Focus on CCS: Room and Broad

Reading: gateway to the South West and home to biscuits, bricks, beer and, um, CCS. Andrew Charlesworth talks to this flourishing family-owned dealership

Oxford Road runs for miles east out of Reading?s pedestrianised town centre ? a ribbon of retail outlets, the Ramada Inn, flats, a filling station and a church. At 495, occupying three conventional shopfronts, is Computer Care South (CCS), an independent dealer owned by brothers Murli and Govind Bhatti.

Like so many small computer dealers, CCS finds that serving local firms is a reliable and profitable business ? more reliable and much more profitable than selling to private consumers, although sales to private individuals still account for 40 per cent of the company?s #1.5 million annual turnover.

The display area of the shop looks as though a broadline distributor has persuaded general manager Robin Sasson to take at least five of everything in its catalogue. The main focus of the shop is a display of about half a dozen of CCS? own-brand Cyclone PCs running Command and Conquer demos on Samsung monitors of varying size. Then there are printers, speakers, notebooks, network cards, graphics cards, audio cards, Scsi boards, motherboards, keyboards, tape drives, hard drives, floppy drives, CD-Rom drives, boxes of disks, dozens of different cables, paper, toner, inkjet refills and software ranging from Microsoft Flight Simulator add-ons to Netware 4.1.

But it is all neatly stacked, almost as neat as Sasson himself, a man of considerable bandwidth, from whose mind information about anything in the shop can be retrieved with value-added enthusiasm.

?The shop has grown into a showroom,? says Sasson, explaining the huge variety of products on the shelves. ?We put as many of the components out the front as possible to show what we are capable of. And it?s a good tactic, because that?s how we get many of our corporate customers. They come in for one thing, maybe software for a PC at home, and see we can build PCs, servers, networks.?

For good measure, framed approved reseller certificates are on display from Intel, Novell, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Mannesmann Tally and Panasonic.

Next to the boxes of disks behind the counter is a small stock of 4Gb Dat drives, ?because we don?t want to look like PC World?, says Sasson. ?When PC World opened I told two of the staff to stay at home that Saturday because I thought our walk-in business would go dead. By lunchtime I was begging them to come in. Our business dipped for the first three months [after PC World opened] then it went right back up again.?

What he means is that PC World, on a shiny new retail park the other side of Reading, might be packed to the metal rafters with computers, but is unlikely to give house room to the range of exotica that CCS stocks. And it is that, Sasson believes, which gives CCS an edge over its competition.

For example, one part of the shop is the capital city of cables. Every possible configuration festoons the walls like grey coiled double-headed snakes. ?I?m very proud of this area, I built it up myself,? says Sasson. ?It?s got nearly every type of cable for a computer you could want ? and if you can?t see it here, I can get it.?

Some would call it death by inventory, but for this dealer it?s a USP.

CCS has been on Oxford Road since 1984 and has grown from selling Commodore 64s and games consoles to building bespoke upgradable PC and server systems. For a private individual looking for a home PC it?s a bewildering array, which is why a number of popular configurations line the left-hand wall nearest the door and run continuous-loop demos of home-oriented software.

?We get three types of customer in the shop,? says Sasson. ?Families who want a PC but don?t know much and we?re happy to help; what we call God users who know exactly what they want and we?re very willing to give it to them; and those who come in with a magazine rolled up under their arm and say ?I want this, I want that? which we know won?t do what they want and end up having a stand-up row with. Fortunately we don?t get many of those.?

But providing IT to local businesses is growing quickly for CCS, from 40 per cent of turnover in 1995 to 60 per cent last year, and the shape of the shop is changing to reflect that. Plans have been drawn up to expand the premises to provide a dispatch area for finished PCs and to cope with the extra stock holding areas and administration offices which will come with the dealer?s expansion as a local distributor later this year.

CCS already provides a convenient stop for other dealers? technicians to buy cables or network cards on their way to customers. The aim is to act as a distributor for local dealers initially and progress gradually.

?We?ve watched how other people have done it, the mistakes they have made and the things they have got right and now we are ready,? says Sasson.

One of the pitfalls Sasson is determined to avoid is mixing trade customers with users.

?We?re building a trade area with a separate accounting system and separate stock system,? he said. ?Because if you buy direct from manufacturers but you also have user sales, nobody in the trade wants to deal with you ? they think you?re going to cut them out.?

