Three-time Fast50 company races ahead

If TechPath managing director Troy Adams is daunted by his goal of $20 million in turnover, he isn't showing it. The three-time Fast50 company has been busy putting in place a major overhaul to the business, which he started in 1996 while in high school. Changes include a new company name and setting the goal to achieve $20 million in turnover in the next five years.

"Revenue growth is flat this year, but the business has been profitable every year since its existence and financially it's doing fairly well," he told CRN.

The Brisbane reseller, which reported 20 percent growth in the 2013 CRN Fast50, was known as Betta Computer Services until its recent name change. TechPath advertises cloud and hosting, business internet, phone systems, managed IT services, IT consulting, software development, as well as hardware from Dell, Apple, Ruckus, Ricoh, QNAP and Cisco, among other products and services.

"We started out as a computer hardware and services business, but the service offering has changed over the years," Adams told CRN.

The new name TechPath is an attempt to "stand out" as it grows into security and data centre services.

But changing the name wasn't an easy decision. For a start, there was a list of 300 potential names to work through. With the help of agency Entica, the list was narrowed down to a shortlist of roughly 20 to 30 names.

"The first thing you do is check the domain is available. That crosses out most of them," Adams said. "The original list was pages and pages long."

The change also meant the "massive" task of rebranding everything the company owned: from shops, vehicles, business cards, to pens, stubby coolers, uniforms, jackets, hats, coffee cups… even golf balls.

"Everything you picked up, you thought, 'Oh, wow, that's branded, too,'" he said.

Recent growth areas include a "heavy" investment into data centre services last year and the launch of a hosted desktop platform.

"It actually has affected our turnover fairly significantly," Adams said. While turnover is about the same as last year, the company now has more clients and the bottom line lines also looks "much better".

Accompanying this has been a big change to the TechPath sales structure. With salespeople used to getting a big commission for every sale, Adams said he had to "reinvent" the sales commission model.

"You're effectively funding that sales commission straight up front. If I didn't change that it had an effect on what they would sell."

The business has also become more sales focused. "We had a flat structure, you could say. We've never really been sales focused; we've been tech heavy. An engineer would generally go and do the sale."