Brisbane's Relevate Group acquires Lance IT

Brisbane's managed service provider Lance IT has been acquired by fellow MSP Relevate Group, also based in the Queensland capital, aiming to complement its project services business.

The acquisition will allow Relevate to increase the size and reach of their business, allowing them to provide clients with a comprehensive end-to-end service for IT managed services and support.

Founded in 2019, Lance IT provides support and solutions to small to medium sized businesses across Brisbane, fixing network problems and helping businesses to implement cyber security strategies.

Relevate has a customer relationship management consulting business, specialising in digital transformation strategy and advice, and a web hosting business, Rippa Hosting, which was established in 2018.

With the addition of Lance IT, Relevate can offer a full service for IT services, support and strategic advice.

This includes IT support, managed services, Microsoft licensing, cyber security, implementations of CRM systems, digital strategy, web hosting, domain names and marketing strategy.

“We were already planning on creating another arm of the business,” Relevate director and CRM and marketing automation specialist Avon Collis said.

“Then we stumbled across Lance IT which was up for sale."

"The acquisition allows us to extend what we already do to create an end-to-end service. Now we can go on and do bigger things with our customers,” Collis said.

“We’ll also be rolling out Relevate People which is a virtual staffing group."

"Basically, everything is centred around the customer. They need all these services, and if we’re able to provide them all, they don’t need to go to three or four different providers,” he added.

Relevate is also in the process of setting up an office in Chandigarh, India, as part of the company’s global expansion.

Set to be completed by the end of February, the office will comfortably accommodate 36 staff who will work in technical support roles such as building custom software, providing maintenance services to clients, or IT support.

“The original plans for the office had 74 workstations and we looked at it and thought, ‘this is a sardine can,’ it was exactly what we wanted to avoid."

"So now we’ve redesigned it and we’ve got 36 people working in the same space,” Collis said, pointing out that many Indian offices are very crowded.

“I want it to feel like we’re all one team."

"We wanted Australian standards, to reflect what you would expect as an employee in Australia to comfortably be able to do your work," Collis said. 

With aims to build strong relationships and improve staff performance with Relevate’s new team in India, Collis has also focused on learning Hindi to better connect with staff in Chandigarh.