Playing With The Big Boys

hen Jalil “Jay” Mahini moved to the United States from India in 1984, he began his career running a small branch of motherboard manufacturer Micro-Star International, where he took note that customers were constantly asking for tweaks to their OSes, their hardware or the peripherals of the systems he was building for them.

After three years—during which he grew his Micro-Star branch to a $1.2 million operation—Mahini struck out on his own, taking a number of clients with him, and founded Micronet Systems. Today he sells custom PCs, servers and, more recently, custom notebooks to small businesses, schools, nonprofits and home-office users out of a 2,500-square-foot store at a Niles, Ill., shopping mall.

“Circuit City, Best Buy and Office Max are in my shopping center,” Mahini says. “And they consider me a threat.”

That may be overstated, but Micronet did grow system unit sales a tidy 70 percent last year to an average 141 systems per month, making him a CRN Fast-Growth Performer. That included a steady increase in notebooks to about 15 a month. Revenue increased 23 percent to $1.6 million.

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And actually, being located near the big retailers has been a blessing. Mahini said the retailers often send him customers who have problems and needs outside the scope of their technical expertise. Besides building systems, Micronet installs wired and wireless networks and provides on-site service and support and other services.

Micronet is an authorized Intel dealer, but it also uses components from Advanced Micro Devices and Asus Computer International. Mahini is authorized to sell Hewlett-Packard systems, but most of the systems he sells are his own.

Mahini said he plans to grow the company by expanding into the education market and has already entertained bids from four school districts. Micronet will also increase its reach in whitebook sales and service, and he plans to expand server offerings with Intel’s help, using that company’s dual and quad Xeon processors.

Mostly Mahini plans to stick with his core competency. “We stick to what we do best—computers,” he said. “We don’t do consumer electronics or convergence technology. We know our core market and we stick to it.”