SmartCompany50 rank: 9
Revenue: $1.9 million
Growth: 92%
Founders: David 40 and Rachel Markus, 41
Based: Melbourne
Employees: 16
Industry: Information technology
Website: www.combo.com.au
David and Rachel Markus (right), who started the business from home, had a burning desire to make a difference in people’s lives. In 2002 they could see that due to GST, small and medium business needed to computerise just to manage BAS and tax.
At the time, the small business IT marketplace was full of kids who had migrated from fixing computers in businesses to looking after larger systems with servers.
“Our opportunity was to bring in corporate IT knowledge, processes, skills and disciplines,” Rachel says.
The company expanded from IT solutions (which includes networking, maintenance, firewalls and trouble shooting etc) to providing e-marketing services including email marketing and SEO and SEM.
The service was not a big bang innovation so the pair employed the “kaizen principles”. “We constantly work at small ways to improve and innovate.”
Neverthless there are many competitors. How did they stand out? “A turning point was realising that we needed to find customers who shared our vision and appreciated what we did for them. We work at the level of feeling. We work to make them feel better by removing their IT problems,” says Rachel. “And we provide high value for every dollar spent: we often provide additional effort or equipment at our own cost if we feel the work we have done has failed to provide value.
The business now plans to go national. At present 80% of business comes from referrals but the company recently stepped up SEO/SEM efforts. “New customers come looking for us when they are in crisis.”
The home page speaks directly to that need, a free download and no obligation consultation. This has proved a successful lead generator. Customers can also chat online and the company is planning to sell productised services online soon.
Combo is also moving into remote managed services so it can combine corporate style help desk with remote access to PCs locally and nationally. In the next two years the pair want to almost double staff and are aiming for revenue of $5 million for 2007-08.
Key success factors:
- Don’t focus on big bang innovatorn: work at small ways to improve and innovate.
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