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01732 759725 DATA SYSTEMS 36 The secrets of my success and have become expert in delivering that message into accounts of all sizes. (Nimble now accounts for about 30% of NexStor’s revenue.) “The proportion of our revenue that comes from hardware has remained stable because we can pick and choose technologies. If we were selling the same piece of hardware, a traditional EMC SAN, say, then I think hardware revenue would decline. But because we constantly look at new technologies, such as object storage, for example, we can speak to different customers with a different message. It’s about being flexible and that’s the beauty of being a smallish company.” 2 Recruit the right people – learn from your mistakes and make a virtue of your independence “Like most businesses, we’ve made a lot of bad choices over the years, but we’ve learnt from them and we are now making the right ones. We find people through recommendation more than anything – people that we have known because we’ve been in the industry for 20 years. “We also feel that the industry is coming towards us now. A lot of independent storage and backup specialists have been sold to bigger organisations and are no longer independent, which is great for the business owners, but not so great for the staff that work there and potentially not so great for their customer base. “What we find is that staff who are used to being quite autonomous and working in an entrepreneurial, independent way are suddenly having a framework and systematisation put behind them and begin to feel strangled. So as other storage resellers are snapped up and bolted onto existing businesses, we get more people approaching us.” 3 Be flexible to attract the personnel you want “A lot of the sales people we know who are worthy of offering a job to are based in the South; it is just the way that the industry has grown up. We’ve both come out of NetApp resellers (Platts and fellow director Rob Townsend once worked for B2net, which was acquired by Proact in 2011) and a lot of NetApp business in the early days was around the M4 corridor. “In the last five years, people’s working lives have changed considerably, and we are now beginning to recruit people to work from home. In the early days, we were wedded to the idea that we wanted to see people in the office. That is not the case anymore. If we’re after a particular individual, it’s a case of ‘What do we need to do to convince you to come to us?’, rather than us having a fixed framework of what the job entails. Within reason, obviously.” 4 Customers like dealing with independent resellers – and if they don’t they should “One of my accounts, a big charity in the UK, deals with three separate resellers that have been sold to one big organisation and they’ve now had a directive to diversify their supplier base. If all you do is talk to an HP reseller, for example, he is only going to give you an HP answer to your problem – and that might not be the best solution. Even with our own customers, we always recommend that they speak to at least another two people and consider at least three solutions. At the very least, they should get a better price for the solution they end up buying.” It’s been a busy and successful 12 months for vendor-independent data systems integrator NexStor. As well as doubling its turnover to £5 million and attracting 60 new customers, the Nottinghamshire-based company founded in 2004 has expanded its product portfolio with three managed cloud services for backup and data recovery, recruited three new employees and moved into larger premises to accommodate its growing headcount. NexStor specialises in data storage and management; servers, backup, archive and data recovery; and virtualisation and connectivity. It is one of just three UK Nimble channel partners to achieve HPE Gold Partner status and earlier this year was responsible for selling the world’s first Arcserve UDP 8000 appliance (to the Gibraltar NHS). With an expanding customer base, experienced new recruits and a solid platform for future growth, NexStor director Troy Platts is confident of increasing turnover to £20-30 million over the next four years. Technology Reseller spoke to him to find out what lies behind the company’s success and what lessons he has learned along the way. 1 Focus on what you’re good at and use your knowledge to become experts in up-and-coming solutions “As a smaller reseller, it is pointless phoning up a business like JP Morgan and saying ‘Do you want to buy any Cisco?’ – that’s never going to get us through the door. So we’ve always been good at identifying up-and-coming solutions, new storage start-ups, new archiving tools and so on, and taking them into big accounts that have never heard of them. “Part of our success is identifying good new technology and using that to open doors into larger accounts that we are typically locked out of, due to the fact that they are already buying NetApp and EMC from their established partners. That, and the fact that we’ve really focused on selling Nimble over the last couple of years Part of our success is identifying good new technology and using that to open doors into larger accounts that we are typically locked out of, due to the fact that they are already buying NetApp and EMC from their established partners Technology Reseller speaks to Troy Platts, director of NexStor, about the data systems integrator’s corporate culture and how that has underpinned a doubling of turnover in the last 12 months Troy Platts