Working the Circuit

As far as technology companies go, Offsite Technology Solutions is pretty old school. The company offers computer support and technology for small companies in the Tampa Bay area — an industry that has been around for more than a quarter century.

Yet Offsite Technology has grown nearly like a startup since it began operating four years ago. The company began with five employees in 2009 and about 20 clients. It now has 23 employees and 120 clients. Revenues grew 25% last year to $3 million.

The question is: How does a new company in an established industry manage such growth in a weak economy?

The answer is even more old school: Go to meet-and-greets, shake hands and pass out business cards while making pitches a dozen times at every meeting, party or event available.

“Our strategy for growth was ... getting to know the business community so they would know we stood behind our products and services,” Offsite President Ron Zielin says. “Most of our customers come to us from referrals and knowing people and being active in organizations.”

Zielin flashes a constant smile in the company's newly renovated industrial chic offices in a rough neighborhood north of downtown Tampa. “Non-stop meet and greets. Probably half the time it doesn't lead to other business but the other half of the time it does. You just have to be out there,” Zielin says.

Of course, once the company gets clients, it has to come through and keep them.

Zielin, an obvious people person, hires IT engineers who are of the same makeup in order to keep business. More is required than simply being able to fix a technical problem. Dealing with upset clients in a calm, reassuring, even fun way, is critical.

“People are hot when they call us,” he says. Something has gone wrong and they have usually tried to fix it and become frustrated. So whoever is going to help them needs to have strong people skills. And finding people with a combination of technical skills and people skills is not easy.
But it is critical.

Nothing electrifying
Offsite Technology IT people have to keep up on the latest in Microsoft for its suite of programs, Citrix for remote access and VMware for maximizing server capacity. But their actual work is quite basic in today's highly technological business world.

Offsite Technology simply needs to keep equipment and software working so a business's employees can keep doing their jobs. While other tech companies cause a splash with their work, if nothing is noticed, Offsite Technology has probably already done its job.

“I tell people we're like the plumbers at your house. Every house has to have a toilet and water and sinks and faucets, and we're the ones who keep that stuff working,” he says. “Every business has to have IT. We support their infrastructure.”

Zielin, a Buffalo, N.Y., native, is a finance and accounting guy by training. He moved to Tampa 10 years ago to be the CFO of Trucks and Parts of Tampa, a company that buys and sells garbage trucks, concrete trucks and roll-off trucks and was part of the company growing three-fold.

With a partner, he bought the assets of a troubled IT support company and basically started over. He ended up buying out his partner four months later because the business was going to be more work than they anticipated.

And then he hit the meeting circuit as his marketing campaign.

Offsite Technology's sweet spot is companies in the 15- to 100-employee range. Smaller than that, and a company can't afford Offsite and having a tech-savvy employee is adequate. Larger than that, and the company probably needs a full-time IT person or group to handle proprietary software. Those are the company's Zielin targets.

Offsite makes sure that all of its IT people can handle any of a company's issues. A client is not tied to just one person where vacations and sickness and so on can affect the ability to handle a problem. “We don't just put one engineer on a company. Everyone can work on it,” he says.

Offsite Technology has clients in health care, doctors' offices, distributors, manufacturers and government agencies. The company is in most sectors, with the exception of retail, because retailers have a point-of-sales system wrapped into a merchant processing system with credit cards and cash registers, a specialty not included in Offsite Technology's offerings.

And Zielin knows where his company's money is made. It is not from being a technology innovator or a low-priced leader.

“We're not those things,” Zielin says. “But we can be intimate with our customers, know them really well and provide a really good service.”

In fact, Zielin considers his company as much a service provider as a tech firm. And he knows the competition is substantial in his spot.

Many companies say they don't have competitors because they do things differently. But Zielin sees practically everyone as a competitor, from Tampa-based Bayshore Technologies to the individual IT guy to the part-time IT person and the young guy who just graduated and is good with computers. “They're all competitors,” he says.

Beyond the clouds
Although Offsite Technology's slice of technology is basic, it is looking to the future to make sure it can maintain growth. Part of that is providing its own set of protected servers to host everything that a business needs offsite -- what is commonly known as “the cloud.”

“We are one of the only places in town that owns and operates its own cloud,” Zielin says of his firm's certified data center. “It's very waterproof and very power-failure proof and very Internet-failure proof.”

That is playing a bigger role as more companies are seeing the benefits of having their operations in a cloud and not on their own servers whirring in a back closet. “All of our clients data and applications are on (the cloud),” he says. “That's really a business we've been focusing on.”

The benefit for a client is that everything is in one place and handled by people who do that for a living -- relieving the business of the constant hardware/software headaches.

“People just want it to work,” Zielin says. “They don't care what goes on in back.”

But anticipating future technology needs will be no replacement for doing what has been successful for the company so far: relieving and avoiding headaches for clients.

There is plenty of opportunity for that in Tampa Bay.

There are about 15,000 businesses in the Tampa Bay area in the 15- to 100-employee range. Because Offsite has only 120 of them, Zielin says he cannot justify expanding into other communities.

“I still want to penetrate this market further,” he says.

Neighborhood Appeal
When Ron Zielin needed bigger office space for his growing computer support company, he was located in a pretty rough neighborhood of Tampa north of downtown and Interstate 275 on Franklin Street.

Around the corner was the Salvation Army, a probation office, soup kitchen and walk-in clinic. The homeless and down-and-out were everywhere.

He chose a dilapidated 4,000-square-foot building in the next block -- same neighborhood, same problems.

But the area had everything Zielin needed for Offsite Technology Solutions: much cheaper land than downtown or Westshore, easy access to I-275 and the city of Tampa's incentives for businesses to locate in the blighted area. Plus, his company has very few walk-in customers. He admits that if storefront appeal really mattered, the location probably would not work.

He invested substantially in the industrial-tech look and maintained a flavor of the historic building. Inside, one would never know where it was located.

The only nod to the neighborhood was a beefed up security system and the purchase of the alley between his building and a vacant one to gate off so vagrants would not use it.