Franchising tech services

SCI-TECH SCENE | CMIT Solutions at beck and call of businesses needing IT help

Businesses that need help with cranky computers, stalled servers and other IT crises can turn to a network of professionals for help.

CMIT Solutions has two franchisees in the suburbs and a third soon to join the company, which aims to manage, monitor and avert disaster for clients’ IT systems on a retainer system rather than an hourly rate.

The Chicago-area franchisees epitomize the kinds of high-level managers CMIT Solutions is seeking to run its businesses, said Jeff Connally, CEO and president.

“We are looking for business people who can relate to a company owner or managing partner,” Connally said. “Our business model looks at the owner-operator as my peer, someone committed to the community and to the long term.”

Jerry Karson, owner of CMIT Solutions of Lake Forest, decided to become a franchisee because he wanted to return to the type of technology consulting work he had done as an IT consultant and as a senior manager at Coopers & Lybrand, an accounting firm acquired by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“I loved helping different companies use technology to their advantage,” said Karson, a New Yorker who moved to Chicago when Kraft Foods took over General Foods, where his wife was a vice president.

Karson's team of three technicians and three free-lancers serves 15 clients with managed services, in which the clients' networks are monitored 24/7 for problems for a flat monthly fee.

CMIT Solutions provides an operations center in Pittsburgh to do the monitoring, and the local franchisees have access to their clients’ operations status. Fees for the service start at $130 a server, $25 per PC workstation and $50 per Mac workstation.

Scott Brennan, owner of CMIT Solutions of Fox Valley in Algonquin, a former technology executive with Rewards Network and Montgomery Ward, took the plunge as a franchisee after he read the book Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul.

“I thought about what I wanted for my family and myself,” said Brennan, a lifelong Chicagoan who has five children and an MBA in entrepreneurial studies from DePaul University. “I thought, ‘I really don’t want to move,’ and I thought a franchise would jump start what I wanted to do.”

Franchisees invest about $50,000 to join CMIT Solutions, based in Austin, Texas, and work out of their homes.

Brennan, who also has 15 clients under managed services, said he enjoys that his small-business clients are thrilled to see him because they so desperately need constant IT service.

A growing industry

CMIT Solutions’ competitors tend to be one-person shops or clients’ employees who have been drafted into the IT manager’s role.

Charles Weaver, co-founder and president of the MSP Alliance, an international association of managed service providers in Chico, Calif., said the $30 billion to $50 billion global industry is still growing, largely because most businesses have no full-time IT departments.

Those with their own IT staff are finding the workload is constantly increasing, he said.

Yet, Brennan notes that anyone who thinks a franchise will be easy must be prepared for the responsibility.

“The magnitude of the responsibility is more than you would imagine,” he said.