Found success using technology to sell technology!
That formula made it the fastest-growing company in the Charlotte Business Journal’s Fast 50 Awards program in 2020 and 5th fastest fastest-growing company in 2021.
A year later, after a global pandemic sent millions of workers home and made digital connectivity even more important, the York County-based reseller of IT products maintained its explosive growth. This year, 4TEKGear is ranked fifth among Fast 50 companies with a three-year average annual growth rate of 233%.
“We had a lot of companies scrambling to get their employees set up to work remotely,” says William Houck, who co-founded 4TEKGear with Michael Miller in 2016. “They needed hardware to properly connect to do their jobs.”
If one global trend isn’t enough to accelerate business, 4TEKGear also rode the wave of a worldwide shortage of semiconductors. The shortage of microchips rattled supply chains and made finding the right IT equipment a challenge. 4TEKGear was ready.
The company’s value proposition is to sell technology using a highly digitized inventory system to help customers get what they need. 4TEKGear reinvested in digital analytics for nearly real-time insights on when products would be available. At other websites, customers merely found out-of-stock notices.
“We spent a lot of time getting access to data and analytics in our supply chain and visualization of where are these units, what they cost and when they will be here,” Miller says. “That type of data in this environment is huge for IT professionals trying to manage employees in their homes.”
4TEKGear sells hardware, software and services — not directly to retail customers in the way a Best Buy would do, but mainly to IT professionals, data centers and organizations that have heavy IT infrastructure. Clients are all over world. 4TEKGear has partnerships with major manufacturers, eliminating the need for significant product warehousing. In 2020, as products became scarcer, 4TEKGear’s founders stepped up warehousing to stay ahead of the historic supply-chain disruptions.
“We doubled down on the digital side to have close to real-time analytics on supply, and that has been the biggest factor in our growth,” Miller says.
The business is lean, but 4TEKGear differentiates itself by providing a team of experts offering guidance on models or sizing to help customers make informed purchasing decisions online, by phone or with account reps. The ability to speak on the phone with an expert helped route customers to 4TEKGear and away from online-only options.
“Our model was primed for this,” Miller says. “We didn’t leave our lane.”
