News in the Channel - issue #7

TECH UNLIMITED PROFILE

Unlimited potential Tech Unlimited has quickly developed a strong reputation in its niche since the company launched in 2020 and posted impressive growth figures year-on-year – and this has been achieved by taking a different approach to others in the sector.

Starting a business – but, more pertinently, making it successful – has been challenging to say the least in the past three years or so, given pandemics, wars and cost rises not seen in a generation. Making a business successful in a niche has been even more difficult, but Tech Unlimited has done just that. The company has posted an increase in turnover between year two and year of 300%, followed by 100% growth the next year and another 50% growth last year. Tech Unlimited, which sells peripherals to the education, health and public sectors, is also now moving to a larger warehouse to cope with demand. But, as Tony Scully, Tech Unlimited’s operations director, explains, this is no accident – the team behind the company spotted an opportunity in the market and set about filling it. Starting from scratch Tony has a long history in the sector going back some 20 years. “As you’d expect in any sector over that period of time, I’ve seen the market change,” he says. “When I started there were a lot of distributors that

had a narrow focus and alongside those, you had the broadliners. Then the industry then went through a phase where the broadliners bought the smaller niche distributors. I worked for a distributor that got bought by one of the big players. We found that when you work for a £3 billion distributor, it is one size fits all. Sounds like that’s negative but it’s not meant to be: you can’t have that scale without having an element of one size fits all.” Tony also found that when working for a large distributor, he was quite restricted in what he could do for customers, such as with sending out samples or having flexibility on price or returns. “Over time, various resellers in the channel said to me, ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if we had a niche distributor like we used to so that when we want to talk about an older product or bespoke requirement from a customer, we have someone that will know the answer or get back to us’. “Various resellers were also saying that they couldn’t get the service level they wanted, and we thought there was an opportunity there to fill that need.” That was in the summer of 2019. Tony,

Tony Scully operations director

techunlimited.co

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