Going Strong For More Than 15 Years
Originally named Avrem Media, our first service offerings revolved around web and digital media creation, including website design and development, audio engineering, and videography with a focus on outsourced, final-cut editing services aimed at other videographers. As you can probably see it’s a pretty niche concept anywhere, but especially in Youngstown, Ohio. After a disastrous first project the whole concept was scrapped, and Owner and CEO Robert Merva went back to doing what he’d already been doing for years prior: home computer repair.
Over time, as the business grew, Avrem Technologies took on more and more business clients, starting with companies of about three people or less whose needs weren’t too far off from that of the average home user. They had small networks consisting of a router, a handful of computers, and a printer or copier. Some were home-based, but some had an office or a retail space. At that time there weren’t many IT companies in the area focused on clients of this size (or businesses in general), and the owners of such companies were often forced to look to big-box retail stores to install software and updates, diagnose issues, repair or upgrade hardware, and setup new computers on an as-needed basis. Today we refer to this model as “break/fix,” as in: it breaks, you call us, we fix it, and we send a bill.
By 2009, Avrem focused exclusively on growing our book of business clients and expanding the services available to those clients. It wasn’t long before Avrem started offering “retainer agreements” where, for a flat fee, we would be available during the day for helpdesk support and emergency troubleshooting, and in the evenings we’d perform regular system maintenance and security services like virus scans, disk cleanups, hard drive defragmentation and physical computer cleaning. Looking back, it’s incredible to see how different things were then, both for Avrem as a company and for the computer support industry.
A few short years later and Avrem worked to change our retainer agreements to a more all-inclusive, proactive service model that’s known today as “managed services.” Clients were hesitant. They didn’t see the value in paying for support and service on computers that weren’t broken. But Robert was convinced the managed services model was a better approach and other companies in different parts of the country were already successful with it, so we set out to convince the community and our client base. By the end of about the third year, we’d succeeded in transitioning every single one of our clients to a fully-managed model. Avrem was a full-fledged managed services provider (MSP) with a suite of not only tools, but processes and best practices that allowed us to proactively monitor and support client environments anywhere, in real time. We haven’t looked back.
Today, Avrem has more than 15 total staff and support hundreds of clients, thousands of end users and endpoints across twenty-two states.
