Franchisee Interview: Growing A Business With Todd Harrell
Growing a Business with TeamLogic IT Franchise Owner Todd Harrell
We’re excited to kick off a new monthly series spotlighting the incredible franchisees who make up the TeamLogic IT family. Each month, we’ll share the stories of dedicated business owners who are driving growth in their communities. This month, we’re proud to introduce Todd Harrell, owner of TeamLogic IT of Morristown, New Jersey, as he takes us through his inspiring journey of progress and achievement with TeamLogic IT.

Q: What made you choose to franchise with TeamLogic IT?
Harrell: I’ve always been a little entrepreneurial and was looking for a new opportunity. I have a business background, not a technical background. I kind of stumbled across TeamLogic IT and thought it sounded interesting, so I reached out.
What appealed to me most about TeamLogic IT was the business-to-business aspect and the opportunity to work with small- to medium-sized business owners and help them improve and grow their business.
After exploring the opportunity and visiting with the TeamLogic IT team, I felt comfortable and decided that this would be the way to go.
Q: What was one of your biggest concerns early on in running your TeamLogic IT franchise, and how did you address it?
Harrell: As I mentioned, I am not a technical guy. So, my biggest question initially was “am I going to be able to do this?” Can I go out there and sell to these business owners and have them part with their money for me to manage their network and make sure it’s secure?
I decided to look at the business as a series of milestones. The first milestone I had for myself was to know the business inside out and get a few clients onboard. Fortunately, I got my first client (an electrician who needed some simple business backup) on the first day we opened.
Soon after, I landed my biggest client — a company that manages all the traffic here in northern New Jersey. We met a few times and after learning more about TeamLogic IT and the services we offered, he decided to make the move over to us, and we still work with him today. Landing a client of that size helped me to believe that I can talk business-to-business and convince potential clients that we can help them manage their business and move them forward.
Q: What do you like about working with small businesses?
Harrell: The biggest satisfaction I get working with small business owners is to help them solve their technical problems, so they can focus on their business. At TeamLogic IT, what we do best is manage their networks and security – and it’s all done behind the scenes, so their employees don’t have to worry about it and aren’t disrupted by day-to-day technology issues.
Early in the business, that was a big selling point for many of the customers we spoke with. Smaller businesses don’t always have the resources to employ a dedicated IT person on staff and troubleshooting or dealing with IT issues takes owners away from their job.
Owners realized the value of TeamLogic IT to help manage IT needs in a more cost-effective way. They also appreciated that we have a greater knowledge of continuously evolving technology needs and trends.
Today, we are reaching out to companies with anywhere from two to 300 employees. We make sure they have the right cybersecurity tools, their networking environments are protected, and that their technology is working for them.
Q: Let’s talk about your team in Morristown. How did you build your team and what did you look for when hiring employees?
Harrell: To start out, it was vitally important for me to hire a good engineer, because I didn’t have the technical acumen and needed somebody who was able to “talk the talk.” I needed someone who was cognizant of all the technology out there, but also knows a lot about the managed services marketplace, because it’s different.
The first employee I hired was more of an enterprise person. They worked at one company, and all their clients were the employees in the company – a totally different mindset than today when you have dozens of companies you work with, and all the networks are vastly different. I realized that he wasn’t the best fit for our needs.
Around six months in, we hired our next engineer, and I was focusing on building the business. In my mind, it was important to grow quickly. We grew to around four or five techs who were fully capable of handling issues that might come up overnight or on the weekends.
Q: What was your first financial goal, and where did you envision going from there?
Harrell: Once I hit my first goal of one million dollars, I was able to pay my employees and even pay myself. I asked myself, what’s next? What’s going to happen with the business in the next three years? In five years? Growth was the only option!
I always felt like I needed to have a big footprint. Many of us start out small, as a one-man, maybe two-man office. From a marketing standpoint, you have to show a big footprint, because people don’t want to give you their money if they aren’t confident with you or your business.
Q: Speaking of marketing, how did you approach that tactic with the business?
