Electronic product releases are a much-awaited event. Every year or so, there is a new version of the same product. A couple of years later, the older version of the product will stop receiving updates or being repaired by the original manufacturer. Consumers of the product have no choice but to update to the newer model – a costly endeavor for the companies.
Sean M. Kennedy, Founder and CEO of TRG, embraced an opportunity to create solutions that aided companies in reducing their operational costs by extending the lifecycle of their products. He says, “In the early 2000s, I had a clear vision of what the mobility industry needed most—a comprehensive set of service and equipment solutions all ‘under one roof’.”
Flash forward to today, TRG has become a leader in the industry providing customers with a full range of mobility services, including buying, selling, repairing, training, consulting, managing, and much more. The mission is to ‘Make Technology Simple,’ helping customers accelerate projects, drive application success, improve employee & customer experience and maximize ROI.
Insights Sights interviewed Sean about the mission of TRG, how it maintains its stronghold in a competitive market and the future plans of the company.
Below are the highlights of the interview:
Sean, what was the initial idea behind the inception of TRG?
In the early 2000s, I saw firsthand how companies struggled to extend their Mobile Barcode Scanning, POS, and Printing Technology lifecycle. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) would sell a company a terminal or device and then come back within 2-3 years and say that the only way they could support that device was if the company upgraded to a new terminal.
It was extraordinarily costly for the companies (not to mention exceptionally frustrating), and I saw an opening and an opportunity to step in and fill a need with the ability to offer third-party maintenance support services on a technology that had a 7–10-year lifespan. So, when we originally launched, we would partner with the company to manage the maintenance and services of the device so the end user could extend the lifecycle of their technologies and upgrade on their own schedule – not a schedule being dictated by OEMs.
This was definitely a niche more than 20 years ago. Then once we started working with more and more companies – we realized we could do so much more than managing the backend work (break/fix, refurbish); we could also manage the staging, configuration, deployments, and spare spool management to be a full-service enterprise partner.
What are the primary objectives and philosophy of TRG?
Our mission is to lead the future of enterprise technology by driving bold endpoint solutions and services with a success-or-else approach. We are obsessed with solving complex operational challenges by pairing enterprise organizations with bold endpoint solutions designed to streamline their operational efficiency.
What are your top-notch offerings that have a strong foothold in the industry?
Without a doubt – it is our lifecycle management of an asset. We can manage and repair devices but also manage the software and security on those devices to help you understand where your assets are in real time. We are all about assisting companies to increase their uptime.
What are the roadblocks that TRG faces in the ever-changing landscape of the business world?
At the end of the day – mobility is changing every day. More and more companies are focused on increasing efficiencies in a mobile and remote work environment. So, while we don’t consider this a roadblock, we need to continuously evolve and adapt our skill set and service offerings to adapt to their mobile needs.
How is your company adapting to market orientation?
Everything we do is around securing mobile endpoints from an industrial to consumer perspective – that is where our endpoint management offering fits so nicely. We are perfectly designed to partner with a CIO and relieve the pressure they have to manage lifecycle and endpoint management internally. We can come in, work with your team and build a plan that makes our customers more operationally efficient and help eliminate challenges with disparate systems.
What is your stance on implementing innovative technologies?
We are constantly partnering in the industry with Tier I OEMs and software products to make sure we are at the forefront of the ever-changing technology landscape. We do this by communicating our customers’ needs to them and ensuring we have the right partners in place to meet all the challenges that can arise.
We also don’t just focus on technologies externally – we invest in them internally. We are a company that believes in investing in enterprise technologies like NetSuite, Salesforce, and ServiceNow so that all of our systems work together effectively, and we have transparency and speed with our customers in getting them the data they need.
What is the next chapter for TRG?
To sum it up – expansion. We have made huge strides over the past several years to focus on and expand our operations in Canada and Europe. That will continue to be a huge area for us over the next five years. And we continue to expand our team — we’ve hired 75 people within the last year in different areas of the business to manage the demand and to ensure we have the right skill sets to match where our customers are.
For example, we have tripled our MDM (Mobile Device Management) team in under 12 months. As we continue to strive to be the best in enterprise mobility management, we will constantly look to bring on new talent to help us scale.
