Prince William Living Interview: Didlake Document Imaging

Rebecca: Hi, friends. Rebecca Barnes, publisher of “Prince William Living” magazine, and I wanna welcome you. Today, we have Valerie Spencer of Didlake. She is the Director of Business Development. And we’re gonna discuss some of the services that Didlake has, who is Didlake, and how businesses in our community can use Didlake services while helping out people in the community. Welcome, Valerie. Thanks for joining us.

Valerie: Thanks, Rebecca. Happy to be here.

Rebecca: Great. Tell us just a little bit about Didlake, for those that don’t know, and a little bit about the services that you offer.

Valerie: Absolutely. So, Didlake is a local, not-for-profit headquartered in the City of Manassas, and we are creating opportunities for employment, community engagement, and personal growth for people with disabilities to create an inclusive, diverse workforce in vibrant communities. We’ve been doing this for over 55 years, and our dedicated team supports the individuals we serve that work in community businesses or working on Didlake service contracts.

We now run some of our own community businesses, and one of those is Didlake Document Imaging. Didlake Imaging is a separate division dedicated to helping our government, commercial, and individual customers go paperless. And Didlake Imaging is a simple, secure, cost-effective transition from physical documents and photos to digital files.

Rebecca: Awesome. So tell me just a little bit, what kind of customers would benefit from your services?

Valerie: So, I serve all sorts of customers, but I would say the most prevalent that we’re seeing are, obviously, those that have a lot of paper. So, think your medical offices, think law firms, think insurance companies, associations. And, you know, most recently, with the pandemic this past year, a lot of those companies that are downsizing their commercial real estate space and don’t want to hold onto those files in a storage unit. So, we’re digitizing those for them so they have access to them from anywhere they are working.

Rebecca: So, a lot of these, they’re really important papers. So, what would you say to somebody who is concerned about security?

Valerie: So, I would say, come visit our safe, secure site. We’re around Kao Circle in Manassas, and we have cameras on the front side, the backside, the interior, the exterior. And we have dual climate control to make sure that your documents are safe and controlled in the right climate. We also provide secure document destruction onsite at our facility with a certificate of destruction.

Rebecca: Awesome. So, that’s, kind of, a one-stop shop. They can turn over their documents, get them scanned securely, and then have them destroyed securely, and then have proof of that destruction?

Valerie: Yep, and then access their documents anywhere they want and anywhere they have an internet access.

Rebecca: So, some of the benefits of scanning… I know that some of those businesses that you named there, by law, are required to keep the records. So, can you just tell us a little bit about scanning versus paper and what the benefits are?

Valerie: You know, so, one of the key benefits are, you know, referring to a document retention policy that every business should have that’s required by law. So, you’d be in compliance with how long they keep documentation, whether it’s a year for the schools and they have to hold onto a school menu or something to, you know, 25 years for an association because that’s what they said in their bylaws. So with a digital solution, we can set some of those timeframes into the system to alert you to say, “Hey, you scanned this in. Five years is up now, and you might wanna review it and decide if you want to destroy it or not because you really don’t have to hold onto it any longer.” So, that’s one of the things that we can do if we really set everybody up in the cloud and go through that full lifecycle solution for our customers.

Rebecca: Okay. So, it saves space. It sounds like it’s more convenient to access those records. It’s certainly, probably, more organized to access those records. And then, on top of it, compliance. They’re probably able to keep… It’s easier to keep with compliance for those rules or laws, either ones they’ve set up for themselves or ones that are governed over their business. Can you give us some examples of recent things you’ve done for clients that you’ve scanned or projects you’ve worked on?

Valerie: Yeah, absolutely. I have so many. You know, most recently we had a customer who had some microfiche, microfilm. They’re not documents. I can’t think of the term, but they had some microfiche, microfilm that they weren’t able to access, especially working remotely right now, right? So, they had couple old machines in their facility, and they said, “Hey, we really wanna be able to access these very important documents.” So, we were able to take that microfiche, microfilm, and scan it in, and now, it’s available digitally, and they don’t have to worry about these machines breaking down and having to go into the office to pull up some of these files.

We also had a customer who was getting some water damage. We’ve had a lot of, you know, kinda, torrential downpours lately in the area. And then, we’ve also had some customers where there’s a little bit of a dripping roof, and they’re not really sure how long that, you know, that water has been dripping into their files. So, we’ve had two customers like that most recently where they said, “Please, just get these up so we don’t have the liability of possibly losing these records. Please digitize these for us.” So, we can secure those files for our customers.

And then, we also do photo imaging and, kinda, securing some treasured memories. So, we had a Vietnam officer who was writing letters to his family back home, and one of his family members brought these letters in and said, “Please, I really wanna, you know, make sure that I maintain the integrity of these letters for future generations to come.” So, we just scanned one of those projects, too. So, you know, there’s a lot of really neat stories that come out of this. It’s helping one individual who…

We had a student who just wanted to get all of his stuff. You know, he was going off into the real world, and he said, “I need to organize all my files, you know, so I’m ready to embrace, you know, my next chapter.” And we just sat down with him, and he had a few boxes. And then, we’re helping these individuals that have, you know, boxes and boxes and file rooms of stuff. So, there’s a story to everybody’s documents, too, and people find them to be very personal to them. And I think that’s where Didlake Document Imaging people may feel very comfortable working with us because we get that.

Rebecca: And that’s great for my last question, which is, you know, there’s lots of different companies out there that do what you do, but you all are local. Tell us why somebody, specifically, would work with Didlake Document Imaging.

Valerie: Absolutely. I think, you know, we really understand that this is not always something that people wanna deal with and don’t necessarily know how to deal with it. So, we are very customer service-focused. We are gonna sit with you and walk through the process with you and to make sure that you’re very comfortable with it. We’re scalable, so we’ll work with your budget. We’ll work with your timeline. And, you know, I think that’s when we see all these customer reviews. We’re getting five-star Google reviews right now, and you can look at our website to see those. It’s really because this level of effort that we put into our work. We’re proud of our safe, secure facility over on Kao Circle. We welcome visitors to come by and visit. We do by appointment only right now. And then, ultimately, the community can help us and help change employment and life outcomes for people with disabilities by using our services.

Rebecca: All right. Well, what we’ll do for our readers is put a link to didlake.org, but we’ll put the specific link as well to the Document Imaging section so that they can get in touch with you to either come check out your facilities or discuss pricing or, you know, whatever questions they might have about a specific project. And we’ll also put the links for the history of Didlake and the opportunities that you provide for people for employment. Didlake is a non-profit. We appreciate all you do in the community, providing jobs to people and making this a better community. So, we thank you, Valerie, for joining us today, and we thank Didlake for joining us. And if anybody’s got any questions, we’ll have all the information below. We will provide all those links, and we thank you again for giving us more information about Document Imaging and what Didlake does in the community. So, thank you.