In 25th anniversary year, TDS relocating headquarters to Lowell

Office equipment supplier Total Document Solutions Inc. (TDS) of Fayetteville has something significant planned during its 25th anniversary year.

Co-owner and CEO Tim Stanley is relocating the business to Lowell. In February, Stanley sold the 4,110-square-foot Fayetteville store at 2515 N. Shiloh Drive to Lewis Brothers Leasing Co. for $950,000. In March, he closed on a 5,550-square-foot building at 203 S. Bloomington St. (U.S. Highway 71 Business) in Lowell for $675,000. Stanley bought the building, south of the Arkansas Highway 264 interchange, from Dr. David Magee. Several years ago, the building was a retail location for IKON Office Solutions, the copier company.

Following a building remodel, Stanley, who owns the business with his wife, Tina, said TDS will open an ultramodern location on July 1.

TDS will celebrate its 25th anniversary in October.

“I wanted to be in the geographic center of our coverage area,” Stanley said. He described that as Benton, Carroll, Madison and Washington counties. “We should have a 15- to 20-minute response to just about anybody.”

TDS, which has 21 employees, manages print and document management services, offers software and IT services and has a dedicated Tier 1 help desk.

As expected after 25 years, the business continues to evolve. What may be a bit surprising is TDS is expanding — even after COVID-19.

This year, TDS became an independent Xerox dealership, transitioning from a sales agent to one of the company’s multibrand channel dealerships. Stanley said the company still offers Xerox products primarily but now also carries Lexmark and HP.

In February, Xerox signed Lexmark as the first original equipment manufacturer (OEM) client for Xerox Financial Services (XFS), its new global payments solutions business.

Stanley said TDS will also start reselling phone systems this year through an agreement with OneComm in Rogers. It’s an example of the company’s move into the digital communications space.

“Paper is not dead, but it’s not growing,” he said. “What’s growing is IT. When it comes to telecommunications, it’s not going just to be print. It’s going to be on screens, voice, artificial intelligence [and] things of that nature. Internal digital signage is a wide-open field.

“I can see us moving into the ‘document becoming alive’ space.”

An Illinois native, Stanley attended the University of Illinois on a football scholarship and played on the offensive line.

After graduation, he took a job with Eastman Kodak Co. and moved to Northwest Arkansas in 1989. The company moved him to Memphis, Tenn., in 1991 and then to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he was Kodak’s national account representative for Office Depot.

By then, he had married Tina, who is from Northwest Arkansas. The two made it back to the region in 1996, and with rumors swirling that Danka would buy Kodak, Stanley founded Total Document Solutions and became the region’s Xerox agent.

Stanley said he’s also working on a logo refresh for the business to mark its anniversary year.

“We’re really moving toward branding ourselves as TDS IT,” he said.