“I basically started with a car, a laptop and less than R3 000 in the bank,” says James Jepp, owner of Insight Technologies IT services.
“I basically started with a car, a laptop and less than R3 000 in the bank,” says James Jepp, owner of Insight Technologies IT services.
From these humble beginnings a year ago, Insight now boasts a significant clientèle. Jepp emphasises communicating with his clients: letting them know if more time is needed and using colloquial language to explain the steps needed to fix things.
While Jepp points out that there is a lot of profit to be made in a small town, businesses should beware of falling into the trap of growing too fast.
“For a lot of IT companies, their success has been their downfall,” says Jepp. “What has happened in the IT industry in this town is that people start small, and as a small unit they can offer good service, because they only have a dozen clients.
Then because they offer good service they get popular, but they don’t have the systems in place to take hold of the market. As they take 30 or 50 clients in, the wheels start falling off [and]they don’t follow up because they have too many people.” Thus service levels tend to decline the bigger a business gets.
Jepp is on a mission to resist this trend, and for this reason has carefully controlled the growth of his company. “We’ve started quite small. There are four of us in full-time employment.
There are two full-time Rhodes Honours graduate technical consultants, myself as a part-time technician and shop manager, and a sales representative and admin guy.” This is still quite a leap from last year when the company consisted of Jepp as a technician plus an administrator.
“We have only proportionally increased our clientèle as we have more people on board,” says Jepp, who sticks to a ratio of five clients to one employee. “If you increase that ratio, your level of service will go down no matter what.”
