MSP 501 Profile: Xamin on COVID-19 Challenges and Strategic Partnerships

Company Name: Xamin
Company MSP 501 Rank: 263
President and CEO: Jonathan Smith
Headquartered: Chicago

Primary Services:

• Infrastructure
• Security
• Data protection
• Cloud

Twitter: @XaminInc

MSP 501 winner Xamin is no stranger to pivoting, even pre-pandemic. President and CEO Jonathan Smith, a company owner for 20 years, has more than a few insights on the matter. One in particular stands out. 

“The one thing you have to learn as you build and grow a business is that you will spend a large amount of time and effort thinking about the well-being of your company and your employees.”

According to Smith, this should be priority number one.

Xamin’s Jonathan Smith

We sat down with him to chat about pivoting during a pandemic, mergers, and choosing the right strategic partnerships.

Channel Futures: What is one thing you wish vendors would do that they don’t?

Jonathan Smith: At Xamin, we work with a number of vendors (Cisco, Dell, HP, VMware, etc.) and usually purchase products through distribution. Then, we’ll work with their vendor teams through distribution. In our experience, we’ve really enjoyed working with their distribution teams. We’ve been so impressed with the level of customer service we typically receive. In fact, our vendor teams have been really responsive, attentive and dedicated to partnering with our team and learning how we can best work together.

However, vendors often treat small and medium businesses (SMBs) as a “training opportunity” for newer representatives at their company. This can mean a fair amount of turnover, and your account reps can be continually swapped out for new reps. As an SMB, it’s nice to get in a groove with your account rep at the vendor. However, there can be a brief lull in customer service when a new rep is assigned to your team. We’ve actually been pretty lucky though, and are usually assigned a rep who’s very responsive and helpful to our relationship with the vendor. 

CF: What new opportunities and challenges came with the global COVID-19 pandemic?

JS: As an IT company, the pandemic actually presented us with an opportunity. As shelter-in-place orders went into effect across the country, companies needed help as they quickly deployed their work-from-home strategies. Additionally, executives were looking to implement new, secure solutions to equip their employees with the tools to work from home. Initially, we were busier than usual. While most of our customers had a remote strategy, they needed help scaling up their remote solutions to work for a much larger portion of their employees. But we knew the initial spike in business wouldn’t …