Saddle Up for Motherboards

atrick McNicholas thinks big. So trying to tell him last year was a bad time to expand his system business wouldn’t have done much good. Moreover, he wasn’t seeing any downturn in southern Florida.

“I thought if this is bad, I can’t wait until it gets good,” said McNicholas, a 33-year-old entrepreneur and CEO of Maverick Computers and a sister company, Maverick Communications, both in Loxahatchee, Fla.

Last year, sales of Maverick systems jumped to 650 units per month—a whopping 2,400 percent growth from the prior year, which put him at the top of CRN’s Fast-Growth Performer list. Maverick’s revenue in 2003 climbed to $16 million from less than $1 million.

What gives? McNicholas, who started out in 1999 with a Web design shop but soon found himself servicing networks and custom-building systems for clients, attributes the growth to a refocus on larger accounts, being active in his community and deploying various guerrilla marketing techniques.

But there is more to it than that. McNicholas is now gunning to become a branded system house with his own reseller channel.

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While still flying under the radar screen, as he puts it, he began having motherboards custom-built in Taiwan and works with contract engineering and assembly partners here in the United States to support his growth. That takes capital. But McNicholas, whose family owns construction and trucking industry concerns, said that has not been a problem, adding that his business turned profitable this year.

While he has to buy his motherboards by the container load, 5,000 units at a time, McNicholas said that enables him to offer lifetime warranties on the boards because he uses only premium components. And that is a big selling point for prospective customers.

“The lifetime warranty is a great feature,” said Michael Mink, owner of Playnow LAN Centers, Hallandale, Fla., who is opening his third computer-game arcade and buying about 50 systems a month from Maverick, many for resale to his gaming customers. “If one of them burns out, I don’t have any hassles. I just call up the tech support person and, no questions asked, they just take care of it. A lot of times the gaming computers, they get hot.”

McNicholas is looking for more customers like Mink who will resell his systems and is laying plans to move into the server and notebook markets.

The Maverick CEO likes to think big, and that may be the biggest secret of all to his fast-growth performance.