Congratulations to EFEX Group, which debuted in second place in the CRN Fast50 in just its first year of eligibility.
“We’ve only been around since mid-2013, so we are a relatively young company,” says founder, sole director and chief executive Nick Sheehan.
“We started with a small team of four people on level nine in a little 45-square metre office, and we went from level nine to level three, and then from level three to level two – just taking more and more space and growing.”
Sheehan now employs 23 people at his managed print services company across three locations in Sydney – North Sydney, Rozelle and Oran Park – and is about to expand nationally. “We are now going to Melbourne. That’s early next year. I’d say by February we’ll be set up down there,” Sheehan says. “We already look after a number of very good, and reasonably big clients in Melbourne. We’ve got a pretty good footprint down there, but will be setting up some permanent space for a small team to kick off.”
EFEX Group is the biggest Australian reseller of Kyocera, according to Sheehan, and has only one other formal vendor relationship – with Fuji Xerox. “We do that to maintain a brand agnostic approach in the marketplace rather than bring a manufacturer to people and saying ‘You must have this’. We try and maintain some impartiality in relation to the products that we provide based on the needs of the actual end user.”
Sheehan knows Fuji Xerox well. He previously ran Upstream Print Solutions, which was sold to Fuji Xerox in 2010. After working for the vendor post-acquisition until 2013, Sheehan got the itch to control his own destiny once again.
“I was interested in doing my own thing again… I wanted to create a business that had a real sense of what service is.”
With the large manufacturers dominating the printing services industry, EFEX Group concentrates on showering small-to-medium customers with more attention than they would get from the multinationals.
“We are not interested in talking to big [customer] companies. We enjoy dealing with small to medium businesses, and just offering them what we think is a better level of service than what they would receive through a manufacturer,” explains Sheehan.
As well as the impending Melbourne expansion, EFEX Group has also pulled off a “small acquisition” since the end of the 2015 financial year, giving it a red-hot chance of making the CRN Fast50 again next year.
“We are on track to probably getting close to $10 million this [financial] year,” says Sheehan. “We have already done over $2 million for the [first] quarter of 2016. If you extrapolate that out by four quarters, that’s $8 million, and then this acquisition will push us to over 10.”
FACT FILE
- Founded 2013
- Key executive Nick Sheehan
- HQ North Sydney
- Growth 175.79%
- 2015 revenue $2.91 million
- Headcount 23
- Top vendors Kyocera, Fuji Xerox
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