Eric Belcher Talks About His InnerWorkings With Benzinga

Innerworkings INWK provides managed print and promotional procurement solutions to corporate clients across a range of industries. Its products include direct mail pieces, books, brochures, catalogues, magazines and more. It's also under the Groupon umbrella, much like Benzinga.

INWK CEO and President Eric Belcher spoke to Benzinga to give some insight into the company.

Briefly, when did InnerWorkings start and what do you do?
We've been around for 10 years. InnerWorkings is a global print management firm – we specialize in procuring printed materials for Fortune 1000 companies. With the significant information we have on our network of thousands of suppliers, we are able to match the right job with the right printing asset at the most efficient price.
Beyond that we actually look at the entire print supply chain – so we're designing with intent at the front end and seeing it through to the optimal fulfillment and logistics solutions on the back end.
The end result – we're able to drive customer savings anywhere from 10 – 30%.

How did you identify the hole in the market?
The print market is a large, inefficient industry. We saw an opportunity to disrupt it by leveraging information and technology -- and combine that with the best team of people out there, we found a way to capitalize these inefficiencies.

Growth has been impressive. Are you on target, from your end?
With less that 1% of it under a managed print solution domestically, and only a fraction of that on an international basis, the opportunity is huge. We're convinced we have the best organization in place to service this market. The question really is, who can capture the biggest share of the market? We like to think that as pioneers in the market, it will be us.

How did you get hooked up with the Groupon guys?
The funny part is that it's actually the other way around. Andrew Mason, Founder and CEO of Groupon, worked at InnerWorkings before there ever was a Groupon. In fact, he built some good technology when he was a part of our team – he's got a standing offer here, if the social commerce gig doesn't work out.

So, why aren't more companies using a print management solution?
Frankly, a lot of companies aren't aware that there is an option to help them manage this part of their indirect spend. Printing is a non-core function for most companies – so it's logical to use an outsourced solution – however, there's a lot of incumbent relationships that we encounter, so our job is to make sure CFO's and CMO's understand the massive opportunity that exists by putting a solution like ours in place.