Copy that

The introduction to a salesman's life was harsh for Keith Roher.

At the onset of his career in the early 1990s, a boss handed him a desktop printer with an ultimatum: Put this printer in your trunk and don't come back until you sell it. Roher found a customer, a dentist in Clearwater.

Roher has since moved on to other challenges — some just as daunting.

He's now president of Tampa-based Zeno Office Solutions, a unit of Xerox's Global Imaging division. Made up of 37 independently run companies under the Xerox brand, that unit has around $22 billion in annual sales. Zeno, which Global Imaging acquired in 2013, has nine locations in Florida and 290 employees, including about 145 in Tampa. Sales at Zeno, says Roher, have grown about 10% a year.

The crux of Roher's challenges revolves around managing growth, specifically hiring, training and retaining top employees from the sometimes-elusive millennial generation. He plans to hire at least 30 people this year for the Tampa office, and at least as many in 2017, in roles from sales to support to software development.

“We want to build a company that's a place where you have a career,” says Roher, 46. “We don't want this to be a place where it's a stepping stone.”

On physical growth, the company is moving out of its 26,000-square-foot standalone building in the Westshore district, which it outgrew a few years ago. It's moving into a 42,000-square-foot office about six miles north, off Waters Avenue, in a former FedEx facility.

The new office will be built with a focus on collaborative workspace, where cubicle walls will be replaced by short frosted glass partitions. Executives will have offices visible to employees, with nearby whiteboards for quick meetings. Roher toured the Tampa offices of Tech Data and PricewaterhouseCoopers to get ideas for Zeno. “We want to have constant collaboration and constant communication,” says Roher.

In addition to the new place, Zeno will occupy office space on the top floor of the 500 Westshore building, where it also recently signed a deal for naming rights. Zeno's lighted signs are now on three sides of the building, and its offices there have a state-of-the-art technology showroom.

Roher recognizes hiring and retaining top people goes further than cool office space. For example, Roher is driven by results of a recent internal survey from exit interviews that show the top reason people left Zeno was a lack of expectations. In response to that information, Roher added more training and field experiences for prospective and new employees. The company also has a leadership development program, where Roher's goal is to ultimately have all the leaders come from within.

Roher has been with Zeno since 2000. He joined the firm, founded in 1996, as a vice president of sales. Roher bought into an ownership stake in 2004, refinancing his mortgage to get the capital. Xerox came into the picture in 2013. “We weren't looking to sell,” says Roher. “They came to us.”

Roher, 46, has since overseen the continuation of Zeno's shift from being a straight-up copier company to utilizing technology to manage documents for businesses. One key component: It uses mapping software to remotely monitor client's printers and copiers. Its core market is mid-size businesses, but the client list includes some large entities, such as Moffitt Cancer Center and law firm Carlton Fields.

While Roher talks up the technology and software side of Zeno, he also says the demise of the copy industry's core companion — paper — is exaggerated. “I've been hearing paperless for 23 years,” says Roher. “But paper is still being printed.”

Follow Mark Gordon on Twitter @markigordon