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Battling increased competition, decreasing margins and slower revenue growth, today’s solution providers are operating in a volatile market. These service com-panies seek geographic coverage and skill set expansion without exposing their companies to the capital risks of hiring, training and retaining on-payroll technicians. Increasingly, their preferred solution is the “contract labor model” currently shaping the industry, a practice that allows service companies to enter new regions, bid on larger deployments and work with emerging technologies—without taking on additional head count.
OnForce, the Boston-based marketplace for IT service professionals, is proving a valuable asset to these VARs and solution providers who want to fulfill on-site services through independents or contractors. Successfully leveraging on-demand business trends, OnForce offers service firms comprehensive listings of 11,000+ qualified IT professionals listed by region, vendor, specialty or other variables. OnForce conducts an assessment of each individual or group before making them available to VARs/solution providers. It’s a pay-as-you-go model with no upfront in-vestment or hidden costs to soften the bottom line.
“People need to find the right IT professionals in the right geography with the right skill set. And we definitely offer best-of-class quality and coverage,” says Paul Nadjarian, OnForce senior vice president of marketing. “You want to know the reputation of the person you’re contracting with. With OnForce, technicians profile them-selves; and they know their individual reputation is on the line with their performance on each work order.”
The privately held OnForce charges an $11 fee for each work order created by a VAR or solution provider. The service buyer pays for the work through OnForce, which remunerates the IT service professional when the work has been successfully completed. IT service professionals pay a 10 percent fee for work received through OnForce. There is no subscription fee, membership fee or upfront cost of any kind to join OnForce as a buyer or provider.
A Strategic Weapon
It’s a solution that has worked very well for Parsippany, NJ-based Core Technology Solutions, according to its CEO, Gary Dedoussis, who says his company started using the OnForce platform about 18 months ago. Dedoussis called OnForce “a strategic weapon” and advises: “Like any small business, we’ve got to have the ability to tap into resources and scale up efficiently.”
Core Technology Solutions delivers services to larger clients, typically the satellite offices of Fortune 500 firms, providing services such as installation, deployment and break/fix that can run up to several million dollars per project. Project management is handled in-house, and the company maintains its own network of independent contractors, but when that network is tapped out, Core turns to OnForce. “They’ve become our recruiting office for contract technicians. They’ve really done their home-work,” says Dedoussis. “We’ve chosen to partner with OnForce because they help us put great technical people into play when and where we need them.”
Core Technology Solutions has worked with OnForce on approximately 1,900 work orders—about 10 percent of its total volume—from January through September 2007, says Dedoussis.
Companies like Core Technology Solutions, working with OnForce, have helped many independent contractors build successful businesses. Crisantos Hajibrahim first signed up as an OnForce provider in early 2004 as a college student seeking extra income and looking to charge competitive prices.
“The work started coming in. The first OnForce work order I got was from a Fortune 500 company that needed work done in southern California, where I’m based. Then, a major retailer started routing work orders to me,” Hajibrahim says. “OnForce offered access to business that I didn’t have before.”
These days, Hajibrahim is the single top IT service professional working with OnForce, with more than 2,000 work orders completed. He has formed a company, called Virus Woman, which employs 12 workers and projects sales of about $450,000 in 2007. Approximately 60 percent of that total is a direct result of his affiliation with OnForce.
He explains that OnForce was instrumental in help-ing him direct his operation—which focuses on roll-outs, break/fix, and wireless—toward more government work, an area he wanted to pursue. “They gave us an entry strategy and I learned from the platform what was necessary to win government work. Initially, only five percent of my work was government-based. Now, it’s up to 35 percent of my total revenue,” Hajibrahim says.
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