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Robert Stewart Finds That It Pays To Have Friends In High Place.
This company, Alert Computing, a custom-system builder in the mountainous resort community of Sedona, Ariz., grew unit sales an astounding 758.3 percent last year, making it the No. 1 White-Hot Performer among CRN's 50 Leading System Builders. And Stewart thinks being in Sedona had something to do with it.
"There are a lot of people in Sedona that have a lot of money and own a third or fourth home. And they [own] businesses," said Stewart, the company's founder and CEO. "That's where most of my contacts come from."
Well-heeled business owners with vacation homes in Sedona need remote access to their business data and to their employees, Stewart said. As a result, he promoted Windows Server 2003 and other Microsoft products last year. "My business just took off," he said.It also doesn't hurt that Stewart's college roommate at West Point used to work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, putting together military contracts for civilian companies. Now he's doing just the opposite. And the civilian companies Stewart's friend is helping to get military contracts include Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed.
"No matter who we were working for or where in the world we were operating, Bob Stewart was our resource—guiding our equipment and software purchases, designing and upgrading our Web site, and being a good mentor to his technology-challenged client and friend," said his West Point roommate, Tim Ringgold, now CEO of Defense Solutions, an international project management and business development company in Exton, Pa.
Defense Solutions has worked with the U.S. Congress, NATO, the Pentagon, the Army of Iraq and the governments of Israel, Hungary and Romania. It has offices in Pennsylvania; Miami; Budapest, Hungary; Tel Aviv, Israel; and Bogota, Colombia.
"What is most remarkable to me about our work together during this period was the thoroughness and promptness of his customer service," Ringgold said. "I knew that if I called Bob, he would find a way to work through our problem and get us to a solution—promptly and inexpensively."
Other Alert Computing customers agree that the quality customer service they get sets the custom-system builder apart from its name-brand competitors. "To be able to call Alert Computing in the morning and have [Stewart] in our office before noon is most unusual in the industry and most important to us," said Merenna Morrow, owner of Rader & Morrow Health Concepts, Sedona.
"It is also important to our staff to be able to call on the telephone and find a happy person on the other end of the line," Morrow added. "Stewart does not sell us unnecessary products, and we far prefer his custom-built systems to anything we can find at major-brand computer companies.
James Breen, owner of ClickerAds.com, Sedona, said he also gets better customer service from Alert Computing than from the branded vendors. "Why do we choose him over Dell, HP, etc.? It comes down to service. When we call Alert Computing, we actually get a human voice, and if we happen to get the answering machine, our call is returned within the hour. There is no charge for phone support, ever, which is more than I can say for the major vendors," Breen said.
A contract with Raytheon for 3,000 servers helped fuel his company's growth last year, Stewart said. But that wasn't the only thing that boosted sales that year, during which the solution provider sold 9,633 servers, 2,143 desktops and 1,700 notebooks.
Stewart, who originally founded Alert Computing as a Web site development company before getting into system building, also put his Web experience to work last year. He said he tweaked his Web site so that it is prominently displayed on most Internet search engines.
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