Technology Reseller v20 2019

technolog y reseller.co.uk 31 through all of that we want to be efficient as well, with good financial controls. TR: What are the challenges or even dangers of such rapid growth? PB: The biggest challenges we have are: one, getting the contact management with the customer right and not overloading them – how do we orchestrate these very interesting things to the right people at the right time?; and, two, educating our customers in terms of what exactly is on offer. There is plenty of choice, but I don’t think people are particularly aware of it, which is why we run the plug-in event. That’s our biggest challenge. TR: Have you quantified the value of the Plug-in event? PB: I have quantified its value on the basis that we are outperforming the market; distribution grew 9% last year and our growth was well into double figures. This year, about 800-900 people have turned up, and 100 vendors. That’s a big not just in the UK but globally. Selling into the data centre itself is a growth area because technology is ever changing, and our Hammer acquisition means we are well placed to take advantage of that. TR: How successful have you been at increasing the enterprise side of your business? PB: We acquired Hammer and that’s grown quite well. What we call business – B2B – is 50% of our revenues now and enterprise makes up 50% of that business piece. So that has doubled in size over the last two years. TR: Your acquisition strategy obviously gives you greater scale and breadth, but what are the benefits for resellers? PB: When you make acquisitions, there are two main things you look at: what brands can we share and take to other markets and what best practices can we share. Tim Griffin (Managing Director of DCC Technology and the Exertis Group) wants to create a spine to the business globally and acquisitions enable that. We work with vendors, we work with services and we share those things so we can bring more to our customers in terms of value. It’s getting more from more. We are bringing best practice services and new brands. Clearly, increase on last year, which was up on than the year before that. This tells me people are getting value from Plug-in and are recommending it. It’s gained a bit of momentum. TR: What more could resellers be doing to grab all the opportunities you offer? PB: We have made a clear statement by putting a services lounge in every area of the exhibition. It’s all very well having products and technology, but we also need to have conversations about how we can help people sell them. Those are the sorts of conversations I would expect to come out of this. TR: What are your priorities for the rest of 2019 and 2020? PB: To hit our target (laughs). We have set out our stall pretty well in each of the areas we operate in. Those growth drivers I talked about are our priorities – carrying on investing there and being joined up with the group so we share best practice. TR: What makes Exertis different to other distributors? PB: It’s the kind of thing you see here today; the relationship piece. If you looked up the stats, you would see we have many more technicians, sales people, commercial people working with vendors than any other distributor in this country. You might say ‘Isn’t that inefficient and shouldn’t you be more like Tech Data and Ingram?’. My answer to that is no. Because we are a distributor with scale and specialism, it is super-important we have people who bring that specialist touch. The combination of scale and specialism enables us to get more value out of vendors and more traction with customers and I think that’s what really sets us apart from Tech Data or Ingram. We are also looking at adjacent lines in consumer, like small domestic appliances, medium and large eventually. We have signed up with Hoover and Danby and are looking to extend our portfolios there Q&A