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ARN spotlight on: Queensland’s Envisage Technology

The Queensland-based MSP shares how it adapted its business model to fit the current environment

The 'ARN spotlight on' series explores partners operating in the local channel landscape right around the country, from Cape York to Hobart, Byron Bay to Fremantle and beyond. In this edition, we focus on Queensland and Albion-based partner Envisage Technology.

Changing with the times

For a business to be successful in the long run, it needs to adapt to change. That’s exactly how the managed service provider (MSP) Envisage Technology found its success.

Envisage’s story started in 1998 with founder and managing director Ben Steel, who saw an opportunity to deliver custom desktop hardware to consumers. In this early stage, Steel was competing with larger retail vendors with lower overheads and direct access to components from import channels.

The MSP eventually changed tack and moved into the consulting space, being an early adopter of the managed services recurring revenue model, according to Steel.

Since then we have constantly reinvented the way we do business to keep in line with customer trends,” he told ARN. 

Today, the 15-employee-strong provider is focused on the healthcare industry, providing services for a large number of clients. 

“It’s a tough industry that has pushed us on how we manage data, deliver uptime and ensure a consistent experience,” Steel said. 

“We are growing our client base in other domains now and the healthcare experience has been invaluable as a high base line of performance.” 

Envisage’s success can also be seen in the MSP’s financial results, reaching a compound annual growth rate of 25 per cent over the last five years. Steel said that this growth represented how Envisage is “always planning the next leap and not getting caught out by the growth we’re achieving”. 

The ups and downs 

Along the way, Envisage has had its fair share of wins, such as partnering with vendors NextDC, Over the Wire, Microsoft, Genie Solutions and working with XIT Distribution, Ingram Micro, Synnex and Dicker Data. However, one major win the MSP saw started out as a loss. 

In 2015, Envisage lost out on a deal to move a virtual practice management company into the cloud, virtualising 30 medical practices with a couple of hundred users. 

After a few months, the client reached out to the MSP and told them the project was moving too slowly, Steel recounted. 

“They gave us a small migration, a four-user practice, to see if we could leap the technical barriers faster,” he said.

“We managed to quickly learn (sometimes through failure) how to solve the technical issues that multi-tenanting the software caused, as well as the integrations with peripherals and supporting tools that needed to be rebuilt in the cloud environment. 

“The client gave us the rest of their practices to migrate and we now have a reputation for providing a stable cloud environment for practice management tools.” 

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However, not all challenges to the MSP have resulted in success. For example, developing the brand’s identity from an individual out to a team proved to be particularly difficult for Steel.

“With any business when it starts, there is an individual who is doing everything from sales to execution. This creates an incredible amount of trust to that person with clients,” he said. 

“As the team grows, there is a process of ensuring that this trust is replicated to new members of the team, otherwise it becomes a huge barrier to scaling the operations. 

“This is incredibly hard in a market where personal relationships are a strong component of the buy decision, and we’re working hard to ensure that clients shift their trust from ‘I know Ben can deliver this so I’ll call him’ to ‘I trust that Ben has recruited the right person and given them the processes to solve my problem.’” 

He added that while this can complicate the process, developing that team-based trust results in a consistent customer experience. 

“We want our technical ability to be shared, not concentrated into a single hero,” Steel said. 

To the future

Looking back at the over the last 20 years of operation, there are a few things Steel wishes he could do over. 

First on his list was seeking out input on developing the Envisage team at an earlier stage.

“I would have received professional advice sooner and invested in upskilling staff before the skill set was required,” he said.

“Stepping back from day to day operations was a key to growing our business and I would have done this earlier.

“Documentation of process would have been something I would have liked to have completed earlier as well.”

As the role of technology becomes ever-increasingly important in the world, so too does the role of the businesses that base their business on said technology, just like Envisage.

“We see the future of our role to be ensuring that we are sweeping the horizon for technology that could either power up or disrupt our client’s businesses and helping them manage the pace of change in their organisations to ensure they are maximising the benefits of new technology without impacting their team’s ability to adopt new tools, all the while ensuring that the base level of their technology just works,” Steel said.

“Digital is becoming central to so many areas of business that more and more consultants are delivering technology solutions; accountants are positioning themselves as cloud experts thanks to Xero and HR consultants are using software-as-a-service tools to deliver the outcomes.

“If MSPs are too focused on answering the phones and selling Microsoft 365, they might miss the bigger problems their clients are seeking to solve.”

Moving forward, Steel concluded that his MSP has the right technology skills; it’s just a matter of getting better at “simplifying technology for our clients and helping them see how it can simplify their businesses.”

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