Jason Bystrak, Senior Vice President, Cloud & Advanced Solutions+ Business Unit, is a long-time friend of the SMB MSP family and we caught a hot moment at the recent D&H Next+ event in Austin. It was a thought leadership conference that was smaller by design. About 200 partners and senior executives from the different line card vendors that facilitated real conversation compared to larger MSP events that have become noise and get drunks. The best part for me? NO EXPO HALL – thank God. Made the even feel like an Executive MBA Saturday session.
A fun fact before we get started. Bystrak and family moved to Dallas from cold Buffalo. Being in Austin – I can now call him my next-door neighbor.
D&H transition from old school red brick pick-and-pack distributor to today.
You can listen to the podcast HERE.
- The journey really started in the 1980s when D&H was B2C top heavy and started to pursue VARs (aka Channel Partners) to build a commercial business
- Fast forward to 2015/2016 timeframe tooled up its talent with former distributor executives from Ingram Micro like Peter DeMarco to accelerate this practice.
- Since its new acceleration strategy, D&H has scaled from $3.3 billion to a reported $7 billion today. D&H is privately owned so it’s really not possible to confirm but I believe it.
- Investing forward in the “advanced solutions” business that Bystrak directs: cloud, storage, compute, networking, security, etc. This also included the services unit.
- Bystrak reports 25% growth year of year in the advanced solutions business.
- Link with Bystrak HERE https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonbystrak/
- Bystrak reports 1,600 employees at D&H that included 400 sales people.
- D&H and an ESOP so every employee is a shareholder after a very short vesting period (90-days) after date of hire.
- Sheesh – it now has multiple offices. I remember when D&H opened it first office beyond the Harrisburg, PA HQ in Toronto (I was there lol). One of the latest offices is in Tampa, FL.
- Not into M&A stuff. Being private is it’s north star.
- All employees are North American-based. D&H doesn’t off shore.
- Average employee tenure is 10+ years.