When it’s your name on the shingle hanging over your door, you better make good on great customer service, says Pete Trimble, founder of Trimble Networks.
“When you label a company after yourself, you have to elevate the level of skin in the game. There’s a degree of pride on the line. I won’t let service levels slip. So it’s a level of pride of the product, the brand and the service offering.”
The former electrical engineer turned IT reseller says his approach to business has been to avoid overcomplicating the company’s value proposition.
“You do a good job, deliver high-quality services, continue to build relationships, honour your contracts and partnerships and that will be recognised, and growth and profitability will follow,” he says.
The business generates 85 percent of its revenue from services, and it’s growing rapidly, reaching $3.3 million after a year of 122.9 percent growth. But Trimble says there are benefits in being small. “You need to be open to opportunities and agile enough to leverage that as well.
“You can keep yourself efficient and take advantage of opportunities that others may think are beyond an organisation of our size.”
Growth has been buoyed by lucrative contracts with Queensland Police and Queensland Rail that opened doors to opportunities – all through word of mouth.
“Trimble was a trusted adviser that underpinned clients’ IT environment with maintenance and support of their systems,” he says. “We go in and consult on what’s required, we maintain and support the environment and we do the reviews, and that leads back into consulting.”
For instance, Trimble migrated servers as part of Queensland Police’s TRIP (Technology Refresh and Improvement Project) under the watchful eye of the force’s program management office.
“It’s created brand awareness for Trimble networks and opened my eyes to building a better-known brand in Brisbane,” he says.
Another growth factor is Trimble’s partner collaboration. A partnership with publicly listed consultancy SMS Management and Technology was instrumental in its growth. “At this point, we’re still very much in that enterprise space supporting and working in partnership with SMS. When I go in for opportunities, I work in partnership and ensure everyone has a win out of it.”
While “looking at how to get into southern states”, Trimble wants to keep what made the business special.
“I refuse to grow too quickly and get attrition of clients. We’re still dealing with the same clients we were 10 years ago. The plan is to grow that consulting enterprise, to leverage initiatives such as Fast50 to build brand awareness in the small to medium business space,” he says.
And while he’s pushing managed services, cloud is uppermost in mind. “I’m also building a hosted service component. We’ll do a lot more wide-area networks and we’ll shift [collocation services] into Azure.”
Trimble is also wrapping his own intellectual property, training and consulting around vanilla Office
365 services and incubating project capabilities with smaller clients.
“I don’t have any intention of trying to take on the enterprise space solely ourselves but we want to learn
from that and offer in our medium business space” that covers customers with 500 to 1,000 seats.
Founded: 2003
Key executives: Pete Trimble (director), Adrian Dean (operations manager)
HQ: Brisbane, Qld
Growth: 122.88%
2014 revenue: $3.3 million
Headcount: 15 plus 5 contractors
Top vendor: HP
Top distributor: Dicker Data
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