Case Studies
Issue No. 20 - December/January 2005
Dr PC
The Dr is in
The black vans of DrPC have been cruising Adelaide streets for a while, but new owner David Raffen is taking the brand places.
David, 45, is a confessed entrepreneurial junkie and the new chair of the IT Council of South Australia. He likes to shake things up.
He has been in the IT game since the late 1970s here, in Melbourne and Sydney, but believes those skills apply less and less as he has evolved from technician to business builder.
After successfully growing his Microarts firm, which focuses primarily on hardware sales, David was on the lookout for opportunities to diversify.
DrPC seemed a natural fit, with potential to extend Microarts’ hardware expertise.
David bought the business two years ago when the opportunity ripened. He had been approached earlier, and was interested, but the sellers’ terms simply didn’t stack up.
“The way it was presented the business appeared to be making money, but when we looked at it properly it was losing money,” David says.
“It took six months of operation before we got a true picture of where it was at.
“I think you need to do that with any organisation you take over. You will fail if you attempt to change things from day one.”
There were also some adjustments for David to make. Dealing with residential and SOHO customers was quite different to dealing with corporates and it took six months for him and his staff to acclimatise and achieve a modest profit.
“Pushing the brand was a priority for me,”David says. His selling point has been reliability and trust.
“We needed to build an understanding with the customer. Their impression of our industry may have been tarnished by previous dealings with technicians who don’t keep their promises.
“We are winning by something as simple as saying we’ll be around at 9am and doing that.
“It’s refreshing for people if their computer is broken down and they ne...
