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A Case Study with Mark Pace, Director, and Nathan Pace, General Manager, Sterling IT
Sterling IT is an Australian family-owned business that has been running since 1995, more than thirty years. It works with small to medium enterprise across a wide range of industries, from real estate and manufacturing to distribution and insurance, and a number of its clients have been with the business for the entire journey.
Today Sterling IT’s primary focus is cybersecurity, keeping clients protected as more of them adopt new tools without fully understanding the risks. Running through everything is a simple ethos: they take things personally, and they respond quickly. That is what they expect of themselves, and it is what they need from their partners. It’s an approach built on trust, honesty and integrity.
Before Hosted Network, Sterling IT’s connectivity was spread across several different providers, each with their own strengths, though none covered everything Sterling IT needed. Account management was hard to reach, pricing was inconsistent, and support was slow when it mattered most.
A bigger challenge, both across the channel and for Sterling IT, was that several of those providers sold direct, which meant Sterling IT was effectively competing with its own suppliers for its own clients. One would cut commissions if the business did not bring on new customers every single month. For an MSP built on long-term relationships, none of that fit.
“We don’t shop on price. We shop on the whole solution. People remember when things go wrong, so support is extremely important for us.”
Sterling IT didn’t rip everything out overnight. As services came out of contract, they moved them across to Hosted Network one at a time, at their own pace, and they are still moving clients over today. There was no monthly quota to hit and no penalty for going slowly. What convinced them was support they could actually rely on: when something goes wrong, Sterling IT can reach the real people who can fix it, and that responsiveness is exactly why they had no hesitation bringing clients across.
“The support’s been really, really great, and being able to speak to key people is the massive differentiator. That’s why we had no hesitations bringing people over to Hosted Network.”
Moving to Hosted Network gave Sterling IT:
The difference shows up when something breaks. Where a direct carrier might leave Sterling IT on hold and then quote a two to three day wait for a response, the same fault through Hosted Network is resolved in a few hours. Sterling IT’s team can log into the portal and handle changes like port resets themselves, instantly, instead of sitting on the phone on a client’s behalf.
It is the kind of experience that has Sterling IT recommending Hosted Network to other MSPs, several of whom are now partners themselves.
“I sat on the phone with one of the largest telcos for 45 minutes and they said it would take two to three days to get back to me. If that was a Hosted Network customer, it’s resolved within a few hours.”
