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Brigantia’s Ian Shaw talks about a recent visit to an ASCII Group member in New York City and the forthcoming 15th Brigantia Members Roadshow.
On a recent visit to New York City I was lucky enough to visit Paul Clancy, owner of Valiant Technology, a long- standing member of the ASCII Group which is the closest US equivalent
to Brigantia.
Trading from a sky scraper on 7th Avenue, initially I thought this would be a very different type of business to the traditional Brigantia member business but it turned out that our American cousins are fighting much the same battles that we are here in the UK.
Clancy looks after local customers including small ad agencies, not for profit organisations, local radio stations, video producers and many more in the mid-town district of Manhattan. The business is both an Apple and Sonicwall specialist with fully trained in-house engineers.
In much the same way as Brigantia members do, Valiant has a focus on break fix, new sales and recurrent revenue generating business models. Having embraced the MSP model early, Clancy has built up his monthly recurrent revenue streams to over 30 per cent of his monthly income and he has plans to further increase this to around 40 per cent over the coming year. Valliant’s current offering includes a managed help desk together with full managed and cloud services covering Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.
Always on the lookout for new services and new ideas to help business customers, Clancy’s most recent move has been towards offering full video conferencing solutions, which with ever improving internet speeds and the increasing costs of transport, he believes should see growing demand.
Interestingly, when asked what the biggest benefit of being part of a channel community like ASCII Group was, Clancy told me it was actually about community and being able to share experiences with other similarly minded “Apple is insisting all its APR retail partners must pay to refit their stores, or lose their coveted APR status.”
Having visited Valiant and talked to a number of other similar American businesses, it motivated me to assist Brigantia members in getting a better understanding of how to build value in their businesses by growing their recurrent revenue services. To this end we have now lined up some excellent speakers and exhibitors for the forthcoming 15th Brigantia Members Roadshow which is being hosted and sponsored by Microsoft at its Campus in Reading on November 22nd.
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