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In my role as the channel’s Grim Reaper, I not only read the last rites to businesses whose pulse is little more than nostalgia but, far more refreshingly, I see strewn across the corporate landscape scores of full-blooded businesses eager to tell the world of their existence.
As we come out of the recession, we should celebrate the steady, the normal and the mundane.
These little gems are not all those who bore us incessantly about how successfully they have migrated their business from hardware to full service.
They are the ones we have seen at networking events, and it is exactly these businesses who day in, day out, meet the needs of SMEs locally and beyond.
Successful recipe
Take the case of PC Express, a business trading from Edgware, North London.
Quietly beavering away since 1990, when it started out as a proprietorship, and
incorporating in 1994, the company has grown from strength to strength.
Directed by father and son, assisted by a loyal team of 10 staff, the business has grown organically. No fancy search engine maximisation stuff here. PC Express has clients going back 20 years, to the days when I had hair. The business has grown purely on the back of recommendation.
The PC Express model is not unique but different enough to applaud. Let us drill down:
l Product is sourced from a wide range of distributors.
l Excellence in portfolio: Brother, Intel, Kingston, and others. Long-term
relationships, technical know-how.
l Sixty SME clients, with a target of 150 in three years. Not fantasy, but achievable.
l Stock on popular lines. This way, vendor scarcity is avoided and SME
demands met
quickly and orders won.
l Hardware (servers, printers, scanners, faxes, laptops, desktops and so on)
all have
preferred vendors. Tried and tested.
l Bespoke. Whether or not the client needs it, through careful components purchase, a tailor-made solution can not only marry the client’s needs but it can also guarantee a support contract.
l Support and services; full range including ADSL, web hosting, SDSL, lease lines, anti- virus, anti-spam and security. The key is support and maintenance.
l Training. Good margin and meets the needs of SMEs that have no in-house expertise.
l Credit control. PC Express’ terms are 30 days. Directors manage the cash very well and little or nothing sticks out in the aged column. No factoring or discounting and, again, standing out in a channel that is heavily reliant on sales ledger financing.
l Know the client. Through simple CRM, clients are periodically contacted.
l Client relationships are wrapped up in legally binding contracts and service-level agreements (SLAs).
l Limited or no outsourcing, meaning that the business keeps control.
The next year or so will see a celebration of these work horses. It is the simplicity of the PC Express model that makes it work.
However, if the PC Express model becomes too successful in the channel, I may have to eBay my scythe.
Nitin Joshi is founder of Channelmoney
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