5 minute read
Interview - MAVCOM
LONG-TERM PRODUCTS OVER
SHORT-TERM PROFIT
Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Paul Morris, Managing Director and Founder of Mavcom, about affordable, efficient devices, investing in young people, and preparing for the future.
By Izzy Moss
Mavcom is an IT service provider and information and communications technology firm based in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. The company started out as an internet café in 2005, moving to their current location at Arnos Vale in 2017. Over time, Mavcom began offering repairs for PCs and laptops, and subsequently began selling products for international brands. Today, Mavcom is partnered with some of the world’s best-known IT brands, reselling hardware and software products from HP, Lexmark, Acer, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Adobe, and providing a range of solutions to customers, from data backup and recovery to network and domain configuration and maintenance. “We have gotten rid of the coffee, but we still provide services to the consumer, like printing, copying, and typing,” says Paul Morris, Managing Director and Founder of Mavcom. “Today the business does everything from maintenance to servicing to reselling.”
REDUCING WASTE, REDUCING COSTS
Many of Mavcom’s clients are operating with cost constraints. Mavcom has found a variety of inventive ways to reduce costs for customers while still providing them with cutting-edge IT solutions – and reducing resource and material consumption in the process. “In 2007, I travelled to Brazil, where I was able to study the benefits of remote desktop technology,” says Mr. Morris. “Using remote desktop technology, we were able to open workspaces in Saint Vincent, Grenada, Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Antigua, rolling those projects out from 2008 through to 2010. Since then, we don’t do much of that type of product, but it’s a good demonstration of how we’ve innovated over the years to help make IT solutions affordable to our clients. We’ve also invested heavily in virtualization technology as a means of maximizing the number of servers we run from a single machine. We hope that will make our operations significantly cheaper, and we’ll continue to roll it out with present and future clients.”
Mavcom found that a lot of people in their area of operations can’t afford to purchase a new computer. “This year, we launched a hire purchase arrangement for the consumer market,” says Mr. Morris. “We entered into an arrangement with a company that is providing the financing. So we have a hire purchase rate at 12% per annum, which is very low for computers. Additionally, we offer a variety of options to purchase refurbished computers rather than always buying new. Customers still get three to four years out of them, at a significantly reduced cost than if they had to purchase new.”
Mavcom is also working to reduce ink usage among their customers, ensuring fewer ink cartridges end up in landfills. “We try to advise our clients to purchase printers that are efficient,” explains Mr. Morris. “A lot of printers are purchased based on price without factoring the cost of the cartridges. Buying a printer with a higher cartridge yield means you won’t need to change the cartridges as often, which helps us strive towards sustainability. Right now, we are not able to send back the empty cartridges like in other
countries, so by reducing the number of cartridges that our clients buy and use, they save in the long term, and it helps the environment.”
“The more regularly a client comes back to purchase cartridges the more money we make, but we have decided to take a more long-term approach,” says Mr. Morris. “We try to supply our clients with cartridges that are more efficient, so they don’t have to keep coming back to us regularly. When we consider the overall impact on our client’s business and the environment, it is better to make less profit in the short term and create a more sustainable business for our clients in the long term.”
INTERN INVESTMENTS
For years Mavcom has been fostering an internship program. “We take the top IT (Information Technology) students from secondary schools and bring them in for a two-week internship,” says Mr. Morris. “We give them a chance to see different components of the business and introduce them to some of our clients and managers to sit and ask questions, so they can get a feel of what the business world is like.”
“Since starting that program, we’ve hired one of those interns full-time,” says Mr. Morris. “We continue to employ staff who are still in, or who have just completed college, with those often going on to become some of our most equipped and diligent recruits. We firmly believe that investing in people is key and we do not have a bias towards hiring older people as opposed to younger persons. In fact, younger people are more easily trained and become a longer-term investment even if they do not stay with the company. We are investing in the development of the country.”
FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS
Mavcom is aiming to improve service quality, along with strategies to reduce their impact on the environment. “We are looking at how we can improve the lives of our clients,” says Mr. Morris. “We want to provide a better service by improving the return from their IT and making their business process more efficient. Within the next year or two we are looking into how we could, in an affordable way, send some of the components back to the manufacturers to be recycled. One of the challenges of this is the high cost of shipping out of Saint Vincent, but we really want to reduce the amount of cartridges ending up in the landfill. In the past, we have tried working with an individual in scrap metal recycling, giving them old computers which we collect from clients. This did not continue for as long as we would have liked, however we are hoping in the future to find someone to take this over to keep more devices out of the landfill, and to benefit the environment.” c
