Nevertheless, just last month Winter found himself celebrating his company's 10th anniversary. Unlike many others in the industry, this year inTechnology has plenty to cheer about.
"This has been an absolutely fantastic year for us," says Winter, pointing to a couple of major wins in the education sector.
"We had it pretty tough over the past couple of years but this year we will actually increase our revenue ten-fold from when we first started," he says.
It's been a slow progression for inTechnology since the mid 2000s.
Before that time the company was the exclusive point of contact for its leading product, an authentication technology called Funk Software.
The relationship went well, but in 2005 networking giant Juniper acquired the company. Even though inTechnology remained a partner, it somehow lost its way after the deal.
"I think one of the things we did when we moved away from the Juniper scenario was we tried to bring on too many technologies that weren't complimentary.
"So in the last two years we've said, 'let's take a step back and focus on our core business and actually go back and focus on our core competencies'," says Winter.
His triumphs encouraged Winter to go back to the company's roots and grow the business as a niche, value-added distributor specialising in security, management and control.
The distie offers technical expertise as well as sales and marketing for partners.
Winter relies on his marketing background to help his partners with their marketing.
"We really work on developing our campaigns and initiatives for our partners to be able to talk to their clients. So as opposed to a channel partner developing an electronic marketing campaign or a developing a breakfast type function, that's part of what we do or work in conjunction with channel partners to offer."
As a word of advice, Winter says, partners should focus on their core skill set.
He believes that if you've got a niche in the security space then you will do well.
"I think that's what we've really been able to show in the last 10 years is our experience and knowledge in that security space, but in niche areas.
"We don't go out there and source firewalls or anything that's a commodity type product. It's very hard to get traction when there are 35 other vendors out there."
Instead the company only distributes nine brands which cater to different types of security technologies.
It also represents some vendors in the wireless space which it inherited from back in the Funk/Juniper days. For example, the distie is the exclusive distribution point for wireless vendor Xirus.
Winter first set up the company after he was made redundant from a marketing role for a gaming software company in 1998.
Back then he anticipated an ongoing career in the gaming industry. Instead he took six months off to reflect and before he knew it, he had started his own business.
"I was working for a Playstation game company where I would go in to the likes of Harvey Norman and come up with hare-brained ideas for in-store promotions. I did crazy things.
"For a product called TuneUp I went to a car yard, bought a couple of cars, chopped them in half and stuck them into Harvey Norman stores.
The theme was, 'tune up your computer like you would your car'. It was one of the most successful promotions that the company had done and they rolled it out across the globe," Winter says.
Marketing is his forte, "something I really enjoy", he says. But when the tech industry went bust in the late nineties his original plans were quashed. In the meantime, a chat with a friend in computer software aroused his interest in other software possibilities.
"I basically got onto the internet, back then on dial-up, just to try and find what I thought was the next technology. I came across the Funk product. Originally, I wrote a business plan for it as something to do while I was taking time off but instead I decided to execute it myself. I got in contact with the guys in the US and took on the distribution.
"We were going through the whole IT bust [at the time]. To actually get into a new business when everything was doom and gloom was interesting," says Winter.
Winter set up the company's office in Sydney's northern suburb of Frenchs Forest and today the distie has 16 employees across three offices in Melbourne, New Zealand and the Gold Coast. InTechnology's Gold Coast office opened on a whim approximately five years ago.
"I happened to come up here for a holiday with my wife and I went home and my wife didn't," says Winter.
"We were living in Melbourne at the time and I went back for a meeting when my wife called and said I've bought a house, I'm moving to the Gold Coast. I asked: Can I come? So that's how the Gold Coast office happened."
The bulk of inTechnology's business comes from Sydney and Melbourne but most of the company's staff is based on the Gold Coast. "A lot of our business is done via the web. We have guys in Sydney and Melbourne that can go to meetings or alternatively we fly down people for their expertise."
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