After over two decades in the IT asset management space, Re-Source Partners found its niche and recently received an award for it.
Re-Source Partners, a Michigan-based IT asset management and disposition firm, was awarded the 2023 Technology Partner of the Year award from Ally Financial, a digital-only bank and auto finance company.
Mike Loria, Re-Source president, told E-Scrap News that over the company’s 21 years, it’s evolved from third-party lessor services to today’s “concierge service” complete lifecycle solutions provider.
“From Day 1, what we’ve been good at is tracking assets,” Loria said.
The award is the first from Ally. Re-Source has been an Ally technology partner since 2014, providing services such as inventorying, tracking, warehousing and deployment of new and existing technology assets, data sanitization and asset disposal.
Loria said Re-Source has brought value to Ally by helping “them control that whole process and make sure what’s coming in is right and what’s going out is right and do it with 100% accuracy.”
“I think that’s where Ally and ourselves recognized what good teamwork can do for a partnership and I think that’s the root of why they selected us as their supplier of the year,” he added.
The award is a way to show Re-Source’s workforce the importance of what they do, Loria said.
The company’s core values are being responsible, reliable and relentless, he added, and the award is “proof that we’re living our values and delivering on them.”
An evolving vision
The company, which now operates out of a 50,000-square-foot facility in Troy, Mich., started in the early 2000s in computer leasing, working as a third party on behalf of the lessor, Loria said. As Re-Source interacted with the clients, they began to ask about disposal options.
Re-Source moved into device disposition around 2008, Loria said, and “did some really heavy tonnage for Dell and Goodwill” before realizing that disposition space was more competitive and less client-facing than they wanted.
Around 2012, the company decided to pivot, Loria said. More conversations with clients revealed that many had weak asset management and some weren’t even aware of what assets they had.
“That got our interest,” Loria said, and Re-Source started to build a consulting practice and do process design to help clients create a lifecycle approach to their assets.
“That was our first step from end-of-life to full lifecycle providers,” Loria said. Today, less than half of the company’s revenue comes from recovered value, he said, and the rest is from the management services.
Re-Source can often save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost assets, he said.
“We track their assets and we find that they’re drastically over-provisioning and not watching for those things,” Loria said. “Five percent of even a $50 million hardware spend annually, that adds up pretty quick.”
Future growth
Re-Source will continue to be very strategic about its growth, Loria said, and is shifting with pandemic-driven workforce changes.
In the past, Re-Source would ship multiple pallets of assets to one location, and then distribute them to employees on-site. Now, with remote work booming, the company is shipping more directly to end users.
“Because of the remote workforce, there’s fewer people on campuses and therefore fewer hands to handle the types of projects we do,” he said. “I think our workforce is going to continue to grow as we hire more onsite techs” to sustain its work.
He’s targeting deeper growth at current clients, he said, as well as expanding in the financial sector and looking to streamline more services, reducing handoff points when items often get lost and taking those logistics off clients’ plates.
“I think we have a couple of ways we go about this, but integrating with the clients with their software is where I really see the future,” he said.
Loria added that for him, it’s never been about dominating the industry, but rather building strong and lasting relationships with clients.
“We look to be solid in innovating and having cool solutions and being a little more knowledgeable about what goes on in the client,” he said.
