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Combo

David and Rachel Markus (right of picture) are on a mission. When they set up their business in 2002 with the third founder Martin Koval (on left), they could see a marketplace full of kids who had grown up with PCs who had gone into business fixing PCs.

“Clearly it was time for every small business to get connected, secure, recoverable and reliable, and our opportunity was to bring our corporate IT knowledge, systems and skills to this market place and reduce the pain being suffered by poorly advised, under serviced business owners,” David Markus says.

It worked, and Combo (Revelation Consulting) now has 23 employees. Revenue for the Melbourne based firm has increased to $2.4 million from $1.8 million in 2006-07.

The company’s biggest challenge has been to differentiate the company from a large field of competitors that didn’t just include the single operators.

“There is a huge range in price from $20 to $200 per hour for apparently identical services. We have learnt to claim our place in this environment and establish credibility for what we do,” David Markus says.

The company did this by setting high entry standards for new employees and insisted on university degrees and industry accreditation. “This has resulted in a team of exceptional service technicians. When combined with constant attention to customer service, systematisation of every aspect of the business possible and lots of hard work behind the scenes, the results for our clients have been significant,” he says.

The company also achieved industry accreditation usually only achieved by larger companies, such as “Microsoft Gold Certified Partners” status to ensure clients it is well qualified to provide solutions. “At the time we reached Microsoft Gold status we were the smallest Gold Certified Partner in Australia,” he says.

The firm uses feedback to provide insights. “We send an emailed survey on the completion of each job ticket raised by our service desk. This is an opportunity to get over 400 bits of feedback each month. Our clients love this as they know they will be heard if there is a problem,” he says. “What we have learnt is that by maintaining this high quality approach we can differentiate ourselves and win good business.”

They have successfully used email marketing to entice clients to marketing seminars and made use of partner databases to expand the volume of our messages, he says. “We have had companies such as ADP, Dunn & Bradstreet and AmCham invite their members to our functions using our email marketing capabilities and their client lists.”

The online strategy that includes search engine optimisation has seen the company achieve the desired page on Google for “IT services Melbourne” at first or second place.

The company also offers whitepapers on a selection of IT service providers, CRM tools, disaster recovery planning, and how to reduce and avoid spam. “These reflect the questions we are met with when we meet new clients, so we give it to them as early in the cycle as possible to establish our knowledge and openness. It has worked well for us,” he says.

Markus says a valuable lesson they learnt was working with clients that share their values. “A course, ‘Love your Business’, made a huge difference,” he says. “Before we attended the course we did a lot of work with clients who did not share our values and demanded solutions that were not realistic and could not be provided for the price demanded. We took the jobs because our business was small and new and we thought we needed the work to survive,” he says.

“After the course, we took a stand to remove ourselves from these clients and only accept clients who shared our values. At this point we shrank from eight staff to four, and took large financial losses as we backed out of bad jobs as gracefully as we could. After the initial downturn in business our company took off and is still growing at an accelerating rate,” he says.

The company plans to expand to Sydney and Brisbane. “Our systems are all accessible via the web and can be used anywhere,” he says. “Over the next two to three years we hope to expand to be a national operation in IT services. We will expand our consulting team to broader applications. We also have aspirations to branch into other professional services such as HR consulting so we can provide additional support to our existing clients as they grow and want to outsource more services.”