The new stock system will give the dealer greater inventory control and the ability to buy predictively. CCS buys most of its stock through distribution, except its monitors which come direct from Samsung, keyboards from Cherry and some consumables from Fuji.

The building works have got the go-ahead and will be starting in March, probably lasting for about eight weeks. An experienced distribution manager is being recruited to run the new operation and telesales staff will be added as required.

In the workshops behind the retail area, PCs are built on a four-day turnaround and repaired in three, although both can be done overnight if necessary. There is capacity to assemble up to 75 PCs a week.

The company has just finished building a batch of Cad workstations based on Pentium Pro PCs with Matrox graphics cards and has recently won a contract to supply PCs to a franchised car dealer, adding them to a customer list which includes the Reading Chronicle, the Royal Berkshire Fire Service, the local police force and the charity Children?s Aid Direct. Turnover is expected to top #2 million this year.

Servers and Raid storage systems for companies of up to 200 users have been built for local businesses from these workshops, but the larger corporate contracts evade CCS, says Sasson, because they are awarded by centralised buying departments run by managers who don?t consider a local dealer capable or suitable to supply IT systems.

?We don?t employ anyone unless they can build a PC,? says Sasson. ?But they must also be able to talk to first-time customers without bewildering them.?

All 11 staff at CCS come up to this standard, with the exception of the administration officer who handles payroll, invoices, purchase orders and just about anything which doesn?t require a screwdriver.

Out in the store, a PC with a transparent casing is on display so that any one of the staff can show enthusiastic customers how to build their own machine. Under the plastic cover are tiny hand-painted figures as though from a model village: a man wields a wrench to adjust the cache; another is stepping briskly down a ribbon cable with a porter?s trolley, presumably carrying packets of data.

The technically competent staff are in demand in local businesses. ?Two of our people are out at a company today cleaning up an outbreak of the macro virus on 200 PCs,? says Sasson. ?At #45 an hour a person, it pays good money for us.?

He says 30 per cent of the dealer?s repair work is eliminating viruses.

One-to-one on-site training is provided for companies at the same rate and at #35 an evening for private individuals. House calls are made in the evenings if a new private customer gets stuck ? and they?re free of charge unless the customer beats them down on the system price.

A whiteboard nailed up in the workshop tells everyone concerned who should be building what machines and by when.

?We don?t have five-year plans and we don?t have board meetings,? says Sasson. ?If a decision needs making, it gets made and then communicated straight away. We don?t want to become a stuffy company.?

Behind the workshops lurks an area which to the casual observer is a dank shed, to an estate agent is ?full of potential? and to Sasson is ?full of history?. It?s the place where 286 PCs go to moan about the demands of modern software, where teleprinters sit and sulk about having been replaced by lasers, and where a 5Mb hard drive complete with handbrake has withdrawn into its cast aluminium case while trying to come to terms with the 2Gb PC.

?I had a Commodore Pet in here last month,? says Sasson.

This area, which can?t earn any money for the dealer in its current state, will be cleared to make room for stock for distribution. Upstairs, where a few offices have filled with cardboard boxes and other inevitable detritus of a dealership, will be housed the distribution telesales team.

The breadth of CCS? business is reflected in the software it carries: on one side of the shop a glass cabinet holds a 25-user copy of Netware and on the other a four-metre rack displays PC games and educational titles.

But not for long. CCS is bailing out of the games market, about which Sasson has no good words to say.

?Where?s the skill in selling a game? Our technical people are better employed building PCs. The big retailers always get the titles first and then cut the prices. If you deal in pennies, you only make pennies. There is always pressure to buy the latest thing and that balloons the stock.?

But the shop will be keeping the reference and educational titles because of its family-oriented customers. And Flight Simulator with all its add-ons will stay as Sasson is a Flight Sim buff ? the store recently hosted a virtual pilots? convention.

Next to the doomed games rack stands another forlorn sight ? a Fujitsu-ICL PC/TV from about 1995. The marque had a brief and unhappy history, shunned by consumers and ridiculed by the press, but this one ? the only one CCS has ever had in stock ? has a sadder story to tell than most of its peers. ?I?ve sold it four times and it keeps coming back,? sighs Sasson. ?If anyone wants to make me an offer, I?d be glad to get rid of it.?

But remember folks, a PC/TV is not just for Christmas.