Genmar is celebrating
25 years ago, this year back in 1996, our MD Garry Moore started a new venture in his hometown of Bishop’s Stortford after returning from 10 years working in inspection in the oil game in West Africa.
Recognising the potential of the burgeoning IT industry Genmar (UK) Limited first opened its doors on The Causeway offering computer sales and repair to local businesses and residential customers. From the outset our mantra has been service first, this attitude proved successful and so attractive to our customers it has allowed us to grow into the company we are today.
The early days saw us offering custom PC builds and repairs as well as advice and onsite services. With computers being far less reliable and users just getting to grips with this new technology, we found ourselves very busy, opening 7 days a week and keeping Garry and his business partner on their toes.
As our reputation grew so did the demand for our services, leading to us employing more staff. Although the location of the shop was in a prominent position it also occupied the old river Stort route, this saw us, and our neighbours flooded 3 times in 4 years. in 2001 this was so bad that we found the shop under 2 foot of water, taking 3 days to drain away, not great for a computer business.
Some 10 years later the town decided to redevelop its town centre, extending the undercover shopping with the addition of the multi-story car park. This saw us looking for new premises with little notice. Lady luck found us making The Links Business Centre at the top of Raynham Rd our new home.
As demand for home computers waned, support for business IT grew and Genmar moved with the times offering a raft of business IT services. One such was the relatively new Hosted Desktop market, the first real step into the now well known “cloud” arena. This saw Genmar as one of the first UK IT companies offering private cloud technology to its customers and becoming the towns first IT Managed Service Provider. Over the next few years our customer base grew to include most of the UK and a few European countries. This growth prompted our taking the unit next door and increasing staff to 15.
2019 saw us with over 150 clients taking advantage of our support services, from industries as diverse as property to finance and construction to recruitment. We were also keeping up with the times, taking the step into public cloud with Microsoft 365 and Azure. Throughout all this time our adherence to our core values of service first saw us rewarded with inclusion in the awards for the Top 10 IT Managed Service Providers, a great reflection of the hard work and effort put in by all the staff here.
Like most businesses the pandemic in 2020 came with a new set of challenges. Remote working proved relatively easy to us having all our staff setup to cope with weekend and out of hours anyway. The demand to setup our customers proved a huge challenge, involving setting up remote working for over 2000 staff in under 2 weeks, with all the additional issues of home broadband and home computers. Once again, our staff proved to be up to the task as the many testimonials we received have proved.
This year we plan to celebrate this awesome achievement with a party for the staff and any of our customers who want to celebrate with us. Whether you can make it or not, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all our customers – old and new – for their loyal support over the last quarter century, as without you Genmar would never have made this journey.