Beach-lover carves out a niche

Leaving her home town of Toronto in Canada to start up an Australian branch of CBL Data Recovery Technologies was a dream come true, says Vicki Brauner, managing director of CBL.

At the time, Brauner was given the choice to build up a local office in any location in Australia.

She already had her heart set on opening up an office in Brisbane. After a lifetime of cold weather, Brauner says she wanted to make sure she could live and work near the beach. “My career with CBL started in January 2003. I was hired as the company’s marketing manager headed out of Toronto, Canada.”

In June of that year, I was given the opportunity to bring the company down under by CBL co-founder Bill Margeson. We had generated interest in Australia before leaving and felt we could make a good business out of it,” says Brauner.

Three years later, Brauner has found a niche for CBL in Australia. Now the company is looking to expand with its recent appointment by HP to service the vendor’s clients in Australia, China, India, Singapore and Taiwan.

Brauner also plans to hire two extra technicians to help fulfil customer requests. This will take
the local CBL staff number to eight, she says.

“The deal with HP will take us away from the niche market we carved out when I first came out. Word of mouth is still live and out there in the local marketplace and it has worked for us in the past. Now the ‘HP’ name gives us a bit more leverage,” she says.

The interest in data recovery makes a difference from when she started the business. Back then data recovery was not often talked about, says Brauner.

She believes data recovery is no longer an issue at just an enterprise level. CBL’s clients range from holiday makers desperate to recover footage of that once-in-a-lifetime trip to a company looking to recover vital emails thought to be lost.

The service provider recovers everything from media storage going from a USB key to a two-terabyte storage machine.

She says the popularity of data recovery can be attributed to consumers becoming tech savvy.
“My parents and that generation of seniors are now doing their financials and staying in touch with family on PCs. These computers have become very user-friendly and people are no longer scared by the ins and outs of the machine they bought,” she says.

When Brauner first came to Australia, hard drives were only available in 20GB or 80GB. She says the average person can now buy a 100GB drive for laptops and companies can purchase hard drives with 2TB capacity.

“With hard drives at such high capacity, consumers are packing their information onto their PCs and laptops. All sorts of catastrophes can come off the back of that,” she says. “You just can’t predict what
can happen with a hard drive. It can fail because of an electrical problem, natural disaster or be attacked by a virus.”

As a society these days, says Brauner, consumers expect everything to happen instantaneously and they want faster drives that are longer lasting.

However, with hard drives becoming mass produced at a cheap rate, there will be quality control issues. “I have had journalists in the past trying to get me to talk about the life of a hard drive and it’s hard to determine. If a customer buys a hard drive they might be alright for the first year,” she says.

“At the end of three years they might look at replacing and after five years they definitely need to change. That’s the normal cycle of the hard drive, but a customer can buy a hard drive and have it die in three weeks.”

She believes this could be because it was that one bad hard drive out of the bunch. Brauner has seen something happen to all types of drives made by all manufacturers.

“They recall cars in a year because of seatbelt failures. It might get all the testing it needs to pass inspection but something always goes wrong and they need to get the car off the road ASAP. It’s the same with hard drives,” she says.

Brauner believes consumers now understand that the data residing on PCs are their responsibility.

Retailers can now sell a PC and entice consumers to purchase a storage unit or some kind of backup accessory with the computer.
“It used to be that talking about data recovery during a PC sale was likened to a car sale. The dealer never sold a car talking about a potential tyre failure and computer sales reps never sold computers with the ‘your computer is going to fail’ mentality,” says Brauner.

As a business, CBL operates on a 24 hours a day, seven days a week way of thinking.

Brauner says she may try to go home at 10 to five and then in walks a job that keeps her at work until the wee small hours of the next day.

“We are often the end of the line, but as I always say there are different degrees of death – we will try and resurrect it. Once we help the client out they tell us ‘We hope to never see you guys again’.

“That’s OK because it means we’ve done the job,” she says.

Despite the seriousness of data recovery, Brauner says there is a lighter side to her job.

She has had one client call up to say her boss’ laptop didn’t work because he’d thrown it across the room. “You do your best to tell the client you will try and help them.

“But once they hear a strange clicking noise and if the disk is scratched then there is nothing we can do,” she says.

Despite her long hours and hard work, Brauner tries very hard to maintain a healthy balance in her life. “I am living my dream. My goal was to come to Australia to live and I have achieved that,” she says.

Brauner made it her lifelong ambition to come to Australia because her brother had migrated to the country in the 1990s. “He would call me up and talk about the beautiful weather, while I was freezing in minus 50 degrees.

“I came down a couple of times for a visit and just loved the country because the culture is so close to the Canadian way of life,” she says.

“But it goes a bit further because the US isn’t pushing at the door.

During this time, Brauner owned and operated her own travel agency, but couldn’t move down under because there wasn’t much of a call for travel agents.

What Australia needed at the time were IT workers.

In early 2000 she sold her business and went Toronto School of Business to do an ISP programming course.

While this may seem left field for a travel agent, Brauner was going back to something she enjoyed.

“My background is programming. I could have become a hardcore programmer but I found it to be a very reclusive field and enjoyed interacting with people. Web design appealed to me because it had marketing appeal,” she says.

“While I was operating the travel agency, I was also working on websites as a contractor. That is how I was introduced to CBL. I was building their site and the president saw that I had a flair for marketing and promotions and offered me a job,” she says.

When Brauner was given the opportunity to start up in Australia she had to spend every Saturday in CBL’s labs because that is where the company’s strength was – fixing hardware.

“I think it’s important to work on your strengths, to be able to perform tasks such as starting a business from scratch.

“It was a challenge and something I had never done. However, it has turned out to be similar to starting up and running my own travel agency,” she says.

“Now instead of listening to people complain about the palm tree obstructing their hotel view, I listen to clients complain about their lost data.”

However, there is a notable difference from working in Toronto. In Australia, women don’t apply for jobs as technicians working in labs.

“I just advertised for a junior lab technician – it’s a hardware-related position – and I have had 45 applicants.

All of them were men.

“You have to wonder is it because women aren’t interested in tinkering with machines? Or do they prefer Internet-related positions? Is it something not encouraged at school?”

In the time she has been in Australia, Brauner has found that not many women work in technical positions; however, a larger number are running IT organisations.

“There is a perception that women are better organisers and so they tend to go for the marketing or managerial roles in IT.”

Whereas in Asian manufacturing plants women work on building products because of their steady hands.

“There is not a field women can’t get into,” says Brauner.