Profile: Newcomer steals CRN Fast50 crown

Five years ago when Adelaide reseller LeetGeek was preparing to open its doors for business, the then 21-year-old founder and CEO Richard Stafford set out to identify what businesses really needed from technology.

From there he developed what has become LeetGeek’s philosophy, which is to be brand agnostic and to always try to find a solution to any challenge, no matter how great or unfamiliar.

Based in Adelaide, LeetGeek had something of an advantage in that competition was limited at the same time as companies in the South Australian city were crying out for help managing the growing complexity of their IT environments – a need many felt was being better met by IT companies on the East Coast.

Stafford stresses that LeetGeek has always been equally focused on both the Windows and Apple platforms. As it’s turned out, with so many organisations now grappling with growing ecosystems of BYO Apple products and trying to accommodate them within largely Windows-driven environments, this capability has served the company very well.

“Our niche is we are a Mac and Windows engineering company.”

And a fair measure of LeetGeek’s success has stemmed from Stafford’s personal determination that his company should be able to solve any technology challenge for any organisation.

“I don’t want to not be able to help someone,” he says.

Prior to last year, most of LeetGeek’s business was in the corporate sector, where Stafford had already built up a valuable book of contacts from his early days as an IT consultant, albeit an almost impossibly young one.

At the time, Next Byte was still seen by many as one of the leading Apple resellers in Australia, with the group controlling a sizable chunk of the South Australian education market.

Then, things started to go off track. As Stafford recalls, a growing number of schools and businesses started expressing dissatisfaction with Next Byte.

As reported by parent company Vita Group earlier this year, Next Byte suffered a more than 20 percent fall in sales in FY12 as the customer exodus gathered steam with Vita recoding a $15 million impairment charge.

Vita subsequently announced it was burying the Next Byte brand, refurbishing the stores it bought for $30 million in 2007 as “Apple-branded”. 

LeetGeek has mopped up most of the spill from Next Byte, transforming itself in the process into an education specialist. It now has around 90 schools and other learning organisations on its books.

“We took a few of their [Next Byte’s] staff and a lot of their business,” Stafford says.

In making the transition from purely corporate to a supplier of solutions to the education sector, Stafford has enjoyed watching how the rules, standards and policies of the business world can completely transform schools, which have traditionally not been sophisticated IT adopters.

“We applied what we did in the corporate space and did it in education,” Stafford says. “We opted to lead with services rather than product. ”

This was an important point of differentiation between LeetGeek and Next Byte, which was purely a shop for Apple without any real expertise in Windows.

“There’s no margin in Apple products; you need to really rely on your value add to succeed.”

And while Microsoft and Apple are important vendors for most partners, Stafford stresses that LeetGeek has always striven to be vendor agnostic, a strategy which has proved popular with its customers.

Another important point of differentiation Stafford highlights is that LeetGeek operates a purely fee-for-service model whereby there are no contracts or managed service agreements.

One of the biggest growth areas for LeetGeek in education has been around network infrastructure. Stafford says that with many schools supporting 1000 or more students trying to connect and access larger amounts of data at peak times their challenges are not unlike those in the enterprise.

“It’s not uncommon now to see schools with enterprise-grade switching equipment,” he says.

And with more and more students bringing their own mobile devices, schools are being forced to invest in better wireless networks. They are also looking for help in adopting enterprise-level standards for managing the devices themselves.

“One of the most overlooked areas is mobile procedures and policies,” Stafford says.

Outside of the corporate and education markets, LeetGeek is seeing increased business in the media, advertising and film industries and recently made its foray into the energy market with a major Australian solar company.

And mining may soon be added to the company’s CV as well.

Having been so successful in South Australia, Stafford confirmed LeetGeek is contemplating a move into new territory; an expansion he says is likely to be westward. 

Talent scout

Fellow LeetGeek director Ben Corbett joined the company in 2009 after being convinced by his South Australian wife to relocate from his native England where had been enjoying a successful career as a senior executive with a company supplying IT solutions to the visual effects industry.

He recounts how he initially planned to go out on his own as an IT reseller in Adelaide. As part of his plans to do so he responded to a job ad posted by LeetGeek with the intention of “scoping out the competition”. He realises now of course he would have had his work cut out for him.

One of the attributes Corbett felt would hold him in good stead, he recalls, is his knack for finding good people.

“I’m good at spotting talent.”

It was ironic then when his meeting with LeetGeek resulted in Stafford hiring him.

LeetGeek currently has 15 staff with plans to add as many as eight new heads next year.