The Sit Down With Success is a monthly series provided by the Huntsville Business Journal that focuses on successful small businesses in the Huntsville/Madison County area and their keys to success. For this month, the Huntsville Business Journal sat down with Nick Lioce of the Lioce Group.

The Lioce Group is a Huntsville staple, providing office equipment and introducing streamlined solutions to the Huntsville business community for nearly 60 years. Founded in Huntsville in 1967, The Lioce Group is family-owned and operated, with three generations of the Lioce family working in the business. Leading the family enterprise today is Nick Lioce, son of founders Nick and Louise Lioce. Also part of the business are Nick’s children, Anthony and Bonnie.

Nick recently sat down with the Huntsville Business Journal to talk about where the company has been, where it’s going, and how it has influenced the Huntsville business community.

Tell me about the history of your business.

N: My mom and dad, Nick and Louise Lioce, came down from Cleveland in 1965. Dad worked for another company, and he quickly became the number one sales rep in the country.

Nick Lioce, the focus of this month’s Sit Down With Success

He went into business for himself in 1967 and quickly became successful. Mom came into the business and started running the admin side, and dad ran the marketing side. She was brilliant. She passed in 2008, but they were a great team.

I started in 1989. Dad had already diversified into phone systems. My brother Harry took over the phone system business, so I came into the traditional copier business and then quickly started diversifying into document management and solutions centered around automation and streamlining. We’ve grown rapidly since 2007, hitting double digit growth every year.

We are up to 91 employees, and because of our beautiful town, we do a lot of government business at Redstone Arsenal, which has led us to start doing federal government contracting business in all 50 states.

What do you like best about being a business owner?

N: I love Huntsville, and I like being part of the business community, networking and trying to help keep our community great. I like to see our employees’ families flourish. My decisions affect every one of their families, so it’s good to see that they’re growing. We’ve given raises every year we’ve been in business, even through the pandemic.

How do you balance life outside of work?

N: My mom and dad put the emphasis on family. Family always comes first. We tell all of our employees that too. We don’t want The Lioce Group to be in the top three on your list. You need to put your God, your family, your friends, and your sanity before work.

What are your company values, and how does that influence your business?

N: The motto is “Do the right thing” with longevity in mind. Generally nine times out of ten you always know what the right thing to do is. It’s not one thing, it’s a thousand things, and my parents have been doing that for 55 years. That’s why the business keeps flourishing.

What advice would you give to someone starting a business?

N: Most people start a business because they have a good idea, and you have to do a lot of planning and market research and you have to think, what’s going to happen with that idea three, five, 10 years down the road. The small businesses are failing because they just think people are going to come to them.

You have to have marketing, which very few people do. They just think the word is going to get out and everybody’s going to buy the product, and it doesn’t happen. So a lot of planning and a lot of marketing.

Would you consider yourself an entrepreneur?

N: Yes, my father was well known for introducing new technologies and being entrepreneurial, and it turns out I do that too. For example, recently we brought on the EV (electric vehicle) chargers, and I was the first in our entire industry to do that. We’re always exploring the needs of the customer and keeping an open mind.

How does a long standing, family owned enterprise stay relevant in modern and changing times?

N: It is an important challenge because of e-commerce and everything going on with the Internet. You can’t know everything, so I’m a member of best practices groups with dealers. I’m a member of CEO groups locally and do a lot of reading and research.

You have to put your ego in your pocket and keep an open mind. Out of five diversifications, not all five are going to work. So you plan those, you budget for them, and hopefully one or two take hold and you maintain your relevance.

Where do you envision the business going in the future?

I’m very comfortable with the future of the business now that I have my children in it and a great group of young professionals led by my VP Bill Berg, to be able to carry it forward.

You have to invest in your people. You’ve got to make it worth their while if they’re going to work for you for 20 or 30 years, and we do a lot of things at the company to keep our employees engaged. We have marketplace chaplains, we do Net Promoter Scores internally, and we do culture indexes that monitor that they’re the right person in the right job.

We say that we are a small business with big business practices. I don’t like a lot of big business practices, but a lot of small businesses don’t think they have to invest in these things – employee engagement and training and employee development – and they need to. It’s hard for them to spend their own money, but it’s an investment.

What’s your dad up to these days?

He’s 89, and he comes in three or four times a week. He loves to hear about the business. He is the greatest salesman I’ve ever seen.

Dad’s greatest attribute – because he was very successful and very knowledgeable – is he always reached out for help and support. He didn’t want to make the decision to say I know everything, even though most of the time he would. He always researched his decisions.

He used to say, “You’ll be successful if you make the majority of the decisions.” Well then he would remind me that means 51 percent of the decisions. So you’re going to make a lot of bad decisions. As long as 51 percent are good, you’re doing okay.

For more information, please visit www.liocegroup.com. To read similar stories or past Sit Down With Success articles, please visit huntsvillebusinessjournal.com.