Fast50: No.9 focused on smart buying during the downturn

Stu Garrow shares a belief common to many of CRN's fastest-growing resellers: when times are tough, the smart start buying.

As business slowed and resources became available at lower costs, top solutions providers such as Garrow's Software Traction, which specialises in consulting for IBM's Rational software development tools, took the opportunity to go on a surgical buying spree. And in IT, it's your people who are your biggest assets, he says.

"We hired the very best people available," Garrow says.

"Having been through a couple of downturns we knew it was the very best time to pick up good people."

Garrow says that even though many staff will be under-employed at the start, hiring them now allows the business room to expand.

"We knew that the real growth would happen as we came out of the recession, so we needed to stay close to our customers and add value to them, even when they weren't spending money."

He says many of those jobs are in sales to access "more customers that have problems to solve", accounting for Software Traction's doubling annual revenue to $2.88 million.

The business, headquartered in Adelaide, manages growth by devolving profit-and-loss responsibility to state managers in most mainland capitals.

Software Traction makes most of its revenue from helping its clients get the most from their Rational tools. It counts 70 percent of its customers as big corporations that employ more than 1000 people.
Software Traction has a cross-section of dominant South Australian industries under its wing, including defence.

The twin opportunities and threats in the year ahead will come from open-source software and free, cloud-based services, which "remain one of the greatest changing forces on the industry", Garrow says.