PharmChem: A partnership that fosters forward momentum

The Challenge: PharmChem is like many other small businesses. It has a lean team doing good work, and it has leadership with big ambitions. Realized, those ambitions would mean more employees, more revenue, and a more robust system in place to support it all.

Looking at where the company was and where it wanted to go, leadership knew that it’d need help getting there. Help specifically in the area of the company’s technological infrastructure.

They’d need to move past part-time IT management and find a dedicated partner. That’s where Sagiss comes in.

The Solution: Kerri Wagner is PharmChem’s chief operating officer, but, with only nine employees, everyone wears many hats. One of Kerri’s is being the IT point person. In her role, she knew that the company’s technology and infrastructure needed to be managed more proactively.

“We had a contractor, and he would come in several times a week in the evenings and do whatever needed to be done,” she said. “But it got to be where we needed someone we could go to whenever we needed something, not just on their timeline when they could come in. …We just needed to upgrade.”

But PharmChem knew it wanted to find more than just someone with additional skills. They needed an MSP that could come alongside them and help align their technology with the company’s goals. That included the need to handle network management, cybersecurity, and generally become a partner. Additionally, they wanted to find a company that was both local and of a similar size to PharmChem. 

Sagiss checked all of those boxes.

“The range of services that they offered were pretty comprehensive,” Wagner said. “There was a lot of alignment on the network management and the ability to handle cybersecurity and hosting multiple platforms. That’s on top of being the go-to help desk for anything we needed. They were able to bridge that gap as both the help desk and the managed IT.”

The Result: The relationship that Wagner and the rest of the PharmChem team wanted is what they got. 

“When you build trust with a few people at a company it doesn't feel like it's just a sale,” Wagner said. “That trust yields them being able to say, ‘Hey, here's a recommendation that you guys could do that will actually save money in the long run.’ ”

For PharmChem, that recommendation was to move from on-premises servers to a fully cloud environment—a project that helped the company that was supporting remote workers even before it was cool operate more efficiently and better position them for the growth they’ve been chasing. 

And Wagner said she knew that the recommendation came from the place of wanting to make the business better, not a provider looking to sell additional services. 

“Building trust and the honesty that I still feel with Sagiss means a lot,” Wagner said.  “When I say they act as an extension of PharmChem and they're like an employee, that means they're acting in the best interest of PharmChem. … They know me well enough now that if I say I trust you to make the best decision for PharmChem, I don't need to know if I don't need to know. They make the decision, they tell me why they made the decision. They give me a writeup to express what the cost associated with it is and how it's going to be better for us in the long run. And I trust them to do their job and they've done it very well.”