Next-Gen VARs: How Would You Spend $1M On Your Business?

$1M Can Go A Long Way, If Used Right

When presented with the hypothetical idea of receiving $1 million dollars to invest in their company, seven of CRN's Next-Gen VARs were excited and immediately knew what areas to implement those extra dollars. Although a trend began to form in choosing to invest in people and infrastructure, these VARs had very different takes on how to put the money to good use. $1 million could dwindle quickly, so the consensus was that it’s all about making it count and using it wisely. Take a look at what they had to say.

Pete Zarras, Founder And President, CloudStrategies LLC

"People, people, people. For us, the cloud and the business model that we are building is more about the business outcomes than the technology itself, and good quality people to deploy the technology and work with businesses make all the difference in the world."

James Matheson, President, Network Medics, Inc.

"The areas that we have been investing in lately, which we see the most growth in, are in our hosting and back-up businesses. We own most of the equipment involved in both of those services and partner with other companies to provide the software such as VMware and EVault. With $1 million dollars I would build out our infrastructure to improve our capabilities there and really expand those services."

Michael Kean, Owner, Altico Advisors LLC

"Mainly, I would invest in hiring more people from the consulting delivery and sales side to get to capacity quicker and faster."

Victor Calabrese, Vice President and CTO, All-In-One Network Solutions, Inc.

"I would expand my help desk to include a couple more offices in different time zones, and I would also expand the technology for the help desk to make the customer service experience even better."

Skip Gould, President and CEO, BrightPlanIT, Inc.

"I would split it up into a couple of areas: 15-20 percent would go towards marketing and the rest would go towards building out our cloud offerings."

Henry Park, Board, 3GC Group

"What I would do is invest that money in infrastructure. I would put that towards a development team to customize some software that we need internally as we grow our company globally. We have a lot of internal workflows because we are growing a global infrastructure for value added reselling, systems integration and project management, which is going to outgrow our current infrastructure for tracking those systems. I would put the first 200-500,000 dollars towards infrastructure and the rest towards expanding our workforce -- especially our sales and marketing teams."

Thomas Douglas, President, JMARK Business Solutions, Inc.

"I would say that I would invest in our people. I would bring on more operations support and build our infrastructure."