We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chris Noles. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chris below.

Chris, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Is your team able to work remotely? If so, how have you made it work? What, if any, have been the pitfalls? What have been the non-obvious benefits?

Our company utilized remote office capabilities for over 2 decades, and we have been helping our clients do the same.
A company with a remote workforce still needs to have regular virtual meetings/check-ins, and it helps your company’s morale and culture to schedule in person luncheons or team activities every couple of week. One non-obvious benefit
we have noticed is that the personal lives of remote workers have improved. They have less “windshield” time allowing them to focus on more productive work while also being there more for their families.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

My name is Chris Noles, and I am the founder and President of Beyond Computer Solutions.

Computer technology has been my hobby since my early teens, and it wasn’t long after that when I decided to turn my hobby into a career.

I started out my career in the 1990’s working full-time for an internet service provider. Since my father ran an accounting practice, many of his clients would call on me to help them setup and troubleshoot computers, and I would help them on the side.

It was not long after this that I decided to start my own computer consulting business. My initial focus was to help my father’s clients. I then became familiar with the specialized needs of real estate attorneys and how to setup technology solutions to make them more efficient.

Today we are a Managed IT Service provider serving many different industries, and our core focus is to help our clients focus on running their business while we keep their business running and secure! This means that we provide a total solution for a fraction of the cost of hiring IT & Cybersecurity professionals. Our solutions include helpdesk, cybersecurity, cloud services and other professional services.

Speaking of Cybersecurity, we are on a mission to let business owners know that they are not too small to be targeted. We provide cybersecurity awareness training that includes topics like how to recognize a phishing email and more. When there is a cyberattack, our team is part of a network of incident responders who help businesses recover.

One thing that makes us unique is that we have the depth of much larger IT companies, but we are still the right size to be able to work with organizations of all sizes where their employees they will get to know our people and our culture and feel like we are an extension of their company. We have consistently ranked in the top 501 Managed IT Service providers worldwide.

I am proud of the fact that many of our clients have been with us for over a decade, and our employees have a positive and flexible work environment. I am also very blessed to have my wife work with me as our CFO in the company!

Let’s talk M&A – we’d love to hear your about your experience with buying businesses.

We made our first business acquisition around 2015. The acquisition was a small IT service provider where the owner was looking to retire. It made perfect sense for us to make the acquisition because just like us, he worked primarily with clients in the real estate law space.

I was surprised at how easy it was for us to do the transaction. We agreed on a price, and we did the closing on the business transaction with one of the clients that we ended up acquiring. It was a win for everyone because he wanted to leave his clients in good hands so he could enjoy his retirement.

It is difficult to acquire new customers, so acquiring other IT companies is a great way to grow our client base and our staff. We hope to do this again someday!

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

There are two books written by Michael Michalowicz that fundamentally changed our business forever. The first book is called “Profit First” which helped us restructure our accounting and cashflow management. We learned that profit, not revenue, was the most important thing to focus on first.

The second book is called “Pumpkin Planning” which taught us how to focus on delivering amazing service to our best clients known as “prize pumpkins” and to turn down any client who was not going to become a “prize pumpkin.”

We went on to hire a profit first professional coach to help us implement these processes. It was not easy at first because these ideas contradicted the way I was taught and how many businesses are ran today, but we are much more efficient because of what we learned and what we changed. I would encourage every business owner to read these books and get laser-focused on a particular niche and on growing your profitability first before chasing only revenue.

There is one other book I recommend called “The Go-Giver” written by Bob Burg and John David Mann. A go-giver is someone who is focused on providing value to others, and I am a firm believer in delivering as much value as we can to our clients every day!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.beyondcs.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondcsatlanta
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris1976ga/
• Twitter: beyondcsatlanta