Tech Unlimited has quickly developed a strong reputation in its niche since the distributor 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, along with two other experienced colleagues, decided to capitalise on the opportunity and took the plunge to set up Tech Unlimited. “We had some financial backing from an outside party, and we started the business officially on January 1, 2020, with zero sales in the history of the business,” he says.
Tony describes Tech Unlimited as a classic distributor. “Within the channel, we only sell to resellers and focus on accessories for devices, mainly for the education, healthcare and public sectors,” he says. “We are a specialist niche and a value-add distributor.”
This can be things like peripherals for tablet devices, such as protective cases, screen protectors or portable chargers, along with things like security products.
Tech Unlimited began by focusing on the education sector, but as the company’s reputation has grown, it has expanded into healthcare and the public sector, which often require the same products.
Lost and found
But Tech Unlimited specialise in quality brands that perhaps UK resellers and customers may not have heard of but are well known in other parts of the world. Brands that may have been in the UK for years but have previously got lost in the wealth of brands sold by the big distributors.
“If you want a case for your iPad or your Microsoft Surface, there are several good options,” says Tony. “I also knew that there were great brands in the UK that were lost because if you’re not tier one for one of the big distributors, you’re just one of 4-500 brands. I also knew a lot of these businesses were robust financially and logistically and had great worldwide success. And the ones that we targeted have typically been doing what they’ve been doing for 25 years plus. But if you ask them what their footprint in the UK was, the answer was almost nothing. So, having had that idea and with our business model, we started talking to them late 2019, and by the time we launched, we had several signed up.
“That’s the foundation of our model. With the brands I was talking to, they knew they had a great product and knew the market inside out. Their wish was to have a specialised distributor that was aligned to their way of thinking and their passion about their products. And we came along and ticked every box.
“But none of these brands were taking a gamble. For example, XtremeMac has been making accessories for Apple Mac for 30 years. The risk they had in losing their current UK business was next to none.
“We’ve now got more than a dozen brands on board and our reputation is growing as a business.”
Adding value
Tony also emphasises the value Tech Unlimited adds, which is not something always associated with distributors. “Someone once said to me that you can’t be value adding distribution because you’re passing on the price for your value add,” he says. “But for us to make our mark in the market, we’ve got to be doing things differently. So when it comes to warranty, samples and pricing, we’ve got to be aggressive and make things easy for people, because anyone we’re talking to, the chances are they’ve got a route they already take.”
Getting resellers on board has been an “interesting” journey, Tony says. “They would say things like ‘why do we need to set up a new supply? They’re brand new, they only have three brands. What is it about them?’”
But by talking to resellers, Tony and his team could convince them of their credentials, and the quality of their products and service. And it is often the latter that is the differentiator, he says.
“Ultimately, we have proved ourselves over time,” Tony says. “For instance, with one big reseller, they bought some product from us and came back saying one was faulty, what do we do? I replied saying; ‘firstly, sorry one of them was faulty. And secondly, just let me know where you want the replacement and it’ll be there tomorrow.’ They asked if they needed to go online for that? I said there was no need – I just needed the address of where they wanted the replacement sent to. We didn’t need a returns number, or the product back. It’s moments like that which are worth their weight in gold to customers.”
Tony adds that customers have said that other distributors can take weeks to send out a replacement because of how their systems work.
Likewise with samples, Tech Unlimited’s size means they can be dynamic and send them out within a couple of days to a customer. “This is crucial because when you’ve got a key salesperson saying they have a great opportunity, but they know that if they can get the end user to hold the product in their hand, that will be the tipping point.
“That fast response and giving that added value to customers is the differentiator now. We can do this, and we can do it quicker and be more responsive than others.”
Space to grow
It is a model that is proving successful: Tech Unlimited is moving to a larger warehouse facility, having outgrown their existing site. In addition, they have taken on another member of staff to deal with demand.
“That is our second new starter of this calendar year,” says Tony. “It doesn’t sound a lot, but for a business of our size, that’s quite significant. We are growing all the time.”
Another way that Tech Unlimited differs from its rivals – and has helped its profitability – is that its team has worked from home predominantly, rather than having a physical office – although the company did have office space that could be used on an ad hoc basis for meetings. This has helped to keep costs down.
Even now the company has grown, Tony has resisted the temptation to invest in traditional office space, instead taking membership of a co-working office space. “We’ve bought co-working memberships and the team now can meet,” he says. “If we were running the business at any stage in the last 20 years, we absolutely would have taken the cost on the chin and had an office. But we have found we don’t need a full-time office, we can hybrid work, but we do need somewhere that we can meet on occasions a a co-working space is perfect for us and from a budget point of view, it’s brilliant.”
While the company has been growing, Tony is not one for getting carried away with its success. “We constantly remind ourselves of what has got us to this stage and don’t try to take the world on,” he says.
“That said, there are new areas and categories that we can move into, but the timing of those will be critical. In the future, we’ll expand the areas of product that we work in and the sectors that we work in, but we’ll only do that without compromising anything that we currently do. What we’ve got now is resellers saying that they’d like to work with us because they have heard we make a difference.”
