Created business · IT department as a service · National and international expansion
Reddog Technology
An IT department as a service business built years before the category had a name — flat monthly fee, unlimited support, owned equipment, and incentives aligned so Reddog only won when customers had reliable technology.
Categories are invented after someone commits early.
Co-created Reddog Technology with Jason Rudolph — customer-facing strategy, product development, pricing models, and executive technology leadership.
The story
- Problem
- Businesses paid hourly for IT failure — providers profited when customers lost time and reliability was nobody’s incentive.
- Constraint
- Flat-fee unlimited support required owning customer assets and predicting support load across hundreds of products — extreme operational complexity.
- Decision
- Model Reddog as an IT department for any size organisation: fixed monthly fee, unlimited support and returns, Reddog bears cost of unreliability.
- Outcome
- National then international expansion; sold to every customer in 2017 rather than as a going concern — years ahead of managed services as a category.
What mattered
- Founded with Jason Rudolph in Brisbane — work began in 2002, Reddog Technology launched 2004.
- Inverted the hourly-break/fix model: flat monthly fee, unlimited support, Reddog bore the cost of unreliability.
- Customers from 2 employees to nearly 1,000 — national expansion ~2008, international ~2009.
- Standardised on Apple and moved early on iPhone — seventy devices when they were still hard to obtain.
- Built custom pricing, asset management, and support analytics — transfer pricing for an IT department at individual-product granularity.
- Sold to customers in 2017 — every customer bought their equipment and documentation rather than a going-concern sale.
The situation
Jason Rudolph and I started working on what became Reddog in late 2002. Prospective customers told us the same story everywhere: IT was unreliable, slow, unfit for purpose, and always one version behind.
Hourly billing made that worse. Providers made money when customers lost time. We set out to build a company customers loved — technology they loved to use and loved to pay for — by aligning our incentives with theirs.
The decision — IT department as a service
Most IT companies in 2004 were break/fix services. We modelled Reddog on how a large company runs internal IT: one department serving many business units — except Reddog was the department for organisations of any size.
Fixed monthly price per solution. Unlimited support. Unlimited returns. New equipment when the business needed it. If something broke or was unfit for purpose, Reddog paid — not the customer. Reliability became a profit driver, not a cost centre.
That sounds simple until you try to price it. We built transfer-pricing-style models for hundreds of products and services, predicting support load and asset life so invoices stayed static while costs moved underneath.
What we built
Reddog developed its own data centres, mail systems, VOIP, firewalls, portable satellite internet, VMware infrastructure, and custom security products — because standardisation across customers in multiple countries required it.
My role was customer-facing: executive and board technology strategy, product development, change management, due diligence on acquisitions, building fit-outs, and the software and mathematics behind pricing and support systems.
We could fit out an entire building over a single weekend and have hundreds of staff operational Monday morning. One remote customer cost AUD $10,000 to get a person on site — the model had to work where geography was hostile.
We standardised on Apple before most corporates would touch it. When the iPhone launched, we bought heavily — seventy devices when they were still difficult to obtain — and turned a consumer shift into an enterprise advantage.
How we exited
By 2017 Jason and I were ready for new challenges. We could have sold Reddog as a going concern — it was large, profitable, and had long-term contracts.
Instead we asked what had made Reddog work. Customer trust. We offered every customer the chance to buy their own equipment and documentation and run their IT the way we had taught them. Every customer took the offer.
That exit was consistent with the model from day one: align with the customer, even when selling the company.
What it proved
Business model design is as important as product design. Misaligned incentives explain most “IT problems” — they are decision problems wearing a helpdesk costume.
We were years ahead of managed services as a category. The pattern repeated later at VUID, in sport, and in advisory work: build the thing before the market has language for it, then leave when the work no longer matches the goal.