Being A Business Consultant, Not Just A Technology Consultant, During A Slow Economy

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Length: 11 min, 37 sec

Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Jason Cowan, president of reseller Cowan’s Retail Systems, and Jim Roddy, president of Business Solutions

BSM: A division of Cowan’s Retail Systems is Profit Café, which specializes in serving restaurants. You specialize in restaurants, but the principles of the transformation of your business can really apply to almost any VAR in almost any vertical market. Can you tell us about your company’s journey from technology reseller to being a true business consultant and some of the lessons that you and your staff members learned along the way?

Cowan: We have a unique view of restaurant operations. Point of sale systems touch so many different areas of the restaurant – front of house, back of house, accounting, management, inventory, employee scheduling – all of those different areas. So we’ve been able to consult for years on how best to utilize technology in those areas. We understand the business need, and we’ve been applying technology to it all these years.

We’re always hiring people from the restaurant business because it’s always easier to train somebody about the technology than it is to train them how a restaurant works. We have much more success than hiring a technical person and trying to teach them how a restaurant works.

Profit Café was spawned from the idea that we have all this technical knowledge but computers – everybody’s using them, everybody’s familiar with them – especially point of sale. People are buying their second and third generation point of sale systems. What was happening more often was people were coming to us and saying, “I understand point of sale. You don’t need to talk with me about that. Just tell me what your best price is.” Unlike our history where we used to consult with people and explain how they were going to implement this in their business and how they were going to improve, all of that unique knowledge that we had, it was kind of being wasted. We didn’t have that right opportunity to explain it to them.

I didn’t just put on a different hat and say, “Now I’m a consultant.” I really did some research to figure out what the best way to do it was, and we now have systems in place to help our customers.

This is only a portion of this exclusive interview. For the complete podcast, go to above media player.