How N‑able’s Getting Started Live Program Gave MicroAge Bathurst the Knowledge They Needed to Change Their Business

MicroAge Bathurst, was first founded in 1988 as Bathurst Office Integration—selling office equipment such as photocopiers and typewriters. In 1993 the company became one of the founding members of the MicroAge franchise. Currently, it is one of the only MicroAge franchises left in Atlantic Canada.

The business had remained under the same ownership until December 2022, when Edgar Gionet bought all the shares from the owner. Today, MicroAge Bathurst provides high quality IT services to Northern New Brunswick Customers, and employs a team of three technicians.

“We’re in a small community. When I say small, we’re maybe hitting around 50,000 people in a 100km radius. It’s small, and it’s a little bit remote. So our customer base is a bit different than you would typically see with a lot of larger MSPs,” explains Edgar.

For the past 15 or so years the company has been providing a break-fix model to its customers. However, aware that the market has been changing, Edgar has been focused on slowly migrating his business over to a managed services model. “This is quite a challenge when all your customers are used to being on break-fix, of course,” he explains. “And that’s one of the reasons we reached out to N‑able, because they have a relationship with the wider MicroAge group, and we knew we’d need a new tool set to support an MSP model.”

Getting the support you need to get started

Edgar came on board with N‑able in February this year. “When you’re coming from only having known break-fix, it’s a pretty daunting prospect to take your entire business model, which generates CA$1,000,000-plus annually, and say well, it’s not good enough, you gotta change and you gotta adapt,” he adds. “Basically, you have a winning formula that you have to change. I needed to have the assurance of knowing that I was at least being handheld through portions of the journey. N‑able’s Getting Started Live program has really helped us in that respect.”

Edgar remembers being surprised by what was on offer when he first onboarded. “From the off, I was told: ‘here are the appointments that you can have for the different product training that N‑able gives you.’ And I was also told that the trainer Andrew [Lancaster] was really good,” he explains. “So, I’m looking at the schedule and the availability times are fantastic. Really, they were all across the board. I had some morning ones; some afternoon ones. There were some exceptional ones that only happen on, like, Tuesdays, so you have to schedule yourself a bit for those, but it wasn’t an issue.”

The availability was so good that Edgar was able to schedule things so there was never a long gap between trainings. “If you’re having to leave three weeks between training sessions, you forget things,” he says. “But that wasn’t the case.”

Quality training with the time you need to explore your challenges

The quality of the training and the time the trainer took to help them also really impressed Edgar. “All the sessions I went to, you had this trainer who has the same message consistently across the board, who’s not skipping any steps, who’s constantly communicating in a format that I can completely understand. I know the technology, don’t get me wrong, but I need someone to explain the administrative portion of what we have to do.”

Edgar adds that everything about the Getting Started Live program was “very well thought out”. “It touched on everything without going too deeply into anything and most of the time I would schedule myself into those meetings where there were less people involved so that we would have time at the end to actually get into a deeper dive on whatever problem we were having at the time,” he explains.

Edgar also felt his business benefited from the fact he was given time to raise any challenges he was having and get specific answers. “Andrew was always happy to take the time to give us an opinion on things that we were struggling with based on his experience. So I’ve actually made some business decisions according to what his experience told him. We put a lot of stock by what Andrew would say, because his training methods were so complete and easy to follow that you could tell the guy really knew what he was doing.”

Taking things to the next level with deeper insights

Edgar continues: “A lot of the time there would be 10 minutes left in a session, and I’d say to Andrew: ‘this is what we’re trying to do, and you know it’s not working well.’ And he’d say, ‘well you need to try this, this, and this.’ That’s all I needed. I didn’t need a 30-minute spiel about it, I just needed to know where to go. That was absolutely fantastic for me.”

Andrew was also able to point Edgar at other trainings to help him get the knowledge he needed. “I would be on one training and then we would touch on something I was having a bit of difficulty with and Andrew would say: ‘you’ve got to come to this training. I’m doing it on this. Hop onto that one and then we’ll be able to dive a little bit deeper into it.’ You only know what you know, so having Andrew direct us to things we didn’t know we even needed was really powerful.”

To round things off, Edgar sums up his experience succinctly: «The Getting Started Live program is a great initiative, and anyone looking to partner up with N‑able and use this service should feel comfortable knowing it is both complete and well-paced.»