Earn A Reusable Wireless Security Reference
Earning an education organization’s reference leads to a VAR’s 50% sales growth three years in a row.
Florence and Steve Nuesch, owners of Paradigm Pioneers, Inc., have never lost a client since their company's inception 11 years ago. The VAR/consultant focuses exclusively on the private, special education market in the state of New Jersey, where Paradigm Pioneers does most of its business. The VAR currently has 28 customers that it services with custom student/staff records management applications, networking equipment, PC support, and managed services. For the past three years, it has enjoyed 50% sales revenue growth each year. While Paradigm Pioneers has done a good job becoming the leading VAR serving the private, special education market in New Jersey, VARs that sell to other vertical markets and sectors can readily apply Paradigm Pioneers' business savvy to their companies.
Partner With An Organization That Your Customers Respect
Nuesch and his wife started Paradigm Pioneers after discovering that customized record keeping applications were needed by several special education schools and agencies in New Jersey. How could a small start-up win the trust of these organizations? Through certifications and endorsements. Paradigm Pioneers earned certifications in SonicWALL network security products (achieving a Gold Partner status), and earned a reference from the ASAH (Association of Schools and Agencies for the Handicapped) (www.asah.org). The ASAH is a New Jersey organization that provides specialized services, such as skill training for teachers who work with hearing impaired children, and it is affiliated with approximately 150 nonpublic, special education schools and agencies in New Jersey. "Achieving the ASAH endorsement entailed submitting a list of references to the ASAH's board of directors and waiting for them to vote on whether they wanted to recommend my services to their clients," he says. Presently, Paradigm Pioneers is one of only three companies that ASAH endorses. "The other two companies include an insurance company and a banking firm — neither of which are competitors," he says.
In addition to earning a reference from the ASAH, Paradigm Pioneers reaches its target market by attending an annual special education convention in Atlantic City, NJ, which draws in thousands of teachers and administrators. Over the years, the VAR/consultant has become a consistent participant at the show, demonstrating customized record keeping applications and educating prospects about the importance of network security.
Keep Your Customers Secure — Wirelessly, Remotely
One customer Paradigm Pioneers landed as a result of its trade show presence and ASAH reference was ECI, a private school for individuals with disabilities, located in Monmouth County, NJ. The school, which has 120 full-time staff members, first became a Paradigm Pioneers customer nearly five years ago, when it decided to implement the VAR's record keeping software. Since that time, ECI (like many of Paradigm Pioneers' customers) has purchased additional products and services. One project the VAR helped the school implement was a secure wireless network security solution. "Many of the faculty members, such as the speech therapists, work in various classrooms throughout the day, and it's not practical for them to log-in to multiple desktop PCs to perform data entry tasks," says Nuesch. "The solution was to provide the faculty with laptop computers and secure wireless access."
Using a SonicWALL TZ 170 Wireless access point (AP), Paradigm Pioneers provided the faculty with wireless access that supports up to 25 simultaneous users from anywhere inside the building, which is approximately 1,000 feet long. "The AP supports IPSec [Internet Protocol security] and WPA [Wi-Fi protected access] security in addition to VPN [virtual private network] tunneling," says Nuesch.
ECI also has entrusted Paradigm Pioneers with its data backup, disaster recovery, and spam filtering needs. "I invested in a server last year, and I use SonicWALL's MailFrontier spam filtering, which I resell as an outsourced service for $2 per mailbox per month," he says. "I was able to recoup my server investment within the first year, and now most of my customers use this service to stop e-mail spam before it reaches their internal e-mail servers."
Paradigm Pioneer also sells managed services such as remote monitoring and PC maintenance contracts. The latter service gives the VAR an opportunity to keep in regular contact with its customers and anticipate when a customer needs to upgrade its PCs or networking equipment. In a couple of instances, Paradigm Pioneers' customers were so pleased with the VAR's services that they displaced their full-time IT managers and outsourced their IT support to Paradigm Pioneers.