About Erez Zevulunov
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| Grew from $150,762 to $504,436 in revenues in 2 years (235% growth) ----- MIT Consulting is a Toronto based specialist in technology solutions. Our core team of professional consultants combines expertise from multiple disciplines to develop a completely customized solution for your business needs. MIT Consulting provides technical support services to Toronto and the surrounding Greater Toronto Area. MIT Consulting also offers advanced e-commerce solutions designed to fit your specific profit model. Whether you're a retailer, wholesaler or manufacturer, MIT Consulting can help you get the most out of your technology. |
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Focus on customer service and satisfaction
- For more on Erez Zevulunov visit www.mitconsulting.ca
I was a venture capital mergers and acquisitions consultant and broker during the dot com days so I worked in industry during the heyday. When the bubble burst I went freelance and started my own business. My background was in business management and engineering so I worked for people I had business relationships with that survived the dot com bust. I did a lot of random jobs for companies that needed IT work. My previous employer was my first client. It was a midsized accounting / legal firm that opened up a consulting division. I was the IT guy who helped convert technology-speak to English for the executives. Six months into it I landed a contract with a marketing consulting company to do a software development project with Scotiabank in the Caribbean. It was my first big project and I got to go to Jamaica for a couple of weeks to design a program that they had tried to develop for over two years.
When I came back to Toronto I hired a couple of programmers and completed the project in six months. My big objective as a business was to find a name people would recognize. I tried every type of acronym for my company under the sun like KFC, HMV, etc. I put down a list of 50-60 names and came up with Managing Information Technology. When we put the acronyms together MIT worked and it was instantly adopted.
From there I formed a marketing strategy. I needed to identify what we did. It was a very challenging position for me because I didn’t want to fall under the typical categories of IT service provides. I didn’t want to be a hardware seller or website designer. 90% of those companies don’t succeed because they are single service, specialists, too focused, and have a high failure rate.
Consolidated services was something our clients liked so that’s what we did. I identified with the SMB market and we specialize for them. We provided day to day outsourcing from A-Z. If there is a service we do not provide yet, we will provide it for our customers if they ask. We will find an outsourced provider or adopt it so we can sell it. We find out what people need and add it to our list of products / services if we don’t already offer it.
We’ve strictly focused on B2B services and have not strayed from that. We don’t want to service personal computers. We do service the owners of our small business clients if they need help at home but we don’t hit the streets like Geek Squad and go after the residential market.
Advice For Startups - Focus on customer service and satisfaction. Our affiliation with all the major carriers has attributed to significant growth but our #1 focus since day 1 is customer service and satisfaction. Because we’re a small business we try to build personal relationships with management owners. We’ve adopted a large corporate feel in that we have 20 representatives who can do technical support – each company will have a dedicated representative and three tiers of backup reps. Our clients establish relationships with certain representatives and we try to match the personality of our client with our staff.
Network. One of the best things I’ve ever done has been networking and joining different associations. We’re a member of the Vaughan and Richmond Hill Chambers. We all joined different types of business networking breakfast clubs. The company pays for the staff to join. It’s all about six degrees of separation. You don’t know who you’re going to meet. Generally somebody needs an IT guy at these meetings and if they are impressed by you they are generally going to call you. We’ve tried mass market like flyers, and newspaper ads in big papers, small papers, focused papers – all have been basically a waste of money. The exposure is nice but the ROI is insufficient. You’re competing against Dell flyers and Staples and Best Buy. Unless you’re giving away the product, nobody will buy from you through direct mail. Join everything imaginable because the power of networking is unimaginable. All the resources in the neighborhood are at your disposal and if you attend instead of sit back and relax you can meet thousands of people in your area that are potential customers instead of spending thousands of dollars in marketing which you can’t afford.
Look for government help. We’ve used R&D programs, student internship programs, co-op student programs, and work for welfare programs. Anything that was government assisted we jumped on board. They were hard to find but we did our research and applied.
Make your company a firm. In this company, as much as we are a small company, we made it a firm. I adopted this approach because of my previous employment at an accounting / legal firm. Everyone is an associate or a partner. In reality there are founding partners who own shares in the company and the rest of the junior partners or associates don’t own equity but have status. Nobody here is the CEO. My business card says director because I am the director of the company. Unless you make over $10 million or have a big head and want to show off, you shouldn’t be the CEO. It also empowered people when I did that. It’s very much like an accounting firm.
Create an image. Everybody in here, when they see a client, is in business attire or as a minimum, a golf shirt as a company uniform. We have a strict no jeans, t shirts, or running shoes policy. Customers respect that because they are used to technical support vendors coming in with unprofessional attire. For the SMB market a computer guy is like a contractor. We’re changing that around for our customers where they look at us like a lawyer or accountant. We are an essential service for the company not a convenience or emergency factor. Once people wrap their heads around it they realize it’s the truth.
Build a brand. Winning the PROFIT magazine award was the next biggest step that we achieved and I plan on being there again this year and in the PROFIT 100 in 2 years. When we found out that we were going to be in this year we did a rebrand of our company with a new logo to make us look more professional. We invested 50-60 hours to design our logo and we had 45 different variations. We had a solid black card but it didn’t work for us because when you give it out people can’t write on it and card scanners can’t pick up the info. We did all these variations but we went with the most simplistic one that caught the eye. We did a media kit, we have an icon now and it’s been huge for us. I want to build an icon that will be recognized like any other brand.
