A Personal History with Xerox

Years ago, during a customer roundtable, the host opened the session by asking everyone what they had wanted to be when they were growing up.

My response, without hesitation, was, “I wanted to work for Xerox.”

That answer created a slightly awkward and funny moment.

At the time, I was part of Ricoh’s Global Production Solutions team, formerly IBM Infoprint, which was based in Boulder, Colorado. Sitting in a room representing one of Xerox’s larger competitors was probably not the ideal setting to admit that Xerox had once been my dream employer.

But it was true.

Growing Up Around Xerox

As a kid, our Xerox sales representative, Carl Jenson, was the coolest guy I knew. He wore gold wire-rimmed glasses and three-piece suits, and he drove a big fancy car. To me, he represented a company that exuded professionalism and class.

But the appeal went beyond the image.

Xerox was one of the most innovative companies in the world. Long before digital transformation became a boardroom cliché, Xerox was changing how people interacted with computers, created and reproduced documents, and moved information through organizations. For those of us who grew up around the industry, it felt as though the company was helping define the future in real time.

My family’s business was a small reprographics firm, and Xerox was woven into the fabric of our daily operations. Xerox service representatives became almost like family. They were familiar faces who spent time in our business, understood how we worked, and showed up whenever we needed them. One of them even attended my wedding.

That was the kind of relationship Xerox built with its customers. It was not simply selling machines. It was becoming part of the operation and, in many cases, part of the story of the businesses it served.

I never ended up working for Xerox, although I came close once. Instead, I spent much of my career watching Xerox from the outside, following its successes, its challenges, and its continuing evolution.

That history is part of what made my recent visit to Go Inspire Group, a Xerox company, in Leicester, UK, so interesting and, in a way, so personal.

Go Inspire is part of Xerox’s Digital Services business, but it also represents something larger: a possible window into what Xerox is becoming.

A Different Kind of Acquisition

Why would Xerox purchase a print service provider?

This is not the first time Xerox has looked beyond equipment to expand its role in business services. In 2010, it acquired Affiliated Computer Services, which became the foundation of its business-process-outsourcing operation before being separated as the independent company Conduent in 2017.

Go Inspire represents a different type of services strategy, but that history makes Xerox’s decision to acquire a services company worth examining.

For those who remember the old Xerox Reproduction Centers, or XRCs, the relationship between Xerox and service providers was sometimes complicated. XRCs often focused on legal copying, scanning, and document production. In many markets, they were viewed as competitors by the very customers Xerox also served.

XRCs no longer exist, and the acquisition of Go Inspire in 2022 feels fundamentally different. Rather than extending Xerox deeper into a traditional print-services model, the acquisition reflects a broader understanding of what customers need today.

Go Inspire is a very different business operating in a different market context. That was one of the questions I wanted to explore when I had the opportunity to connect with Danny Cook.

Danny described the rationale for the acquisition in simple terms: “I think it’s more directional.”

That forward-looking statement says a lot. Go Inspire was not simply an attractive print operation in the UK. Xerox saw a business already moving toward strategy, data, creative services, and omnichannel communications.

Today, businesses are no longer looking for isolated solutions. They are looking for partners who can help orchestrate communication across channels, departments, and customer touchpoints.

The challenge is no longer simply producing documents. It is connecting experiences to outcomes.

A customer may receive a printed statement, scan a QR code, visit a website, receive an email, engage through a mobile device, and ultimately complete a transaction through a digital workflow. Increasingly, organizations want those interactions managed as part of a coherent business strategy rather than a collection of disconnected systems and solutions.

That is where Go Inspire becomes interesting.

Beyond Print

For years, industry observers have framed conversations around print as a debate between physical and digital communications, but the reality is far more nuanced.

Customers do not think in channels. They think in outcomes.

As Danny explained, “We’re an outcome-based business. It’s not about digital or print first.”

That captures the larger shift. The starting point is not the channel. It is understanding what the customer is trying to achieve and then working backward to determine the right combination of data, creative services, technology, digital delivery, and print.

Customers want information when they need it, in the format that makes the most sense at that moment. Sometimes that is digital. Sometimes it is physical. Often it is both.

Organizations that understand this are increasingly focused on customer journeys rather than communication silos. That shift creates opportunities for companies capable of bridging worlds that have historically operated separately and turning those combined capabilities into repeatable solutions that can be scaled across operations, customers, and markets.

“The value is further up the chain,” Danny said.

It is found in understanding who to target, why the communication matters, and how the channels should work together and not simply in producing more output.

Go Inspire brings deep expertise in production, compliance, personalization, data, creative services, and delivery. Xerox adds technology, automation, scale, customer relationships, and a broader digital-services infrastructure.

The opportunity lies in bringing those capabilities together as a unified, repeatable solution.

Viewed through that lens, Xerox’s investment in Go Inspire begins to look less like an acquisition and more like a strategic marker.

The Xerox Renaissance

The opportunity has never been to abandon the expertise Xerox and Go Inspire have built over decades. It is to use that experience as the foundation for something bigger.

As my friend Ray Stasieczko would say, “You can either drag the past into the future or bring the future into the present.”

The difference is whether legacy becomes a constraint or an advantage.

Viewed that way, Xerox’s history in production, information management, service, and customer relationships is not something to escape. It is something to build on.

I believe Xerox may be entering a renaissance of sorts.

It has been through a difficult period of financial and operational restructuring, but it does not appear to be trying to recreate the company it once was or relive the glory days of copiers and office equipment.

Instead, it appears to be leveraging the assets that made Xerox successful in the first place: trusted customer relationships, deep expertise in business communications, operational scale, technology, and an understanding of how information moves through organizations.

Building the Future

As businesses struggle to connect physical and digital experiences, manage increasingly complex customer journeys, and navigate rapidly changing communication preferences, the need for integrated platforms will only grow.

The companies that succeed will not be those that choose paper or digital. They will be the ones that understand how to make both work together.

The company that fascinated me as a teenager may not look the same today.

But the opportunity in front of it may be every bit as significant as the one that made Xerox a household name in the first place.

And that makes this next chapter for Go Inspire, and Xerox itself worth paying attention to.

TreelinePress is built for this kind of work: connecting corporate strategy, market transformation, and the larger stories reshaping customer communications.

I work with organizations through executive interviews, sponsored podcasts, event coverage, market commentary, and custom media projects designed to explain not only what a company is doing, but why it matters.

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