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Before The Herjavec Group, Herjavec founded Brak Systems in 1992 and later sold the company to AT&T Canada in 2000. From there, he was involved with the sale of Ramp Networks to Nokia the following year. In 2003, he co-founded The Herjavec Group.
With its main office located in Toronto, The Herjavec Group also has three other offices in Calgary, Montreal and Ottawa. Its employee count is currently around 50 staff members, Herjavec said, with the majority of them working out of the Toronto office.
“We want to build the largest and best security integrator and solution provider business in the country,” Herjavec said. “We’re really focused on growth. Every quarter, we want 20 per cent new customer growth and to do this, we’re constantly picking up new technologies in order to penetrate new customers.”
Among its company highlights last year, Herjavec mentions, were its acquisition of Metacomm Inc., a security integration provider. Before the acquisition, Herjavec said the company did not sell McAfee products. However, once the acquisition and integration was completed, The Herjavec Group went on to become one of the top McAfee providers in the country.
Herjavec also said the company recently signed a letter of intent for an acquisition directed at a regional security company that The Herjavec Group hopes to announce soon. If all goes well, Herjavec said the deal will close by the end of May or early June.
“We’re hoping to get great people from the acquisition,” he said. “But it’s also the customer base and the vendor relationships that we’re hoping will come out of the acquisition.”
Asides from its acquisition plans, Herjavec said thanks to the recent economic change towards a utility model last year, its sales in the managed services space have exploded during the 2007 year.
“We’ve sold more managed services last year than we did the previous four years combined,” Herjavec said. “We’re seeing demand for managed services for mail gateway and other gateway services.”
Herjavec also attributes a large part of his company’s success to exposure from being on Dragon’s Den.
“There’s a tremendous amount of brand recognition thanks to the show,” Herjavec said. “The show asked me to come back for season three which will air in October of this year.”
Concerning company plans for this year, Herjavec said while growth is still a key goal, the company will be primarily focusing its efforts on strengthening its foundation over the next
few months.
“We’re doing well,” Herjavec said, “but we can do better. We want to get deeper with our core products and we want to further build our infrastructure and the resource team, which includes engineering and our help desk, in order to help ourselves grow next year and the following years.”
On his advice to other solution providers, Herjavec says, “it’s better to be great at one thing than at many.”
