Your Business: Bigger would be nice ... but not too big

Kendra Ross (left) and Jackie Hatchwell say constant change keeps their working lives exciting. Photo / Richard Robinson

For Kendra Ross and Jackie Hatchwell, lucrative IT jobs in the mid-1990s no longer fitted their lifestyles as they started families.

"We had to create our own work environment," said Hatchwell.

"We were good at what we were doing. Our feeling was, 'What have we got to lose?"'

With the help of family and friends as investors, they set up Duo Distributors, a wholesale company which supplies a top-tier reseller market - businesses such as Gen-i, Fujitsu, Integral Axon and Datacom - with a premium brand of computer memory for companies.

Confident communicators, the women approached the end-users of their IT product - the big banks, Government departments and schools - to find out what they really needed, rather than hearing it from the resellers second hand.

"We would then go back to the reseller and say, 'This is what they need'," said Ross.

Fourteen years later, Duo Distributors has five staff in New Zealand and two in Australia, all women, and will be taking on more staff next year.

Originally a Wellington company, the firm - which now has a $5 to $10 million turnover - expanded to Auckland in 2006 and crossed the Tasman.

It now has a 50/50 spread of customers in Auckland and Wellington, and Australia provides 15 per cent of the business.

"With the increase of our product portfolio, we believe 50 per cent of revenue will be generated from Australia within the next 18 to 24 months," said Hatchwell.

Ross has been driving the Australian side of the business.

It has a serviced office in Sydney and an office and warehouse in Melbourne, and is supplying product through resellers such as Gen-i and Datacom to federal and state government departments, the big four banks, the mining industry and police organisations.

The women say that in hindsight, they would do Australia differently.

Said Ross: "Remote management is extremely hard - you need the right staff."

If they were doing it again, they would have a venture partner in Australia.

Not long after they entered Australia, the recession started.

Hatchwell: "We were quite exposed, with one product range. We had to think what products could we add which were complementary."

They became sole distributors of a secure flash drive, IronKey.

A few months ago their competition started supplying it too.

"It's constant change, the pace of change is what keeps it exciting, you don't know what's around the corner," said Hatchwell.

The women have added more encrypted hard drives, which protect mobile data, to their product range.

Duo has founded an IT professionals network, the First Tuesday Club in Wellington.

It has 220 members, including senior Government IT security people, and meets monthly.

"We hear about what they want," said Ross.

The IT firm is relaunching its website, duo.co.nz, and duo.net.au to make it more interactive for customers.

Ross: "We want it to be a research tool for our customers and their customers, with white papers, and on-demand videos about our products."

The company does not have a board, but Hatchwell says it has reached the stage where "we would like to form a more formal advisory board".

As customers ask for more products, Hatchwell and Ross have been asking: "Do we build a lifestyle business or an empire?"

Says Ross: "We don't want to be an empire but we want to be a bit bigger."