Maury G is a Managing Partner at Levels Ventures, an Australia-based IT channel management consultancy and advisory services firm. He talks about his current job role and how Levels Ventures is working with channel partners and developing it business in Asia-Pacific (APAC) and EMEA regions.
Describe your current job role and the parts that are somewhat challenging?
My current job as Managing Partner and, Head of Alliance and Partner Ecosystem consulting at Levels Ventures focuses on helping vendors to align their partner acquisition and activation strategy, distributors to build more of the channel and resellers loyalty, and help IT resellers, system integrators, MSPs, and MSSPs to accelerate their revenue and customer acquisition through our Growth Assessment Programme (GAP). We have clients across EMEA, and APAC regions.
Can you explain how your company works with channel partners?
Our main business is to provide management consulting and advisory services to the channel ecosystem (vendors, distributors, system integrators, solution provider, resellers, CSPs, MSPs, and MSSPs). We have been helping the ecosystem with more of what we call the GAP Assessment. The GAP consulting approach is invented in-house and helps us to help more of the ecosystem players to identify key areas for growth and enable them to work on it. We have worked and continue to with hundreds of resellers, distributors and vendors, and this has allowed us to observe and understand the 50 touch points that can give any company we engage a 360-degree view of their business model, go-to-market (GTM) strategy, vendors and technology stack.
What this has done is help the ecosystem of players to be ahead of the market in terms of clarity of the shift in the industry trends. We also allocate decent number of hours every month to conduct free discovery calls with vendors, distributors, and channel partners to see if they need our help and implement our Growth Assessment Process (GAP) assessment with them.
How do you ensure channel partners flourish in a highly competitive market?
To ensure that our customers and their partners can flourish in a highly competitive market, we normally advise them and work with them to identify their niche where they eliminate the traditional competition and where they also can sell by value and not by aggressively offering discounts. Creating value to their clients is also part of what we advise our clients to do when they work with their channels and distributors.
What are the latest trends you see emerging across the channel?
We can see clearly that many channel partners are navigating the pass to become more of managed security providers (MSPs). Other segments in the market that are worth of focusing on are working with emerging vendors (Typically Series C or Series D Start-up’s) where we help them to realise more revenue and support coming from the new vendors that want to aggressively enter new markets and achieve exponential growth.
What is your management philosophy?
My management philosophy focuses mainly around “scale smarter”. I truly believe that if we specialise, that will make our company to focus more on one or two niche areas where we can really excel and beat the competition. The scale smarter attitude helps us to identify areas of exponential growth and make us focus on that and keep fixing the approach till it is refined perfectly.
When you look back at your career, what has been the most memorable achievement?
One of the defining moments in my career is when I stepped out of the corporate world and started to support the channel ecosystem from a very vendor agnostic approach. Most of the vendors will try to help the channel partners as much as they can, but because they are big enough and follow the pressure of the quarterly numbers, most of their efforts go to the direction that will help their agenda and not actually the whole vendor portfolio of their channel partners. This is where we come and play a key role in orchestrating all of this for the resellers, system integrators, MSPs and make sure that they are well taken care of.
What made you think of a career in technology?
Some 25 years ago, before I enrolled to my business and computing school, I was fascinated by what is going on in the tech sector. After talking to one of my mentors who is a very known figure in the IT Industry, I agreed with him that in the next 10 to 15 years every company will become a tech company and every industry will be disrupted by technology. And that is about very right now.
What do you think will be the hot technology talking point of 2021?
I am fascinated by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the impact it is having right now. Aside from this, Blockchain implementation, cyber security, robotic process automation (RPAs) and digital twin are few of the hot topics that are trending this year and will be trending for the next few years.
What are your personal interests and where do you like to spend most of your time after work?
I developed a keen interest in photography when I was about nine years old. And being privileged that I managed to travel to 88 countries allowed me to capture beautiful moments from almost every continent. Thus far, I have managed to host two solo photography exhibitions. When it comes to sports, I am an avid player of golf, squash and beach volleyball.