Master Of Reinvention

Take Steve Harper, master of reinvention.

In his 16 years at the helm of Network Management Group Inc. (NMGI), founded along with business partner Randy Johnston in 1989, Harper figures he's adjusted his company's focus every three years. To mess with success any more frequently would be foolish, he figures, advocating the need for solution providers to change not only with time, but with technology.

"One of our things is that you have to be able to reinvent yourself regularly," says Harper, 54. "We need to find new concepts, new products, new ways of doing things. At the same time, networking with other resellers is invaluable in finding out what works and what doesn't work. We avoid being an innovator, but we're always positioned to be early into a market."

That's especially true in a tertiary markets such as Hutchison, Kansas, where it's difficult to become too niche-oriented, he said. There certainly is a place for focus: NMGI has an especially strong accounting solutions practice and Johnston, who is NMGI's executive vice president, was named as one of the 2004 Top 100 Most Influential People by the publication Accounting Today. Wireless networking is also big, given the flatness of the local geography.

Two themes dominate Harper's current thinking: NMGI's DoubleCheck E-mail Manager product and the company's burgeoning managed services practices.

"The single greatest thing we've done recently was develop a product that we could sell with our VAR buddies across the United States," Harper said.

DoubleCheck is a sub-$2,000, Linux-based appliance that manages spam by using 22 different technical and social approaches. Originally developed for a specific client, NMGI now boasts more than 1,000 installations including nuclear power plants, state lotteries and Las Vegas hotels, and a network of about 80 resellers represents the product across the United States.

For Harper, partnerships are an invaluable way of doing business for NMGI. He relies on Heartland Technology, as an example, as an ally for deploying document management applications, something in which NGMI doesn't specialize but that relates well to its accounting practice. And he regularly chats with Ted Warner, president of Connecting Point of Greeley in Greeley, Colo., to compare notes about best practices. "We're both an hour outside of a big town, and we have the same value system," he said.

One area where they're sure to be comparing notes these days surrounds managed services. NMGI began making a big investment in its offering in mid-2004, and this is Harper's latest three-year plan. Harper figures the company is just at the beginning of this evolution and has no illusions that it won't take a serious investment.

One critical piece in the migration will be NGMI's use of ConnectWise PSA, which handles service management tasks including call-tracking, process alerts and other customer relationship management (CRM) functions. Harper picked the software because, you guessed it, the application was developed by another VAR. (ConnectWise, based in Tampa, Fla., has been in business more than 20 years.)

Other technologies that are providing the foundation for NGMI's managed services work include tools from LPI Level Platforms, N-Able and Kaseya.

Constant reinvention, of course, requires serious employee buy-in. That's why every year, NMGI's entire staff meets for an all-day offsite where the management team test their strategies for soundness with the people who spend most of their time in the trenches. Adopting a managed services practice, as an example, requires solution provider support personnel to think differently about how to prioritize problems. And the sales team needs to be able to articulate the shift from reactive services to ones that provide more proactivity and structure. From a higher level, the managers need to maintain the proper revenue mix between product sales and the time investment in selling the managed offerings.

By including the entire team in strategic decisions, the NGMI owners feel they can keep them more motivated. Another personnel-related policy that might raise eyebrows among other solution providers but that Harper says is necessary in a small market like his Kansas hometown: He pays a generous base salary so that his staff isn't buffeted too much by market ups and downs. It must be working: the average tenure of an NGMI employee is 9.5 years.

"These people want stability, and I'm going to give it to them," Harper says.