Network Systems Business Boosts Value with Innovative MSP Products
When he and a co-worker bought the office printers and copiers company they were working for in 1982, Ron Taylor knew he was on to a great thing.
His new company, Office Systems Northwest, posted 10 solid years of expansion as a supplier of office products. But , when the copier market began going digital, Taylor and his colleague had to regroup. ‘Suddenly, we were hooking up copiers and printers to networks, but we knew nothing about PCs and networks. Office Systems Northwest made a decision to expand into networking, buying a computer and network services company.
‘Almost instantly, we would have liked to change the business design of the network services division,’ Taylor recollects. Working under the’break-fix’ model, the PC company sold clone PCs’and spent a lot of time chasing around to mend the clones.’ One of the largest problems was distinguishing between the purchaser’s and the service supplier’s responsibility.
‘When a {computer|P. C. PC breaks down, information that used to reside on the computer needs to be retrieved or restored,’ Taylor recalls. ‘It was a nightmare to try and say why that wasn’t our responsibility.’ although a project approach – with statements of work, milestones and signoffs – improved things, Taylor still recalls it as a tough business.
Everyone else in the industry who I talked to was in the same boat.’
And that, coupled with business transformation support from N-able, finally ended in a stable financial model that truly worked.
Taylor says that it also became simpler to sell the services. ‘Remote network monitoring and reply is so salable,’ he emphasises. ‘The logic of it really is so clear : let your machines tell us what’s going on so you haven’t any down time and never have to call us. We closed 95% of the business we presented the new solution to.’ actually, he asserts,’The N-able product helped us land about 33 contracted clients within nine months. We were still adding new clients when we sold off that division.’ Even better,’Clients outsourced more to us over time. Taylor points out that most firms in the computer and network services industry,’just sort of die out after a while. When the owners are ready to get out, there’s not a lot to sell. The customers is constant to an engineer and will tend to follow the engineer.’ against this, Taylor says,’N-able permitted us to build a model that made our buyers devoted to the business. We could reply to any customer request at any time, so their relationship was with Office Systems Northwest, not with a selected engineer.’ And that, he says, made the organization’s services division an attractive purchase target. ‘The time to sell a business is when it’s truly doing well, when it’s growing.
Taylor still believes in the outsourcing model and in the network services company he worked with N-able to make. Office Systems Northwest ( now a supplier of office printers and copiers ) and the new, independent services company share a bilateral contract whereby Taylor’s team resells network services to clients who want it, and the services company provides Office Systems Northwest with managed network services.
Taylor observes that the price N-able provided went far beyond good product and support.
N-central really understood our venture and what we were going through. They helped us make the services company into something that would be sold.’.
