Bringing It To A Personal Level

And that's what Jeff Roback, founder and president of Praxis, a Marina Del Rey, Calif.-based solution provider, discovered when developing his customer relationships.

"Many smaller organizations are looking for a more complete and ongoing engagement of the VAR's staff they see the VAR as an extension of their business," Roback said. "They focus their staff on what is core to their business, allowing the VAR to provide support around our expertise. [In this case, it's] IT service delivery. This makes it possible to maintain profitability and mutual value in the relationship in between projects."

Although Praxis' initial focus wasn't always on the SMB market, it was always geared toward servicing its customers. "We began as a Mac-only firm in 1992 and were always very services-oriented, which in some ways was ahead of our time," Roback said.

"[Although] we've adopted equipment sales as part of our strategy, we still stay largely focused on services ... 60 percent services, 40 percent product ratio," he said.

Roback has found that small-business revenue opportunities are underestimated and have misled VARs. "In fact, services between projects is crucial to the SMB as it provides high value, but also because it serves to differentiate the smaller VAR from the larger VAR who simply can't afford to provide this type of services model," Roback said.

This business model is what prompted the relationship with one of Praxis' most profitable clients. Ten years ago, the solution provider was contacted by Shorewood Realtors, a Southern California small business whose sales were skyrocketing but was in need of a centralized database.

A residential real estate company, Shorewood Realtors has 35 employees plus its off-site sales agents spread out in several offices throughout the South Bay, Calif., area. Alongside the nationwide housing boom over the past decade, the company's profits took off and it needed a way to not only link its sales offices to its headquarters, but to create a database that would track all aspects of a sale.

"They had deployed technology in a manner typical of SMBs of the time, a few stand-alone machines running vertical market applications and word processors," Roback said.

"We needed a database that had all of our agent listings, commission information, companywide e-mail," said Lynn Edwards, CFO of Shorewood Realtors.

A Cisco Premier Partner and Microsoft Gold Partner, Praxis quickly knew what the client needed and how to move forward. "Lynn had severaland still does to this dayportions of [Shorewood's] business in FileMaker and needed some assistance to continue with development of the databases," Roback said. "Lynn had a vision for a database that would tie together the firm's crucial business processes."

Praxis took that business vision and made it a reality through the integration of several technologies. "We designed a database system that lives in a Microsoft SQL server at the corporate office. It is exposed to Shorewood employee PCs via 4th Dimension database software [from 4D, San Jose, Calif.]," Roback said. "This software enabled a functionality that was critical for Shorewood: full cross-platform capability."

Shorewood's off-site and branch personnel were also given secure wired and wireless connectivity. "The system runs across a WAN utilizing Cisco routers and switches, and we also put quite a bit of effort into designing security into the infrastructure, as the data being tracked is quite sensitive and must be protected at all times," Roback said.

Another part of Praxis' appeal to the SMB segment is that its 10 employeessix technical, three administrative and one salesqualifies it as a small business as well. "We associate with small biz because we are a small biz," said Jennifer Roback, Praxis' vice president of sales.

The husband-and-wife team also strongly stand by their service-centric model as being the strongest contributor to their success as a solution provider. "It's very important to build your business model around long-term relationships with your clients. That means staffing your company with the type of people that SMBs need on a regular basis," Jeff Roback added.

And it also means creating working relationships that have the opportunity to extend beyond the office walls. "We have a pretty tight relationship [ with Shorewood]. We even go to their holiday parties," Jennifer Roback said.

Apparently, the appreciation is mutual. "My relationship with Praxis is wonderful. We kind of grew up together," Edwards said. "[Praxis has] helped us grow by setting up all of our structures, they do all of the maintenancethey do everything," Edwards said. "They monitor us 24x7 and know when stuff goes down often before I do.

"We started small, they started small. We needed a companywide database and in the beginning, Jeff and Jennifer sat down and helped us do it, along with Cisco," Edwards added.