The Lloyd Group is not a managed service provider. Co-founder, President and CEO Adam L. Eiseman won’t even let the staff of his New York-based solution provider use the words.
“We banned ‘managed services’ from our vocabulary years ago,” Eiseman told audiences Oct. 15 at the Ingram Micro Venture Tech event, in Las Vegas, Nev.
Eiseman considers his company a managed care provider, a model he says offers a proactive, holistic approach to services that allows his company to function like an enterprise IT department. The Lloyd Group delivers a bundle of software, hardware and services that covers all aspects of a customer’s business processes instead of simply delivering a tool or service—security, disaster recovery or network monitoring, for instance—for a specific pain point, Eiseman said.
“We came from a services background. Even though we were doing a good job, we were failing,” Eiseman said. “We only heard from our customers when they were in pain.”
This traditional model didn’t allow for the Lloyd Group to be proactive in its work with customers, or for it to grow as much as executives wanted, he said. The company was forced to spread its IT costs over a relatively small user base.
So in January 2005, the Lloyd Group shifted to a new model, dubbed “LloydCare.” “We needed to convert to working like an enterprise IT department,” Eiseman said.
LloydCare is an around-the-clock approach that gives the Lloyd Group constant access to its customers and vice versa, Eiseman said. It also gives his company recurring revenue. Working on a per-user, per-month pricing model based on a customer’s vertical market—rather than a per-device model—makes the solution a much easier sell to the C-level executives the company targets, Eiseman said.
“LloydCare is a business solution, not a technical solution,” he said.
By bundling services like training and support into more traditional offerings like network monitoring, the company can offer a total package at a price that’s easy to calculate, is easily scalable and makes good business sense, Eiseman said.
“Business owners really want to talk business. We can turn managed care into a budgetable expense,” while also providing inroads into economies of scale as his customers grow, he said.
The LloydCare model has helped the Lloyd Group grow, too. The company now brings in 65 percent of its services revenue from LloydCare customers, and hopes to continue to shrink the less than 45 percent of revenue that comes from product sales, Eiseman said. The company’s current customer focus is on the under-250 seat small and midsized businesses, but they find their sweet spot is customers in the 28- to 30-seat range, he said.
“The SMB is not the place for an IT department or even an IT person,” he said. “That should really be outsourced.”