Bringing It To A Personal Level

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Ask any reseller servicing the small to midsize market and he or she will tell you that the keyand the biggest perkis the personal, long-term relationships that can be developed. Translated into dollars and cents, that equates to long-term, recurring revenue.

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.

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