What’s your three-year plan?
How about your five-year?
And your 10?
For many small-medium-sized UK IT resellers, merger or acquisition represents a lucrative exit strategy.
But, just as with pension planning, you have to invest long-term to see a big return.
Running a profitable spend-as-you-earn ‘lifestyle’ business can provide a good living for owners and their employees.
But play a more canny long game, and the eventual rewards can be life-changing.
Cleverly, UK-based hosted telephony provider MyPhones has developed an innovative and unusual model that is enabling its most loyal partners to do just that.
In simple terms, commit now to selling its products and solutions, and it will commit to later acquiring your business.
“We like to think of it as Growth-As-A-Service,” says MyPhones Sales Director Paul Gibbs.
“It’s about leveraging the opportunities of the present whilst simultaneously de-risking the future.
“Champion our wholesale offering by retailing it on our behalf; scale your business by leaning on our buying and provisioning power; and, together, let’s guarantee a great outcome for us both.”
The initiative – based upon a negotiated mid-long term contractual agreement – represents a potential win-win for provider AND partner.
And, crucially, it is a potent commercial force in a super-competitive channel market where differentiation is sometimes hard to demonstrate.
In short, if solutions’ functionality is broadly comparable across the board, there have to be other compelling reasons for a reseller to choose a particular vendor partner over another.
Without those other reasons, procurement decisions can only be about price – and that’s a race to the bottom which benefits no-one.
As if to underpin the point, as well as MyPhones’ progressive ‘growth-as-a-service’ head-turner, its wider offering is just as creative.
Software, hardware, connectivity, mobile: all aspects of the digital workplace are white-label options.
But it’s the go to market model (and in particular the quote-to-cash dynamics) which really differentiate.
After all, connectivity contracts can be expensive, high-risk balance sheet items.
And how many small resellers can cope with the financial burden that accompanies an order for, say, a hundred i-phones?
A bigger, secure and empathetic vendor partner not only has the financial clout to take the steam out of all of that; it can also smooth out any day-to-day management bumps by lending resource and expertise when its needed.
“Pretty much every aspect of a reseller’s customer relationship can be outsourced to us to varying degrees,” says Gibbs.
“We can be actively-involved in resellers’ pre-sales conversations with their customers; we can structure finances in ways which enable resellers to leverage our buying power; we can make it easy for resellers to manage cashflow with easy payment terms; and resellers can lean on our provisioning teams to make deployment as efficient as possible”
“Resellers that buy into that approach find they are able to grow their business much more effectively.
“Once that concept of dependable, long-term growth is proven, they are able to begin thinking more strategically about what they want their future to look like.
“And when THAT begins to happen, we are able to help them put an exit plan together which sees us value their business and guarantee to buy it from them at a point in the future that works for them and us.
“That’s EVERYONE winning.
“If that’s not a powerful partnership differentiator, I’m not sure what is”
So, when might the time be right for YOU?
Three years?
Five?
Ten?
Got you thinking, right…?
- To learn more about how your reseller business can thrive now AND in the future, visit www.myphones.com
