TECHNOLOGY PROBLEMS are solvable, but because we’re human it may not always feel that way. That’s why SabinoCompTech built our platform, The Awesome IT Way, and branded our company on the concept of humans first. While every IT business owner knows the importance of building relationships, we’ve found that when we truly put humans before technology, it takes those customer relationships to much deeper levels and ultimately achieves greater success for everyone.
At 22, however, when I started a computer repair business with my husband, I thought it was important to hide who I was—a youthful Latina who loves fun and is serious about technology—in order to be taken seriously by our customers. When I got accepted into the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program a few years later, it helped us refocus our growth plan. In 2016, we closed that business and launched SabinoCompTech as a 100% managed service company.
With this new business, I decided not to hide my age or who I am. I was intentional about making our personalities part of our brand. Through our website and our marketing collateral, we want customers and prospects to have a sense that they know us. So, by the time they actually meet us in person, we are exactly who they expect.
As a small business, it’s easy for us to understand the trials and tribulations of our small business customers and prospects. Every engagement starts with a human-to-human conversation that asks, what are you struggling with? Particularly as our clients continue to deal with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, they have new worries, and some of them are in industries that have been greatly challenged. So, we ask them to tell us what’s happening in their business, what they need help with, and how we can adapt to meet their needs.
Focusing on what they need and removing the fear, frustration, and negative emotions they feel when dealing with technology issues is what led us to build The Awesome IT Way. It’s an all-inclusive managed IT service offering that includes RMM, backup and disaster recovery, security (including security awareness training for end users), compliance, consulting, and unlimited support. We target businesses with 20 to 50 users in what we call the “”compliance vertical””—healthcare, accounting, legal, manufacturing, and other industries subject to data privacy regulations.
Embracing the Awesome IT Way and allowing us to become their outsourced IT department helps clients feel confident and protected. Even when something goes wrong and their frustrations and emotions inevitably surface, they trust the relationship and know that we will take care of them.
Our messaging to prospects and clients is that by paying attention to who they are as humans first, we can better solve the technology pieces, which are secondary. It’s a strategy that has paid off, with SabinoCompTech growing consistently at 20% or more year over year since our founding.
Last year, I was chosen to be part of the first cohort of the C200 Champion Program, which was created to support women entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial class and mentoring I received reinforced that we were on the right track, so our intention was to invest more in sales and marketing and grow organically.
But like our clients, we are humans first. We were already balancing running a business with raising teenagers when some health-related alarms rang, so we decided to take advantage of an opportunity to be acquired by one of my mentors, Mayron Herrera, CEO and co-founder of Synetek Solutions, also in Texas.
Now in my new role as vice president of sales and marketing for Synetek, I’ll have the resources to infuse The Awesome IT Way into a larger company and scale much more rapidly than we could on our own. I’ll also continue to put humans—my customers and my family—first.
Photo by Rob Greer
