15 Aug Sam Coyl Interviewed On KTEK 1110’s ‘Price Of Business’
Tuesday morning, Netrepid President Sam Coyl caught up with Kevin Price, host of The Price Of Business, to talk about the challenges and process of taking Netrepid from being a local/regional IT services provider to becoming a national provider of cloud-based services.
In addition to explaining Netrepid’s solutions and how businesses can leverage them to meet today’s technology demands, Sam also explained why he is ready to take Netrepid to the next level. He also shared some inside details on what Netrepid is doing to get national traction, and how the goal of going national has altered the way the company does business.
Listen below to the full interview in MP3 quality. Immediately following the embedded MP3 audio file, there is also a transcription of the full interview.
Entrepreneur Interview: Sam Coyl On ‘Price Of Business’ With Kevin Price
Kevin Price (KP): Welcome back to the Price of Business. I’m your host Kevin Price talking to you about YOU and YOUR business. Talking a lot recently about businesses that are right on the edge of going national. They’re regional, sometimes local brands – but they’re all over the country, and they’re trying to take their company to the next level. I’ve got Sam Coyl, and he’s with a company called Netrepid. Welcome to the program, Sam.
Sam Coyl (SC): Good morning, how are you?
KP: Netrepid, is that correct?
SC: That is correct, yes.
KP: Alright, just wanted to make sure. Give us your elevator speech – what do you do?
SC: We’re a technology firm based out of Harrisburg focusing primarily on IT infrastructure, hosted/cloud-based services.
KP: Ok. So for people who aren’t in those arenas, why don’t you take it down to a macro-level, where the average person can understand exactly what you do.
SC: Sure. The big push for us over the last few years – and what makes this business work – is the need that everybody has for technology. With cell phones, mobile devices, and companies leveraging technology more than they ever have, its kind of overwhelming. As you said, most people aren’t really up to speed on all the technical jargon and lingo. We’ve been able to provide services that allow them to lease the technology they need, and pay for what they use, rather than having to invest in large capital expenses and hire more employees than they necessarily need in order to run that technology for their company.
KP: Ok. Compared to the old model – which is people actually purchasing these things – you instead lease it?
SC: Correct. The traditional philosophy was that you bought a machine or a server to run each of the different business components you have – email, web hosting, file sharing, all those kinds of things. As technology has gotten more complex, those servers and that software is becoming more expensive and more complex to operate. What we’ve done is build those environments into a multi-tenant method so that clients can use the pieces and parts they need, rather than having to build it themselves.
If you think about Apple’s iCloud, people are storing files and things ‘up in the Internet.’ They didn’t have to build their own server — they don’t even know where the server is — but they know that when their iPhone says it synced, they know that data is out in the cloud somewhere, and they can pull it down later when they need it.
KP: Tell us about the typical size range of your clients, in terms of number of employees and revenue.
SC: Over the last few years, that demographic has started to expand dramatically. When we first started, and we were more regionally based, the clients were small businesses in our local geography – 2 to 15 employees and under $1 million in gross revenue. Over the last couple years, as technology has become more needed and globally accessible, our clients have started to increase in size, to where they average 50 to 100 employees and $50 million to $100 million in revenue.
KP: Are you involved with SalesForce in any way?
SC: We provide similar services to SalesForce, but we don’t directly compete. They provide Software as a Service (SaaS), whereas we provide the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
KP: So do you attend things like DreamForce?
SC: We attend similar things to that. We find that people that have already embraced that type of technology are more likely to embrace the services we have. They’ve already adopted the philosophy of leveraging what they have (their people) and moving their technology and other large expenses out to cloud service providers. We meet a lot of great people there, a lot of potential customers and potential partners as well.
KP: As we introduced the segment, we talked about the fact that you’re currently a regional company that’s in the process of going national. How’s that effort going? What does that look like?
SC: Like all things, it takes a lot of planning upfront and a lot of trial and error. We started out making sure that our website presence was up to speed – that it was accessible, doing search engine optimization, linking, and other things that are necessary to make yourself visible in the global environment. We’ve also been doing a lot of research into who our national and global competitors. We do compete with the Rackspace’s, Amazon’s, and some of those larger companies. We make sure that the services we offer are relevant and that the pricing is competitive while still allowing our company to have reasonable profit margins to sustain continued growth.
KP: How old is the company?
SC: Next year will be 10 years.
KP: How many employees do you have?
SC: We’re at 18.
KP: When you look at your website, you guys do a lot of different things with 18 employees.
SC: The trick is to leverage the technology rather than having a larger workforce. Make the technology work for you. We use the same philosophy that we sell to our clients – it doesn’t make sense to invest in unnecessary overhead, make the technology work for you. Technology is up 24 hours, we can build in redundancy, it doesn’t call in sick. We leverage that rather than use a large workforce.
KP: Love learning about these new companies. Looked over your services section – rather huge. Why don’t you give a panoramic overview of that?
SC: The short version is that we can provide that IT infrastructure for your company. Everything from Exchange email hosting, shared collaboration, remote backup, actually running servers in the cloud. For large workforces that are spread out over a large geography or multiple offices, their servers don’t actually need to be in their building. We can put those in a virtual environment and provide those pieces and parts so that at the office – there aren’t any actual servers. People can show up and use their laptop or iPad and still have access to technology they are used to having in the office.
Kevin Price’s The Price Of Business airs weekdays from 8:00am to 9:00am EST on Business Talk 1110 KTEK in Houston, Texas. The show can be streamed online at business1110ktek.com.
