Lebanon
After nearly three decades selling computers and wiring Upper Valley businesses with IT infrastructure, Blum was working his last week on the sales floor at Systems Plus Computers at the Centerra Marketplace in Lebanon. Before the week is out Blum, 71, will have retired after selling his share of the business to partner Chris McAndrew.
Customer Kate Barber, of Cornish, has brought in her MacBook Air for servicing but tells Blum that she is also “thinking about upgrading” to a more powerful laptop. Gazing at the row of MacBook Pros on display, she says with a hint of trepidation, “this is what I was thinking of going to.”
Barber taps the keyboard of the display model. Blum, anticipating her questions, says “the earlier generation had only 4 gigabytes in memory,” noting that the newer MacBook Pros have up to four times as much memory. “If one of these is in your price range, I think it’s a much better machine,” he advises.
Blum then darts across the showroom floor to fetch a price sheet, brings it back and hands it to Barber. “I definitely need more storage space,” Barber agrees, scanning the sheet.
Blum’s career has followed the arc of the personal computer industry — “the entire lifespan of the PC,” he said — as the devices became ubiquitous in people’s daily lives.
When Blum first began to sell computers, in 1981, at a store in Montpelier, the PC was just beginning to make its way into homes and offices. Data was stored on floppy discs the size of a 45 rpm record and fans whirled inside the boxy devices to cool the electronics. The first days of the Internet — with its dial-up access through 56K modems over telephone lines that screeched when connecting — was still a decade into the future.
Today, the desktop PC is greatly diminished, succeeded by sleek laptops, tablets and smartphones that are thousands of times more powerful and dozens of pounds lighter than the equipment of the past. But when he started out, Blum recalls, he was selling Compaq computers “that looked like a little suitcase and weighed 30 pounds.”
Although many may think of Systems Plus as the place to buy an Apple laptop for their kid heading off to college, the biggest part of the business is its work as a remote IT department on behalf of businesses that typically don’t have the resources to manage their own systems and networks in-house. This includes such staple IT functions as operating servers for data backup and equipment procurement and maintenance for medical, dental and law offices, retail stores and schools.
“A lot of our retail customers are not aware of the bottom part of the iceberg,” Blum said.
Much of that iceberg — its 6,400-square-foot offices and 22 employees — is tucked in back offices, where technicians and network service managers work in cubicles and at stations scattered with computer parts, soldering pens and utensils that more resemble surgical instruments than hand tools. Unlike the tech counter at big-box stores, which typically ship computers back to the manufacturer for servicing, Systems Plus handles most repair jobs itself.
The “business solutions” side of Systems Plus has become critical as the ability to squeeze profits from the sale of PCs and laptops has shrunk as high-volume, price-slashing online retailers have grown. Where Systems Plus can excel is in providing local IT functions for Upper Valley businesses that otherwise might find themselves having to deal with a disembodied voice in Sunnyvale, Calif., or Bangalore, India — two cities famous as tech-support hubs.
Systems Plus has big clients, too, such as Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, The Dartmouth Institute, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and the Claremont School District — plus more than 4,000 other customers the company has served.
“We’ve invested a lot of resources in personnel and developing that side of the business,” Blum said. “It’s obvious to all people in business today that the functionality of their computer networks is a key part to the functioning of their business.”
Blum and McAndrew each gravitated into natural roles at Systems Plus. Blum was the outgoing salesman and managed the overall business while McAndrew focused on the hardware side, including repairs and service.
“I’m a nuts-and-bolts guy,” said McAndrew, who added it’s too soon to know how the business will evolve with him as the sole owner, although he expects the “managed services” component to remain dominant.
As an example, McAndrew cites a recently launched new service called Plus Care, which he described as “one-on-one” tech support for customers.
For a monthly subscription fee of $14.99, System Plus performs automatic maintenance on computer devices such as making sure program and operating system updates are running and checking the devices regularly for viruses and malware.
Previously, such service was available only to business customers.
“Our core business and foundation have been laid for many years,” said McAndrew, who credits the company’s employees for making for a smooth transition with Blum’s retirement. “We know how to do those things very well. Now we’re rolling out managed services at the retail level. This will be a really great thing for our customer base.”
“Hi there!” Blum smiles at a customer as she approaches the store’s service desk. He recognizes her.
Ginia Allison, the former president of the Rotary Club of Hanover, has come into Systems Plus for advice on how she can project digital photos from her iPad onto a large-screen TV during her upcoming birthday celebration and family reunion in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
Blum suggests scheduling a half-hour or full-hour “sit down with one of our guys” for technical help on how to move the family photos from her tablet to the screen so everyone at the celebration will be able to view them. A “discount rate” may apply, he notes.
