David Lynch (OAS Technology)
When David Lynch joined OAS Technology in February 2020, he had no idea of the major company decisions he would have to make within that first month.
As Australia soon went into its COVID-19 lockdown, Lynch was tasked with pivoting both his team and customers to remote working while implementing a whole cloud infrastructure for the Newcastle-based business.
Now, more than a year into his CEO tenure, the former customer of the Cisco and Microsoft partner now has the larger task of ramping up the company's expansion across regional NSW.
But before any of that, Lynch is looking to strike a balance with the 43-strong team’s mounting workloads as the post-pandemic places increasing demand on managed service provider support.
“We're all about trying to get that work culture and work-life balance right,” he told ARN. “We provide gym memberships and a few other perks to our employees, but sometimes the ticket queues can and do climb.
“And it's just trying to balance new project work and new installation work with meeting the demands of the support queues as well.”
Indeed, Lynch added that OAS’ client managers are now “in a bit of a holding pattern” with onboarding new customers.
“We are being selective about which new clients to take on,” he said. “And we put them on a bit of a trial period, making sure we’re taking on a client that’s not going to ring us up every five minutes because that does put a strain on our queue. Yes, being selective inhibits growth, but if I get another 10 tickets a day, it does earn you more drama.”
Although the OAS team initially spent eight weeks working from home during the first stages of lockdown last year, Lynch said the preference now is to work from its offices across Newcastle, Upper Hunter, Central Coast and Taree, NSW.
“We place a heavy reliance on the collaboration that happens within the office ourselves,” he explained. "What's really hard to do over Teams is when you either overhear a conversation or feel like you can add some value.
“We see much greater value in having the team together. At some stage, there may be that balanced approach where it might be a little bit from home, but we certainly haven't hit that mark yet. The reason, we might run out of space.”
Founded around 30 years ago as an electrical engineering business, OAS has over the years slowly pivoted to office automation, compute, networking and communication solutions.
In the last five years, the company has gone from seven to 20 per cent growth year-on-year. However, OAS has something of a brand problem, explained Lynch, as many customers continue to confuse its name with that of its signature product, Minder Hosted Infrastructure.
“I could see that there was confusion between the brands [and OAS],” he explained. “So Minder essentially was our product, the hosted solution. And, rightly or wrongly, it had taken some dominance over the actual company brand.”
Having embarked on a major rebranding exercise involving new advertising material, customer workshops and even changing van graphics, Lynch is hopeful the OAS brand is in a prime position to embark on its acquisition ambitions across NSW.
The company recently bought local solutions provider Noeledge in Taree, with Lynch calling the “future bright” for further acquisitions.
Explaining the decision to pursue acquisition over organic growth, he added: “It's really hard to go and open an office up in theory; get set up and push our business through when all of those long-held relationships are currently in existence. So, when a person there is part of the package, there's a continuum of services and the continuum of familiar faces.”
Looking ahead for the rest of 2021, one of Lynch’s key priorities is looking out how to make OAS more efficient through automation.
“Automation is not widely used in an MSP environment: it's easy to roll automated processes into enterprises,” he explained. “It’s a lot harder when you've got multiple clients on multiple different sorts of networks across multiple software pieces. So that we're open massively to lots of different ways to achieve some efficiencies as well.”
Meanwhile, from a customer standpoint, the biggest challenge is, in Lynch’s words, “moving away from the mentality of having a piece of tin sitting in the corner” to a consumption-based cloud.
“Subscription-based models are becoming more prevalent in everyday life,” he explained. “But everything else we have now is on a subscription-type basis, even insurance. So it is helpful from that regard and that’s the selling point we are working around.”
