Mountain Club | Members' Club Cloud Printing Case Study

Mountain Club runs two locations in Queenstown, New Zealand, where around 75 members print across both sites. Those members arrive from more than 40 different companies, each laptop governed by its own employer's firewall and privacy settings. After a seven-month onboarding effort that consumed over $10,000 and still left nearly half of the members who needed printing unable to use it, Mountain Club switched to ezeep. Members were printing within hours, support tickets dropped by 80%, and the investment paid for itself in under a month.

Printing for Members Who Arrive From 40 Different Companies, on 40 Different IT Policies

A members' club is not one network. Every person who walks through the door carries a laptop governed by someone else's IT department, with firewall rules and privacy settings the club has no visibility into and no authority to change. When those members sit down and expect to print, the setup has to accommodate 40 security postures at once, without asking any of them to relax.

The Challenge

Mountain Club ran a printer at each of its two locations, managed through PaperCut. On paper the setup was straightforward. In practice, every new member represented a fresh compatibility problem, because every member belonged to a different company with its own firewall and privacy configuration.

Onboarding stretched across seven months. "We had a seven month battle draining $10k+ of resources trying to get through the nightmare of onboarding so many people," says Billy Waller, General Manager at Mountain Club. Nearly every new person who needed printing access triggered a call to the club's outsourced IT provider.

The effort did not even finish the job. After seven months, roughly half of the members who needed to print still could not. Waller went looking at alternatives and found the market wanting: on-premises servers, directory services, and partial cloud offerings, none of which addressed printing for 40 companies that would never share a network.

"The setup was incredibly simple, suspiciously so. It was so easy I almost didn't trust it. People were onboarding and printing within hours after we had months of issues [with another provider]."

Billy Waller

General Manager,
Mountain Club

The Solution

ezeep removed the dependency that had made onboarding so painful. Because ezeep is driverless and serverless, there is nothing to install on the user's machine and no inbound firewall rule for anyone's IT department to approve. Each member organization keeps its own security settings, and its people print anyway. That single change turned a per-user IT project into a self-service action.

Both sites now run through one cloud print environment, so a user set up once can print at either location. Users print from whatever they brought with them, across Windows, macOS, and mobile devices, without a driver package or a VPN client in sight.

Waller had reviewed several options before choosing ezeep, and the deciding factors were the product and the people behind it. "I chose ezeep because it felt like a modern software solution in an industry plagued with software that feels like it hasn't evolved past 2005," he says. "On top of that, their team was incredibly helpful and spent more time than I would have expected talking through all of our edge cases that might have created problems."

The Outcome

Members were printing within hours of setup, after months of failed onboarding under the previous platform. Print-related support tickets fell by 80%, and Mountain Club recovered roughly four staff hours every week that had gone to print troubleshooting and IT callouts. Waller estimates the switch reached ROI in under a month.

Waller is candid that printing is not perfect. "We still have people with print issues, but the number is 80% less support tickets," he says. The difference is that print support is now an occasional exception rather than a standing line item in the operating budget.

Why It Matters

Mountain Club represents the scenario where cloud printing delivers the most value: a shared space where the people printing do not share an employer, a network, or an IT policy. Traditional print management assumes one network and one IT owner, which is why onboarding stalls in spaces where neither exists. For members' clubs, coworking operators, and any hospitality or workspace business serving professionals who arrive on their own corporate devices, this case study is directly relevant.

About Mountain Club

Mountain Club is a private members' club in Queenstown, New Zealand, operating two locations: Beach Street and Five Mile. The club serves professionals, creatives, and entrepreneurs with workspace, a cafe, concierge and event planning services, and more than 300 member events a year, alongside reciprocal access to a global network of partner clubs and hotels. Around 75 members print across both sites through ezeep, connecting from their own employers' devices without driver installs or changes to any company's security configuration.

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