Involved in CCTV, computers and low-carbon housing, serial entrepreneur Ben Nami has a knack of getting into industries aligned with the zeitgeist.
Adam Bannister: How did you the idea for a computer repair business develop?
I’m investing a lot in SmartFixIT as we try to make it the AA of the computer industry – to be the most recognisable to the public and synonymous with a quality service
Ben Nami: “I was at Sunderland University doing interactive media and found all these guys with computers who didn’t know how to repair them. So, with a few guys off my course, I went round repairing people’s computers and providing various IT services –much to the disappointment of my lecturers, who didn’t like the fact that I was using university to make money!
AB: What are your long-term goals for SmartFixIT?
BN: I’m investing a lot in SmartFixIT as we try to make it the AA of the computer industry – to be the most recognisable to the public and synonymous with a quality service.
It’s about getting this amazing wealth of talent together, giving individuals and smaller companies more buying power, merchant services and insurance, because through mass we are bigger.
By the time we had 13 members we were spending £5m a year on IT – that’s a powerful cooperative.
AB: What does your company bring to the market?
BN: We’ve got a different angle as we have an IT background. We have almost 150 engineers now.
We also build the brand outwardly.
You can have the best service in the world but if you can’t outwardly market it, it’s useless, which was the biggest shortcoming of one of our main rivals. They didn’t have any money to brand it so no one’s going to hear about it.
We want to shout from the rooftops who we are and know we can deliver the service.
The recruitment process has been very stringent, not so much in terms of qualifications, but reputation. We tend to hire older engineers who’ve just come out of big corporates.
It’s very hard to create a customer base, because while you’re working, you can’t be advertising. It’s a vicious circle: you can have the best talent in the world, but without the marketing you can never get the jobs, so we do the marketing for our members.
AB: And what does this marketing involve?
BN: We’ve gone to town on our current advertising campaign. Chris has been keen to get a big-brand mentality into our heads and punch above our weight.
If we need more engineers we can always recruit them.
But besides the current advertising campaign, I’ve never really advertised anywhere. I’ve built all my companies on word of mouth and reputation.
People come to us rather than us having to find them. I’ve always been a stickler about avoiding paying for advertising.
AB: Even in the early days?
BN: Yes, we grew purely from word of mouth. We built up to 3,000 customers very quickly just because we were the only people in the area providing the service – and it was a service people were happy with.
We probably lost money on jobs through spending so much time doing them meticulously, but that in the end paid off as people keep on coming back. I must be on some of my customers’ fifth and sixth generation PCs.
