Regional resellers: Bundaberg

Queensland Computers: Geoff Augutis, managing director

We started in December 2005. My brother Luke and I both worked for another IT company in town. I was 18 and Luke was 22. We had a 100-square-metre shop and we did retail sales and retail servicing. 

We started out with three people, and these days we have 14. We’ve got two stores in Bundy and we’re in negotiation for a third in Hervey Bay. The big thing for us has been a move towards focusing on business as well as consumer. 

The last 18 months has seen a huge move into managed services, from an hourly service rate to a managed profile where we manage whole sites at flat rate.

We’re very selective with our staff and work very hard to make sure we’ve got the right staff. Most of our staff have really good people skills and a really good rapport with our customers, even if they are technical. We are not against pulling in people from other locations and paying them the money they deserve. Because if you want quality, you are often paying for it.

Wide Bay IT: Jakes Koekemoer, operations manager

The company was founded about 33 years ago by Michael Webb. About three years ago, we bought into Bundaberg and Hervey Bay and diversified into computers, small business and medium enterprise servers. 

We run a fully copy and design centre doing anything from signage and printing on wide-format canvases right through to business cards and manuals. The second part is telecommunications – we run our own lines and are an independent supplier of VoIP. We are also certified in structural cabling, and then the fourth part is printing with Fuji Xerox, where we do the maintenance, structural planning, and installation. And we are a gold member of Leading Edge Group.

We are trusted for service, and it is the service component that really works. About 30 percent of our business comes through word of mouth. With the rest we have an active salesforce that goes out to talk to people, and that is where our success lies. 

Lutz-tech: Stephen Lutz, owner

We provide services for several nationwide contract holders, for supermarkets and ATMs and a variety of service stuff. We don’t sell anything; we are purely service.

I got into computers as a kid. My brother fixed TVs and VCRs and things like that, so we pretty much grew up with it. There was an original business back in the early 1990s, and then a company called Camelon based on the Sunshine Coast bought them out. I started working for them in 2005. I purchased the Bundaberg branch off Camelon in 2010.

I’ve concentrated purely on the nationwide contractors and it has given us a few more contracts, because we purely do that. As long as you’ve got that core IT knowledge you can usually work out what needs to be done and how to fix the problem.