering a dealer option available to Print IT businesses. The mechanics are simple: you make the introduction, the platform provider handles the sale, the onboarding, the support, and the billing, and you receive a share of the earnings in return.
When it comes to how you receive that share, you have a choice. You can take a one-off upfront commission at the point of sale, a clean, immediate payment with no ongoing involvement. Or you can take a monthly recurring revenue share for the life of the contract, including renewals.
The upfront option suits businesses where cashflow is the immediate priority. But the numbers tend to favour the recurring model. As an illustration: on a typical 10-user customer on a 36-month contract, an upfront commission might pay out £700 at signing. The same referral on a monthly recurring basis generates around £32 per month, meaning by month 22 you’ve already earned more than the upfront option, and you keep earning through month 36 and beyond into any renewal. Over the full initial term, the recurring model pays out £1,165 in total, 66% more than the upfront alternative.
For businesses that want to test the waters before committing to a full reseller relationship, or that simply don’t want the operational complexity, the dealer model is a meaningful entry point. And once you’re comfortable with how voice works in your customer base, moving to a full reseller arrangement, with your own branding and your own margin, is a natural next step.
Where to start
The businesses that have added voice successfully didn’t do it all at once. The typical pattern is: identify two or three existing customers who are already asking about phone systems or who are on ageing setups, have a conversation, and build from there. You don’t need to go to market with a fully formed proposition on day one. You need to find out whether the opportunity is real in your customer base, and the only way to do that is to start the conversation.
If you’d like to understand what that looks like in practice, what the commercial model is, what the onboarding process involves, and what other Print IT businesses are doing, we’re happy to walk you through it.
Curious what a voice referral actually looks like, and what you’d earn from it? We can walk you through both payout options and show you how other Print IT businesses are building this into their commercial model.
