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"My Biggest Mistake...and How I Fixed It" - August, 2007

Tech guy needed to see different angle
Monday, August 20, 2007

By Jim Kerr, as told to Plain Dealer reporter Marcia Pledger

I started learning about these new products called microcomputers when they first came out. At 17, I was writing software. When I was in college I started CRU Solutions.

It was a different company back then, just focusing on software. Now we design technology solutions, supply the hardware, service it and manage clients' networks all the way out to the Internet. But it's still the same company. Except for one corporate internship, I've never worked for anyone.

I'm a technology guy, so luckily I was able to build this company by serving customers well and banking on referrals. I never actually looked for clients. They found me. But when I was ready to grow the company five or six years ago, I started advertising. In a year's time, I spent about $20,000 on radio, direct mail and five billboards. We even knocked on doors. The result was just absolutely embarrassing.

My biggest mistake was not differentiating sales from marketing. I'm a math guy, so I know you've got to start somewhere when you approach an issue. The problem with that approach, I later found, was that I focused on trying to sell products as opposed to offering solutions.

I was selling without having created a market to sell into. One billboard, for instance, promoted buying the Pentium 4 processor when it first came out in 2001. A direct-mail piece marketed an e-mail server. We were trying to sell to businesses - businesses that had never heard of us or understood why they would be interested in the product. It took about a year and a half for me to realize that I was wasting my time and money with my approach.

I hired a business development officer who I met at Bible study, and I credit him for helping me to better understand strategic marketing. He spent a year working at the company, just trying to understand our business. About 90 percent of our clients are small to medium-size enterprises that have 15 to 50 employees.

He made a few changes in that first year. After that, he began creating packages that were attractive to both our former customers and our new customers. Instead of saying we have laptops, desktops and servers to sell, which was my approach, he identified solutions that both information workers and mobile workers were interested in. For instance, some of our clients had our hardware, but we were not doing remote management for them. We created a set of benefits that made clients want to pay a small monthly fee in order not to have to worry about things like slow servers and space dwindling on a hard disk.

The way services were packaged was critical, though, and it called for a balance. We had to make a fair and reasonable profit. Meanwhile, clients had to get more value than what they were paying for in order to make it a win-win situation.

After his second year here, in 2003, our sales increased 300 percent. That’s a significant increase in any economic environment, but this increase happened during the dot-com bust, at a time when technology stocks were crashing and the whole technology industry was tanking. Since that time, growth has been more modest, with 10 percent to 20 percent annual increases.

Part of our growth has come from helping clients understand that they need a lot more than just a product to accomplish their business objectives. Just knowing that they can turn to one company to handle all their technology issues has made a big difference.

If you want to grow your business, often one of the best ways is to look at your business model from a different perspective.

Jim Kerr is President and Founder of CRU Solutions, which is celebrating its 25th year in business. CRU is a comprehensive IT systems solution provider of exclusive, industry-leading hardware, software, connectivity, expertise and a unique approach to customer service. CRU’s intelligent™brand of desktops, laptops and servers are custom built in Northeast Ohio exclusively with matched Intel components. You can reach him directly at jim.kerr@crusolutions.com. Additional information is available at www.crusolutions.com.