Tech Transformation

What does an hour of lost productivity a day, multiplied across ten people, actually add up to? At Dupler Office, it added up to an entire employee they didn’t know they were paying for.

That’s the hidden cost of old tech that Megan Jackson, Director of Design at the Columbus, Ohio furniture dealership, landed on when she looked back at what her team was losing to computers that crashed mid-meeting, servers that wouldn’t connect over VPN, and programs that simply wouldn’t launch. Roughly an hour a day, per designer. With ten designers on staff, that’s not an inconvenience. That’s a full headcount, gone, to nothing but friction.

Summary

• Dupler Office’s design team was quietly losing about an hour per designer per day to technology problems — across ten designers, the equivalent of an entire additional employee.
• A showroom renovation, a full cloud migration, a shift to wireless-first infrastructure, and a companywide laptop refresh for the design team all happened within three to four months of each other.
• The fix wasn’t a bigger IT budget. It was moving money away from servers and cabling and into the tools designers actually touch — for about $100 more per designer, per month.
• When technology actually works, it disappears. Dupler’s designers now run live, in-meeting design sessions with clients without worrying about a dropped call or a frozen screen.

Jason Lund, CIT’s Director of Innovation and Solutions, has known Dupler Office since before either of them worked with CIT — he was their independent consultant for years before bringing them on as a customer. When he finally sat down with owner Randy Dupler to do a full technical assessment of the business, he wasn’t there to sell a fix. He was there to understand why a genuinely well-run design team kept getting stuck.

Four Transformations, One Timeline

Most businesses would call one of these projects a big year. Dupler took on four at once.

The company was mid-renovation on its entire experience center showroom. At the same time, it was migrating everything off physical servers and into the cloud — partly because the new space simply wasn’t going to have room for a server closet. Layered on top of that: a hybrid, fully free-address workspace, where no designer sits at the same desk two days in a row, and a companywide rollout of new laptops for the entire design team.

“It was really disruptive, extremely disruptive,” Megan said. Before the renovation, every conference room ran on different technology, every workstation had a different connection type — some docking stations, some HDMI, some mystery cables nobody could identify — and the design team was still working on gaming laptops that weren’t built to run design software for eight hours straight, every day. None of that was going to survive a move to a free-address office where any designer might sit anywhere.

Retiring the “Cap the Well” Mindset

Jason is blunt about what he found when CIT’s team interviewed Dupler’s finance, accounting, and design staff: the business was still set up the way a lot of dealerships were before the pandemic — wired connections, an on-site server room, an assumption that everyone works from the same desk every day.

“It is the accepted norm in our industry that designers are equipped with often cheap technology,” Jason said. “People are trying to look for sort of a silver bullet. I just want to spend a little bit of money and cap the well and fix the problem, and that’s not the reality.”

Gaming laptops were part of that norm too, and Jason doesn’t spare himself from the correction. He’d recommended them for years before realizing they weren’t built for the job. “Gaming laptops have no place in business as a business tool for people who work all day running those things 100% of the time. It’s a bad solution.”

The professional-grade laptops that replaced them aren’t cheap — Jason pointed out that a laptop that would have sold for around $4,000 at the same margin a couple of years ago is closer to $8,000 now. But once CIT ran the actual math per designer, the difference came out to roughly $100 a month. One billable hour of design time. Against an hour a day already being lost to tech problems, the numbers weren’t close.

A Team Laptop Rollout, Not an Individual One

One decision Megan credits with making the laptop transition land well: Dupler didn’t hand out new machines one at a time as people happened to need them. They sat the whole design team down at a table, together, and set every laptop up at once.

“The value of having everybody sit around a table together and set up their laptops at the same time… that camaraderie around being able to troubleshoot and problem solve shoulder to shoulder with all of our peers at the same time” made the rollout easier for everyone, Megan said. Feedback from the team backed it up — people learned from watching each other work through setup issues in real time, instead of hitting the same snags alone, days apart.

When Tech Disappears, Designers Show Up Differently

Dupler now runs ten designers against a smaller sales team — designers actually outnumber salespeople at the company. That’s deliberate. Roughly 95% of the projects that come through Dupler’s doors touch design in some way, and designers sit in on nearly every client engagement, an estimated 90% of them, from the earliest quoting conversations onward.

That only works if the technology holds up in the room. Megan described running live design sessions directly in client meetings — showing proposed layouts and solutions in real time, without the fear of a program crashing or a call dropping mid-presentation. Before the transformation, that fear was constant. “You can’t meet deadlines. You can’t execute client meetings,” Megan said of the old setup. “Now, I mean, knock on wood, we haven’t had those experiences in the last several months, which has been extremely refreshing.”

That’s the actual measure of success here — not a shinier laptop, but the fact that nobody on the design team has to think about the laptop at all anymore.

Partners, Not Competitors

The transformation also required Randy Dupler, the company’s owner, to hand over more control than a lot of leaders are comfortable giving up. Jason described him as someone who used to personally buy laptops at Micro Center and stay deeply hands-on with IT decisions. Getting Dupler’s team what they needed meant Randy stepping back and trusting CIT’s recommendations, even when they contradicted advice Jason himself had given years earlier.

CIT also didn’t rebuild Dupler’s vendor relationships from scratch. Rather than replacing the AV and technology partners Dupler already trusted, CIT brought in a partner, EZ-IT, to handle the AV work and coordinated directly with Dupler’s existing vendors on a shared plan. “We came in and worked with the teams that you had relationships with,” Jason said. “We empowered them. We partnered with them.”

That collaborative approach showed up in a very literal way at Dupler’s grand opening. Jason flew out to be there in person, the way he had for the original technical assessment. Nothing broke. The showroom worked exactly as designed, and watching Megan’s pride in the finished space, he admitted, caught him off guard. “It was really smooth,” he said. “It became just a celebration.”

Megan isn’t sure yet what the next chapter looks like — more efficient workflows, a look at where AI fits into an industry she calls “archaic” in places, maybe just holding steady for a while. What she is sure of: technology isn’t the thing standing in the way anymore. “If you’re gonna have stress about something, it’s about things that affect your client or the outcome,” as Jason put it, “not, shoot, is my VPN connection gonna crash?”

Listen to the Podcast Episode

Want the full story behind Dupler Office’s transformation — the renovation, the laptop math, and what it actually takes to make IT disappear? Listen to Megan Jackson, Director of Design at Dupler Office, and Jason Lund, CIT’s Director of Innovation and Solutions, on the Tech for Business podcast.