Martin Januš, MyQ’s CEO and Co-Owner: On a Mission to Save People Time

“MyQ will be here as long as there are ways to combine software and hardware to make life easier for users.”

The ever-increasing pace of development in IT, with trends and technologies emerging every day, brings people no relief, only fear and more wrinkles on their foreheads. In light of the foregoing, we’re pleased to present in MyQ, spol. s r.o.

MyQ, spol. s r.o. is an enterprise-class printing and document management solution, with a vibrant community of partners and dealers spread throughout 90 countries. MyQ is self-funded and continues to grow at an astonishing rate.

The company’s headquarters and R&D is situated in a modern office space in Prague, with branches in Austria, Germany, France, the UK, UAE, Russia, and the USA.

Martin Januš: Interview Highlights

Q. Why was the company set up? And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

In 1992, we started as a small family distributor of laser printers and copiers. After a decade, the market changed dramatically. We needed to expand our scope beyond just hardware and competitive pricing to stay in the game, so we started developing several single-purpose utilities designed to help our customers with security and printing. And then we stumbled upon a big gap on the market — managed printing services. There were no universal, easy-to-use, affordable and scalable solutions that would fit our vision of improving printing security, productivity and work efficiency for our clients back in 2006. And we decided to change that. The original team of a handful of programmers rapidly grew to more than 100 people, and our main product, MyQ Solution, has since then found thousands of customers and over a million devices in more than 90 countries.

Q. How successful was your first project roll on? Share the experience.

In the beginning, we only intended to diversify and enhance our local approach to customers in the Czech Republic. However, we were soon faced with significant demand from distributors in other countries, which motivated us to cross the border. I remember the first projects that needed several months of tuning and adjustments to run the system properly on a few copiers. And five years later, MyQ has made it possible for one of its partners to install the system, replace five thousand copiers, secure printing and improve scanning processes in a customer’s organization in less than five weeks, including the training of 12 thousand staff.

Q. What kind of responses have you received from your consumers over the years? How have they motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?

We started as other printing solutions, primarily with securing the print of sensitive documents, simplifying device management, and enhancing reporting and output control. In 2008, the economic crisis helped us open many doors thanks to savings and TCO optimization. Later, customers became interested in safety. This satisfied both CFOs and IT managers while worrying about the largest department in each company, the employees. It was then that we discovered a miraculous benefit – personalization. Something that speaks to all modern cultures. Something that moves people’s attention from just monitoring what they do to how they can do it more efficiently. Something that allows you to focus on what you do best because it simplifies and automatizes any operation with a document, from its capturing, enhancement, transformation, through its workflow to its delivery to a final location. All is done with one simple and fully personalized click on any available printing or mobile device.

Q. What challenges did you face in your initial years? What can your peers learn from it?

The biggest challenge was to understand the needs of different cultures and requests from individual countries and integrate them into one product. It remains a challenge to this day because standards and working styles are changing and you always need to match this change with the right solution as soon as possible.

Q. “Earning the trust and respect of consumers all around the world is through consistent focus on delivering high quality in all of our actions.” How do you interpret this statement?

I fully agree, and I would add that it is extremely important to bring some benefit to everyone on the customer’s side. Otherwise, you create trust and relationship on the one hand, but restlessness and a sense of insecurity on the other.

Q. How do you stay relevant to the consumer interests and needs in this highly volatile market?

Our key is personalization. Modern systems need to have a personalized solution for every business process, employee or department. MyQ makes it very easy to adjust and display the right set of pre-defined functions for each person.

Q. What do you feel are the reasons behind your company’s reputation?

We wanted to make users’ life easier: To help them find extra time in their busy schedule and enable them to do better things than boring bureaucracy. It makes us very happy to receive prestigious awards saying that MyQ is one of the best easy-to-use products they have ever tried. To uphold this reputation, whenever we are implementing a new function, we make sure we remain simple and reliable for our partners and their customers.

Q. Do you have any new products ready to be launched?

We invested a huge amount of effort last year into rewriting or adapting our technology to be able to enter a public cloud environment. We are going to launch more than one product this year (which we’ve internally dubbed “Cloud-First”). It will be an exciting journey for us and our entire partner and customer community. I love to watch how markets change every day to adopt this new working environment. Imagine how many new doors we can open to customers who up until now haven’t been able to install or maintain server products. Now it will be as easy as downloading a new application to your smartphone.

Q. Where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

It depends on the metric, but currently, we are in the top five in our industry without any substantial marketing or sales investments. In other words, MyQ solution is expanding just owing to the word of mouth and recommendation. If you play a game, you naturally want to win. It is always about motivation, which varies among individuals. We are powered by the success of our customers and their users. We love to see them focus on what they do best because we have freed their hands. MyQ will be here as long as there are ways to combine software and hardware to make life easier for users.

Martin Januš: An Enigmatic Leader

Martin is 41 years old and talks about his work with undisguised enthusiasm. He likes winning in business, but also in ice hockey, playing for his favorite team – MyQ Heroes. His mission is to give people more free time and make their work-life easier. He is the prototype of a lazy guy who would rather develop an efficient process or tool than do the same thing twice. He is also someone who can spot and fix details that are nearly invisible to others.

“It makes us very happy to receive prestigious awards saying that MyQ is one of the best easy-to-use products our users have ever tried.”