No time for yum cha as PC Fever spreads

SMB-focused hardware and services reseller PC Fever has doubled its turnover year on year and expects to do so again this financial year. The West Ryde-based firm has more than tripled staff numbers through some tough economic times.

Rod Stern, MD at PC Fever, said the Sydney company had expanded from two staff to nine in an 18-month period ending mid-2003, and had doubled its revenue each year for the past two years and was on track to double it again by June 2004.

'We started this expansion in December 2002, when we got upstairs here. The renovations upstairs were supposed to take two weeks and took six months. We went from a bunch of desks to a showroom,' he said. 'We've doubled the floor space here.'

Stern, who has a disability, said he started PC Fever in 1996 to keep himself active and mentally challenged. 'It was just me from home and it rapidly outgrew that and I moved into these premises on Victoria Road [in West Ryde] on the ground floor,' he said. 'It was basically to keep my brain working.'

Stern put his company's success down to high customer relationship ideals combined with a fortuitous choice of specialisations -- security, outsourcing and services. SMBs increasingly needed VPN, intrusion detection, firewall and networking expertise they could not afford to supply in-house, he said.

'That's about 20 percent of our business. It has been growing a lot in the last 12 months and I expect that it will grow even further because companies are becoming very aware of security and that it's very hard to get anyone to do it,' he said. 'Although a lot of people say they can do it.'

One of the new employees was a marketing professional. PC Fever previously advertised mainly by word-of-mouth. However, future expansion may be predicated on ramping up its business partnerships as well as intensified marketing, he said.

'We're entering a world now where enterprise partnerships or relationships are going to be the thing, especially at the smaller end of the IT business market,' Stern said.

He said no company could be 'all things to all comers' any more but end-users had less and less time and inclination to mix and match specialised players. Customers still preferred to buy 'complete solutions'.

PC Fever itself would look to build on and add to its existing partnerships in 2004, he added.

Stern also singled out large hardware vendors for criticism on sales and pricing strategies in what he said had been an economically difficult few years. 'In terms of sales, it's been very hard to compete with the Acers and the Dells and they are just killing the market,' he said. 'Dell's the main offender.'

Stern said many of the larger computer vendors undersold their competitors -- but the price cuts had to come from somewhere so service was often not as good. Australian competitors could carve out a niche by focusing on service, he said.

'We don't sell cheap packages -- we're not Yum Cha Computers,' Stern said.

Hardware vendors Acer and Dell Computer were contacted for comment but were unavailable at press-time.