Master The Transition From VAR To MSP

Cameron Rowe
Cameron Rowe

A company’s business model is everything. It dictates how it makes money, what is required of its employees and what sorts of business-to-client policies need to be put in place.

But what happens when the head of a company decides it would be more profitable to overhaul its business plan, pulling the trigger on the long and arduous process of business transformation?

That’s what happened two years ago at Destin, Florida-based CRC Data Technologies, when management decided to discontinue its value added reseller business, and pursue life as a managed service provider.

CRC Data Technologies started in 1992 as just two guys in a garage fixing computers, says company founder and CEO Cameron Rowe, and now has hundreds of clients in its local Florida area and along the Gulf Coast.

Rowe said that as technology was advancing, the industry was undergoing a change a little over five years ago with more automation coming into play. As he was looking for a way to improve his company’s internal processes Rowe decided to move forward with the different model and began transitioning his clients.

"It’s absolutely a tough transition, and we do have further to go," Rowe said. "But we already see the advantages of revenue and client satisfaction. The biggest transition was being a break-fix shop where we deal with every solution to developing more repetitive solutions. It’s something that’s easier to support and easier to explain. When a problem occurs, we can do it in a larger scale and expertise than if we do it with a more diverse configuration. The more we can get things more uniform, the easier it is for us with that configuration."

As a managed services provider, Rowe views preventative maintenance as a big step toward make his own job easier, but preventing future problems his customers may face by getting out ahead of issues may be most important. That, Rowe said, results in a happier client-base. Clients are assisted in developing the best practices and policies in order to avoid major issues.

"So many customers are used to just asking ‘just fix it,’ but we basically go to our clients and say 'here is the list of requirements we need you to meet, and these are all considered the best practices,'" Rowe said. "The biggest thing for us is developing that best practice list, and going over preventative practices before hand of here is how you do things the right way and why."

NEXT: Protecting The Business