PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
Iain Shaw responds to Scott Wilkinson’s ‘The Last Word’ column from July’s edition of PCR.
Scott Wilkinson from Edinburgh based SimplyFixIT has simply got it as far as I can see having read what he wrote in last month’s PCR. It struck me as prophetic that I should have been writing in my column about Brigantia National Laptop Repair when he was writing about the need for a national indie computer repair shop brand.
Brigantia has been around a while and we have evolved over the years to the needs of our indie channel membership community. With the recent round of investment into Brigantia Partners, our move south to offices in Canary Wharf and the ongoing hiring of a young and dynamic new team, we have put ourselves into a position where we are going to be able to deliver everything that Scott mentioned in his column in the future.
Brigantia Partners is not only building on the historic work done in creating the membership community, but is also putting considerable new resources into developing a raft of new recurring revenue programs that will be suited to the small to medium sized businesses that most of our members look after at a neighborhood level.
Along with helping members to improve their margins and value by providing services at better prices Brigantia will be making available a range of business management tools that will help to run our member’s businesses more efficiently and so more profitably.
We respect that all of our members are independent and proud of it, however by adopting some consistent good practices in the way that businesses are run it will make it easier for Brigantia members to sell their businesses.
There will be a number of reasons why a member might wish to sell; retirement, need for a change, ill health and death are a few common ones. A likely acquirer will be another Brigantia member; if the business is run with common values, similar services and the same management tools as a potential acquirer, it will be easier to absorb and will command a higher price.
Over the coming months and years we hope that our members will develop a growing sense of pride in being a Brigantia member and making our new, distinctive logo part of their corporate identity. In effect we see Brigantia becoming the brand that Scott is looking to see grow under what will be a quasi-franchise model.
Someone looking to be involved in our industry with money to invest will probably find the prospect of starting from scratch daunting and the purchase of an IT franchise poor value for money. A business which is part of the Brigantia membership community, with all that represents will be a more appealing prospect.
Brigantia intends to create a market for members’ mergers and acquisitions such that whether the transaction is ‘internal’ or from outside Brigantia Partners plc will act as an honest broker allowing all parties to proceed with an increased level of confidence.
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