Join a peer group. For someone starting a company I would build a peer group of people that are in the business, people that are in the industry or just friends that are in the professional industry. I try to meet up with a peer group monthly.
Finance, finance, finance. Don’t use your liquid capital – always leverage. If you have $5,000 to $10,000 in your pocket, don’t go out and invest it and realize you have nothing for the next day. Use it to secure that money for a $7,000 or $10,000 line of credit. You pay a little of interest but you have money in the bank. It’s been the biggest problem in our company. I started this company with under $5,000. The first year I didn’t take home over $20,000 in salary. This year we will break $1 million in sales and I hope to triple that the year after. Even today, as we grow this rapidly, financing is a difficult challenge. If I’m leveraging all our liquid cash and I have a bad month, I can’t pay salaries. I also apply for government loans. It’s an extra 2 points above prime and I’m getting my office move financed by the government so I’m paying $300-$500 / month. I don’t have to worry about my cash flow now, I can afford it. I would also advise anyone in a small business that it’s worth every penny to invest money into a consultant or accountant that knows small business but note that it’s very hard to find a good SMB consultant or accountant.
Get referrals. Your number one source of new business is your existing customers. A very successful accountant, who was also my client, told me that 99% of all their business comes from referrals. You can tell existing clients you’re launching a new service but if you ask them, 9 in10 people will know someone they can pass you on to.
Get free press. Free press is very powerful .PROFIT magazine is free – it costs nothing. We put our name in there and we won. Newspapers all accept articles. If you write a newsworthy story people will write about you. Even if it’s a local newspaper you might get on the front page if you can create a story to tell. We’ve been nominated for numerous awards and apply to them all. It’s free.
Support your community. Another big thing we do is support our local community. We have thank you letters from synagogues, churches, and neighborhood centers. We try to help out any organization we can if it’s free services, or providing volunteers, or sponsoring auctions. Good faith is always good faith - it has to be selfless. You don’t go in expecting to get business but overall you will get back twice as much as you put it. It’s magic – I can’t tell you how much we end up getting in return. We might go in just covering basic costs and we’ll receive a 10 fold exposure on it. A lot of people fear to do that for organizations.
Mistakes To Avoid - Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. It’s all part of learning as long as you learn from your mistakes. Take chances in expanding or in trying new things and if you do fail, retract and analyze so you learn for the next time. You can never stay stationary. If you stay stationary you die.
Don’t forget to invest in yourself or into the company. A big mistake that a lot of companies make is that they start ahead of the curve pioneering whatever they are doing. What they forget to do is reinvest their profits into their company in training, people, and resources. Entrepreneurs neglect that as they grow. We have policies that all staff that go for training can apply for us to cover the cost of their course. If they go into that course and they pass, we pay for it. If they fail, they pay for it. We tried the other way around and people didn’t pass and we ended up paying for it. This way works much better. We also try to provide in house training for new and existing staff. We’ll buy programs or get an instructor to come out and train us. It’s more cost-effective to hire a consultant to come to your office and get them for an afternoon and have the whole office there compared to taking people off to go to a $300 / person whole day seminar.
Don’t feel sorry for people that work for you. If you feel sorry for them, at the end of the day, you’ll be the one that pays for it. You’re responsible for the whole company. If it’s not working out and you need to let them go, you have to think about your company, yourself, and the several other people that work for you. Always think of the many versus the few.
Never sell yourself short. A lot of new companies under-price themselves to get business but they end up hurting themselves because at the end of the day they can’t pay their bills. If you aren’t charging what’s appropriate you’ll end up making less than you would working at McDonald’s. There has to be something left in the bank at the end of the day. You end up spinning your wheels and it’s a big mistake a lot of small business make because they undersell themselves and don’t make enough margin to survive the in the long run.
Break business relationships that are not good for you. If you have existing relationships but they have you in a choke hold, don’t be afraid to cut the relationship even if it’s a big client or supplier for you. No business is better than bad business. Don’t be afraid to cut them out. If you don’t, you end financing the losses.
If I Were To Start A New Business - I’ve already got seven new projects on the go. My latest project is the Canadian medical directory. It’s a web-based consolidated directory portal that takes practitioners as a single source, one stop resource for Canadian consumers. The website is up at www.canadianmedicaldirectory.com . I want it to be the WebMD for Canada – it’s an important personal project for me. We eventually want to have online pharmaceutical sales and get service providers to be in the portal. If you’re a diabetic, you can monitor your day to day reports through our portal and your doctor can log on and see all their customers. We want to partner with the software vendors that deal with the OHIP billing. We have 50,000 practitioners across Canada and the website already have daily visits in the hundreds without advertising and 10,000 unique visitors a month. I’m going into the directory business and am starting nine different ones from a pet directory to an office relationship directory. Those are going to be some major powerhouse services.
Also keep in mind that the tech sector is less than 30 years old in evolution and is uncharted territory. Things will change beyond reason over the next 10 years. You have to relate to brick and mortar which is thousands of years and see that the virtual version is only 10-20 years old so if you look at where it will be in a 100 years from now you’re still at the base of the iceberg - not even close to the top. There’s no such thing as enough competition in the market. That’s what pushes us forward. We started at the most difficult time possible and it’s worked out for us.
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