Back in 1995 John and David were working at Future Shop – a Canadian big-box store for consumer electronics – and I was buying my computers from David who was on the sales floor. John was in the back fixing computers. At the time it was common practice for people to unplug, bundle up and cart their computers into a place like Future Shop to be repaired. One day David mentioned that he and John were thinking of starting a company. These two young chaps figured it would make much more sense to bring the repair to the Client. And they had a great name to boot! And so was born the Nerds On Site (NOS) enterprise.
It was in 2001 that I joined as CEO and we began the process of building the company out from the London ON region to across the country – from St John’s NL to Victoria BC.
We’d phone all the tech companies listed in the Yellow Pages before entering each new town just to assess the competition. On average 82% of those calls were either not answered by the company that was listed, or not answered at all. That means over the course of a year or so the bulk of the companies listed had just slipped away … either swallowed up by others, closed or just faded into ether. This was a market space clearly in need of a brand – one that could be trusted to be there. Thus was born some early company axioms… ‘Competition is good… just not good enough’ and ‘Working to build the PowerBrand of choice for SMEs everywhere’.
Our enterprise model…
Pushing across Canada we developed our 4 step growth program.
First, Brand Awareness… NerdMobile™ parades of 3-5 Nerds-branded VW beetles downtown, in commercial and industrial parks and college & university campuses raising awareness that there’s a fun new service in town.
Second, Brand Presentation… telling our story to EntrepreNERD (eNerd) applicants, kicking off a 12 week Marketing Plunge Plan, and engaging with the local SME community by networking, Gold Calls, as well as digital and marketing collateral programs.
Third, Brand Penetration… identifying verticals and enterprise opportunities and telling our story to Client wannabes with our 3N process of consultation – Needs Assessment, Normalization & NerdCare (our service and maintenance options)
Finally, Brand Building… building tailored Client Project Teams and conduct our Fill the Beetle-Feed the People events in partnership with downtown missions and food banks.
Our enterprise focus has always been our Client. They are the boss. We work to build a longterm relationship with them. It may be corny, but we always capitalize the ‘C’ in the word Client as a matter of practice. A key NOS axiom is ‘We don’t service computers… We serve People, with computers’. We enjoy a 96.5% Client Satisfaction rating but are most humbled with the 80,000 plus written messages our Clients have shared with us. I’d be happy (and proud) to share a sampling of these with anyone who’s interested this liquid gold!
Our model is defined by our 3 levels of Rules of Engagement (RoE). First, and foremost, is our eNerd to Client RoE’s… written by our eNerds defining exactly how we agree to treat our Clients. Second is our eNerd to eNerd RoEs… defining how each team member works with each other as professionals, once again written by eNerds. Third, our eNerd to Nerds On Site RoEs… defining how each team member works with NOS and vice versa, written by NOS. Each are up for edit to reflect changing environments and market conditions.
Our talented team of eNerds operate as a collegial network of specialists who collaborate to build learning and business opportunities together. We’ve developed a transparent and positive control system at the centre of operations – I Am A Nerd (IamAnerd.com)… a timely, accurate and accessible control system. This business-on-a-tablet system empowers each team member with centralized CRM, purchasing, shipping, billing, searchable resource library & knowledge base, our virtual University of NERDology, and our state of the enterprise front page.
Our culture…
Our search to attract and engage stellar talent never ends. We define our culture with these company pillars… to fuel our CHARGE! into the marketplace we look for these character and personality traits.
C – confident, competent CEOs… Capability Expansion Orchestrators – for themselves and the opportunities they’re exposed to.
H – honest… with themselves, with our Clients and with our team of entrepreNERDS.
A – attitude of humility… remembering at all times that we may be skilled, but our Client is the boss.
R – responsive and resourceful… ‘Time is the only currency of consequence’… and so we treat our Clients’ time and agenda with respect. Also we creatively collaborate with other team specialists to deliver the ‘better in class solution’ options our Clients deserve.
G – goal and destination oriented… as responsible CEOs we must keep in mind why we do what we do and where it’s leading us this day this week, this month, this quarter, this year.
E – engaging & enthusiastic… we are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen and we must be good human engineers to do so. We must also have passion and joy for what we do and allow it to show through, thus allowing our Clients to enjoy working with us.
To support a refreshing, learning & connected culture we encourage weekly team breakfast meetings and TacticalTuesday leadership sessions, monthly entire team phone meetings, quarterly eNerd ReBoots to share new or evolving tech and business practices as well as annual NerdFest weekends or NerdCruises for the whole family to meet, play and learn from each other.
Our future…
The market opportunity we find in front of us, especially across the United States is daunting. It is overwhelming! When you start talking trillions of dollars of tech spending, it seems a little far-fetched or even beyond belief. Simplifying it, we discovered that in cities of 100,000 or more in America, the average tech spend is six dollars per person per day. That’s $600,000 every day of the year in a city of 100,000 people! Wow!!
In our heart of hearts and dream of dreams, we’re yearning to capture one dollarette (one CAD $) of that $6 USA per capita per day.
Much like the universe itself, the IT industry is expanding at a faster rate every single day. We serve 4 Client demographics… Residential, SOHO(single operator, home office), SME (small and medium enterprises) and Corporations. Our sweet spot is the SME marketplace. Passionate and driven entrepreneurs anywhere from five people to 500 people in size. They number about 95% of all the companies registered in North America and they create in excess of 85% of all new jobs.That’s some market opportunity! All of our marketing is focused on this business demographic, the one that’s been growing steadily for more than three decades.
As exciting an opportunity as the SME market space has been for us in Canada, the opportunity in America is gargantuan. America may have 10 times as many people, but it has more than 20 times more SMSs than Canada does. And we’re chomping at the bit to serve and service these remarkable and driven leaders and their enterprises. Our aim is to help them grow their people, their enterprises and their communities by providing them a complete range of proven technology solutions.
We’re excited to begin this plunge into the American market place, with YOU and our franchise model.
Gratefully,
John, David and Charlie