Allison says Systems Plus has been like having her own help desk to answer questions about technology and devices that can be bewildering.
“Jake first introduced me to — if you want to call it that — the ‘wired world,’ ” Allison says. “My kids were impressed that I would come in her for help.”
Blum fell into the computer business by chance.
After dropping out of Harvard Law School in the late 1960s to become a singer in a rock band — he once sported a pony tail — Blum became involved in the wholesale distribution of natural and organic foods in Vermont. He was introduced to PCs in the early 1980s when he needed a system to track customer invoices.
“I just enjoyed the logic” of computers, Blum said, and that interest led him to work for one of the first PC stores in Montpelier. The store’s owner had previously worked in mainframe computers and took Blum under his wing. “He taught me a lot of stuff,” said Blum.
Blum later moved to the Upper Valley (his sister, Liz Blum, is a former member of the Norwich Selectboard and current Hanover Co-op board member) where he got a job at Chip’s Computer Center on South Street in Hanover. There, Blum met two other computer enthusiasts who worked at the store: Chris McAndrew and Josh Kahan.
Eventually, when Chip’s was sold, the three employees saw an opportunity. One night after work, over dinner at Everything But Anchovies on Allen Street, they hashed out an idea.
“The three of us were talking and said, ‘Boy, we could do this on our own,’ ” recalled Kahan, now the IT director for the city of Lebanon. “Jake and I sat around the kitchen table at my dad’s in Norwich and came up with a business plan.”
They opened their first location on the third floor of Lebanon’s Rivermill Commercial Center in 1988. There was no elevator in the building “and all the computers had to be hand-trucked up the stairs to the store,” Blum said.
A less back-breaking location eventually was sought.
The company moved first to the “Boiler House” building at the Rivermill complex, and then to Centerra Marketplace when the shopping plaza opened in the late 1990s. (For eight years it also had a second location on South Street in Hanover.) The business remains at Centerra. The original hand trucks are still in use.
Kahan said Systems Plus has been able to remain an independent computer sales and service business because of the unique nature of the Upper Valley, with its college- and medical center-based economy coupled with the spotty high-speed Internet service of a rural setting that led people to rely longer upon local retail businesses.
“The Upper Valley is not completely different from the rest of the world, but it is also isolated,” Kahan said. “The big trends of box stores and online shopping weren’t sweeping here yet and people were still willing to walk into a small place and pay a little more for the attention and hand-holding.”
Systems Plus, said Blum, also has focused on three key brands: Apple, Lenovo (which acquired IBM’s ThinkPad laptop division) and Compaq. Securing certification as an Apple dealer and service provider in the late 1990s was also key, given the computer giant’s presence at Dartmouth, where Apple laptops are popular among faculty and students.
“No one wants to pay way over what they can get elsewhere for less, but time management and simplicity of logistics is critical,” said Kahan. He noted how the city of Lebanon, when it had to replace its large-format printer — a piece of equipment that cost around $7,000 — Systems Plus won the bid.
“These are complex, bulky instruments that you don’t want to have to send back to the manufacturer if something goes wrong,” he said. “But if I can get it immediately and have local people to talk for service, it’s a no-brainer.”
“Hiya!”
Blum greets a customer who walks through the door carrying a white, wireless Apple keyboard.
“My desktop won’t recognize this thing,” the customer, Joe Reilly, of Hartland, explains handing the keyboard to Blum. Reilly says that when he types on the keyboard nothing appears on the screen.
Blum gives the keyboard a visual inspection. “The battery could be dead,” he surmises.
“Battery?” Reilly wonders as Blum disappears into a backroom. The notion hadn’t registered that a wireless keyboard requires a battery to power its signal to the desktop. While Blum is installing a new battery, Reilly muses upon what should have been obvious.
“It evidently needs to be recharged. I never knew that,” he laughs. “Everything is simple once you know the answer.”
Initially, McAndrew and the staff at Systems Plus thought Blum would slowly ease into retirement through a transition period. But last week, Blum informed his former employees, many of whom have been with the company for more than a dozen years, that they were more than capable of carrying on without him.
“We got an email on Monday saying he didn’t think he needed to come in any longer,” McAndrew said, his voice falling in obvious sadness. Apart from working together for more than 30 years, McAndrew said, he and Blum are also close friends and he acknowledged his long-time partner’s absence will take getting used to.
“It’s been a little tough,” McAndrew said.
John Lippman can be reached at 603-727-3219 or jlippman@vnews.com.
Correction
Jake Blum, Chris McAndrew and Josh Kahan worked out their plan to start Systems Plus Computers over dinner at Everything But Anchovies in Hanover. The name of the restaurant was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.
