At immixGroup, Creating Demand for Others Triggered Growth

McLean, Va. — Since 1997, immixGroup has been a high-tech matchmaker in the public sector marketplace, joining more than 250 commercial technology manufacturers and their channel partners with federal, state, and local government agencies seeking to purchase their products.

“We do this by representing IT companies that range from market leaders like IBM and McAfee to the smaller emerging technology companies, including new cybersecurity companies that come into the market,” says company president Art Richer, a sales and business development executive with more than 25 years of experience in selling IT products and services in the government sector. “We provide them with a platform of services to help them grow. And we also make it easier for government agencies to buy these products by offering them preferred contracts and business partners they like to deal with.”

ImmixGroup facilitated more than $1 billion in sales last year, resulting in some $60 million in revenue for the privately held company.

Richer says that immixGroup’s success is due largely to identifying the changing go-to-market strategies as new tech companies come into the public sector marketplace and “we’ve evolved with that — and we continue to evolve — over the past 16 years that immixGroup has been in business.”

“As the markets change, you have to respond to that. You have to continue to reinvent yourself because the markets do change,” Richer says. “Along the way, we have changed our go-to-market strategy, and the services we provide to companies do allow us to continue to grow based on where the markets are going.”

As an example of this change, Richer recalls that when immixGroup was founded, most technology companies had their own sales staffs and held their own contracts with the government for providing technology and needed services.

“Today, these technology companies want to scale much more quickly. They want to make sure that they’re being efficient with the resources they need to come into the market, so they look more to the channel today. They look toward partners to do some of this work. They don’t want to hold direct contract vehicles. They’re commercial companies — they’re not focused on government alone,” he explains. “They’re relying today much more on partners.”

ImmixGroup started by providing companies with a strategy to support the sales team. “We helped them to get their contracts and maintain their contracts, so most of the technology community that we served thought that we were a contract management firm,” Richer says. “Whereas that was 100 percent of our business 15 years ago, today it accounts for less than 5 percent.”

ImmixGroup crossed into the middle market in 2008, using only retained earnings to fuel the growth. The staff numbered about 70 employees. In 2013, this number is 275.

“Today, our business is about supporting those demand creators, helping the partners, helping the sales team generate demand for their products, and actually helping them to drive business in this market space. So it’s really been a fundamental shift in what our business model was,” he explains. “This is very important, that you continue to evolve your business model to support your customers.”

Richer says that “plan, execute, and measure” were critical elements in immixGroup’s entry into the middle market. Equally important, he adds, is building the right management team.

“Critical to going into this first tier of the midmarket is that you have to build an executive team so that you can continue to evolve your business,” Richer says. “If you grow from 100 people to 200 people to 300 people, these are critical junctures in the evolution of the company, and you have to be able to build a management team in scale.”