MSP 501 Profile: Fidelis Keeps Customer Experience at Heart of Expanding Business

Company Name: Fidelis Inc. 

Company MSP 501 Rank: 275 

CTO: Paul Zimmerman 

Headquarters: Seattle, WA 

Primary Services:

LinkedIn: Fidelis Inc.

MSP 501 company Fidelis Inc. has a strong focus on the customer experience. In fact, “fidelis” in Latin means faithful. The company takes a co-managed approach with customers to build long-lasting and enduring relationships. This strategy helps the partner navigate through the pandemic.

Fidelis offers IT, managed services, networking and network infrastructure, communications, cybersecurity, cloud services, as well as technology consulting. It supports customer technology and helps develop a technology road map.

“It’s about basics. Taking care of the customer is about how I want to be taken care of. How I take care of my employees is about how I want to be taken care of,” said CEO Scott Wittstock, who founded the company in 2008.

Here, Paul Zimmerman, who joined Fidelis in 2012 with the acquisition of POS Core Technologies, talks about the challenges and opportunities exposed by the pandemic. He also talks about how vendors can help partners and the upside of being an entrepreneur.

Channel Futures: What is one thing you wish vendors would do that they don’t?

Fidelis’ Paul Zimmerman

Paul Zimmerman: Lead generation via marketing efforts to be given to strategic partners. Most vendors try to do this, but the amount of leads that they generate pales compared to the leads we generate from our website. If we’re a top-tier partner, it would be great if their marketing efforts helped to create brand awareness in the decision-maker target audience, and effective online marketing could generate warm leads to be parsed out to the most trusted and reliable partners in the geographic region for the lead.

CF: What new opportunities and challenges came with the global COVID-19 pandemic? 

PZ: Many organizations pivoted to work-from-home but did it in a less-than-secure way just to continue business operations. Now that it looks like many businesses will have a big portion of their staff working from home, there are opportunities for managed service providers to help secure those remote devices and help with migration of systems to “the cloud” to make them accessible from anywhere.

Some businesses are going to be hit very hard, and some will fail because of the pandemic. Others will thrive. Our job will be to help those most impacted to minimize the chances that they fail. And for those organizations that are trying to figure out how to best support folks who are no longer in the office, that is a good conversation for us as managed service providers to be having with them. We have the tools, we know how to do remote support, and we can help support users remotely at scale. 

CF: If applicable, why are you a business owner instead of working for someone else? What is the allure of entrepreneurship to you?

PZ: I’m a business owner because I love what I do, and I want to be able to do right by my clients. We reinvest heavily in our company so that we have the right people, tools and processes to serve our community. It is gratifying to be able to help support our local nonprofits, and to help our for-profit clients thrive. Having control over how we work with customers, and frankly, what customers we work with, is really important to me. It’s also nice to be able to pick the people you work with.

Longer-term, hopefully there’s a handsome reward for all of the hard work we put into nurturing and growing our business!