How Dropbox Business is helping transform business growth in publishing

Westchester Publishing Services was at an inflexion point in 2014 as it wrestled with how to compete with new, agile, offshore competitors. At that point they changed their business structure and doubled-down on investing and competing in a crowded marketplace.

Since that pivotal change, Westchester has seen growth around the world, including the opening of new offices in India and the UK.

The secret to its rapid growth? According to Chief Revenue Officer Tyler Carey, there are a few things critical to its success: “Ambition alone doesn’t build a business globally. We needed to hire in additional management with new perspectives, foster an environment of collaboration – both internally and with our customers – and provide the tools for that collaboration. Installing Dropbox Business made that all fall into place.’’

To find out how Dropbox Business is helping transform a brand like Westchester, and enabling it to scale globally, watch the video above.

Transcript

Tyler Carey, Chief Revenue Officer, Westchester Publishing Services
“In publishing, the trend is for more established businesses to be bought by more younger, leaner, more agile companies. We realized if we didn’t change we were at risk of being consumed by all of that, and it was necessary for us to expand and grow. There were three core areas that needed to be addressed in the business. There’s just been a legacy of using outdated technology like FTP as kind of the go-to for a lot of vendors and, you know, even some publishers in the space as well, so by moving to Dropbox Business, we were able to offer our clients a much more nimble, and agile and modern way of handling the transfer of very large files that are common in the publishing industry.

The other piece of that is that as we adopted, we were able to look at the existing workflows that we had globally between our operations in the States, the UK and India and identify better ways of doing business rather than just trying to do the same old thing with new tools in the toolbox.

Lastly the big ‘a-ha’ moment for us was when we had been working on building a client portal, that would allow our clients to access our systems in real time, so by rebuilding that portal, on Dropbox as the architecture behind the scenes, and using the DB APIs for file transfer, we were able to expand our client’s capabilities to manage files with version control, access archives that are stored in the system, and transfer gigantic files very quickly to us and vice versa, and layering on top of that our own technology and our understanding of publishing workflows to make something that really is something that really is a fit for our clients to make them much more efficient and make their experience with Westchester better.

The great opportunity this has given us too though is that by re-envisaging how we engage with our clients’ content, and by the added capacity that tools like Dropbox bring us, we’re able to embrace new markets that we weren’t in before, including the educational space, which has gigantic, high colour files, which transferring back and forth with staff, freelancers and clients via FTP just would not have plausible. The right IT tools do transform business growth, no doubt about it…just look at us!”