01732 759725 08 DISTRIBUTion Intec Microsystems is primed for growth following its acquisition by Chiltern Capital of laptops. We'll buy from the likes of Westcoast where they might have 10 or 50 units left out of their normal stock levels of 500 or 1,000. It's almost opportunistic. We buy product from hundreds of companies and then we go out to the reseller base, predominantly in the UK, and sell those products,” explains Cantwell. “We sell to approximately 600-700 resellers a month out of a reported 8,000 resellers in the UK. Our target is to get in front of more of those 8,000 resellers to tell them what we do and to promote our products and services to them. That represents a great opportunity for the direct vendor partners we have on the distribution side of the business, who see us as a great route to market.” So much so that Cantwell expects distribution to be the fastest growing part of the business, fuelled by an expansion of its vendor portfolio and greater reseller reach. “The actual margins are slightly lower on the distribution side, but you can pick up on volume because you're getting support from vendors. You get more marketing assistance and can piggy-back off their marketing, so it is probably easier to grow the business by working with direct vendors than it is by broking. With broking you’re on your own; distribution is a partnership between you and the vendor.” New partnerships Intec currently has distribution agreements with more than a dozen vendors of hardware and software, including WatchGuard, Riello UPS, UniFi, GOODRAM, iQuila and Zyxel amongst others. As part of its growth strategy, it will be announcing five new distribution partnerships in the next two or three months. “We’re not taking on vendors in a scattergun approach. We're taking on vendors that we believe fill gaps in our product portfolio. We won’t be taking on more UPS vendors because it will just dilute that commitment to the ones we've already got.” Cantwell says that Intec has historically found favour with vendors that feel ignored by the larger distributors. “The big guys will openly admit they don’t have the time or the resources to promote small vendors the way they would do HPE or Cisco or one of the other big guys, because that’s where they make their money, make their margin. When you're a small vendor, you have to look for companies like Intec that are going to be hungry and not lackadaisical about the opportunity they’ve been given. We reach out to resellers; we don't wait for the resellers to contact us to buy something. Our ratio of sales/ account managers is far higher than the big broadliners. Our outreach is far more thorough and professional. “We want to grow the business while maintaining the quality of the relationships we've got with our vendors and our resellers. I don't want to dilute either by taking on too many vendors that are similar or taking on too many resellers and not being able to deliver the quality that they are used to. It's about growing Intec in a managed way.” This, suggests Cantwell, includes extending existing relationships to cover Europe, where Intec generates around 20% of its revenue and has feet on the ground in Holland, Austria and Spain. “We are looking to our existing vendors to expand their relationships to cover Europe and are already in discussions with some about taking on other territories,” he says. Reseller services A third, much smaller but profitable part of Intec’s business that Cantwell says is growing ‘quite dramatically’, albeit from a low base, is the provision of services to help resellers with installations, break-fix and the delivery of extended warranties. If a reseller has the opportunity to do a cloud migration or security install or rollout of Wi-Fi across a large estate but doesn’t have the capability to do it in-house, Intec can do the configuration or the entire rollout on their behalf. “That’s one of the areas that we're going to focus on over the course of the next 18 months,” explains Cantwell. “The larger resellers have their own internal teams to do that, but a lot of the smaller ones get some great opportunities that they have to pass up because they don't have the resources. “A lot of the big disties have built service capabilities, but in the same Celebrating its 20th anniversary in December, hardware, software and services distributor Intec Microsystems is embarking on an accelerated growth phase, following its acquisition by private equity investor Chiltern Capital and the appointment of Alan Cantwell as Executive Chairman. With the departure of company founder Dean Leather, Intec is being run by the existing management team of Andy Russell, Ian Whatton, John Lester and Stuart Hall, supported by Cantwell, who has known the company from its earliest days. Cantwell, who is also Executive Chairman of Midlands-based IT solutions provider Kuiper Technology, has extensive experience of channel businesses, including IT support company Selection Services, which he set up and ran, and Misco in the UK and Europe. Over the last nine months, Cantwell and Intec’s management team have worked on an ambitious growth strategy with an initial target to increase revenue by one third, from £74 million in 2022 to £100 million by the end of 2024, which would make it one of the UK’s twenty largest distributors. Intec started out in December 2003 as an IT broker, buying and selling unwanted stock, before expanding into distribution, with turnover now split equally between the two parts of the business. “As a broker, Intec will look for opportunities to hold stock. We will go out to the market to find cheap deals on product such as end of life versions Going for growth Alan Cantwell
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