Harrell: We got our car wrapped! That was a great marketing tool for us and afforded us a lot of exposure around town. We got lots of calls from people saying, “I saw your car and I thought I’d give you a call.” We also took advantage of the marketing materials from corporate. I remember people saying to us, “these are great materials,” when we went on sales calls.
Q: Are you doing anything different or innovative with your TeamLogic IT franchise to track customer satisfaction?
Harrell: We have a new tactic we instituted called Smile Back. After every ticket when the tech finishes, we send the client a little note that asks, “how did we do today” – featuring facial emojis to symbolize their level of satisfaction. We get on average about 35% of the clients to respond back, which is great. And out of that, 95% of the time we’re getting a “good” smiley face back that they are happy with their service. We circulate that feedback among the team and celebrate our successes.
Q: Now that you’ve been in the business for over a decade, how have changes in technology impacted your business?
Harrell: As we all are aware, technology changes daily. It’s so rapid and can be hard to keep up with. That challenge for businesses is a good selling point for us!
If you think about our TeamLogic IT engineers all over the country, we’re bringing together thousands of experts who are keeping us abreast of all things IT. It gives us a huge knowledge advantage versus our competitors, which may be a local independent shop or single proprietorship. It’s important to ensure that our employees continue their education as technology changes and evolves.
Back when we started, the marketplace was different as well — it wasn’t as focused on managed services, but was instead more concentrated on what we call “break-fix.” It was a challenge to sell people on the idea of paying me a little bit every month to manage their network so they didn’t have bigger problems down the road.
Most of the people we work with now are very familiar with managed services and the importance of cybersecurity. Today, you can’t go in and talk to somebody without mentioning cybersecurity and the need to have data encryption and multi-factor authentication. Businesses are also noting the importance of disaster recovery and sufficient business continuity solutions, so they can recover if something catastrophic does happen.
Q: How are you helping customers when it comes to cybersecurity and potential cyberattacks?
Harrell: There are always going to be breaches, that’s why you need to have layered security. But it’s also important to have the ability to respond if something does happen. We offer our clients several solutions that help give us a first alarm if somebody’s trying to breach their network. We can respond appropriately and shutdown the network if needed.
Data recovery is an important part of this as well. If you do have a breach and your data is lost, the stress of worrying is taken off the owner, as we can help put solutions in place that recover the data and businesses can get back to work quickly.
Bottom line, if your business is not protected from potential cyberattacks and you don’t have a recovery aspect in place, you can be down for weeks, and in some cases, might not be able to recover and eventually go out of business.
Q: What impact did COVID have on your business?
Harrell: COVID was a transformative event for our business and for many of our clients as well. There were several clients who were struggling during and after COVID. We worked with them to ensure they didn’t have a drop in their network security – and many of them are in business today.
Technology itself underwent a drastic change. Suddenly, we went from an environment where everybody’s working out of the offices, to most everybody having to work from home. The transition from office to home threw a lot at business owners (as well as my own business).
We worked to get our clients up and running using technologies that they might not have used before. There was a lot of skepticism if employees could work from home effectively. But after COVID, businesses realized that yes, we can work from home and technology is not the limitation.
Making sure our clients feel protected and that they are in good hands is an important, ethical part of the business. I can’t promise that they’re never going to have problems, but what I can promise is that our team is very passionate and they’re going to do everything they can to make sure you’re back up and running.
Q: What does the future hold for your TeamLogic IT business?
Harrell: Our growth continues! We’re looking to add four more engineers on top of the two or three we added last year. We’ve moved three times due to the need for a larger space, and we may be on the verge of another move in the next year or so to accommodate our growth.
Another important addition was the investment into hiring a full-time salesperson. Initially, I had always done that myself, but bringing in a dedicated salesperson allowed us to expand and led to larger deals for the business.
I see a lot of opportunities ahead for us. Many companies need to switch to a technology partner who is capable of handling their IT needs. I tell my employees that our business is not technology – it’s customer satisfaction. If we do a good job there and our customers are happy, we’ll be able to keep our customers and continue to grow.
We give every one of our clients the white glove treatment. People call us because they’re having a problem, they’re frustrated, and they’re not able to do the work they need to do for the day due to IT problems. We do an excellent job of getting those issues resolved and their businesses back on track.
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