60 Business View - February 2016
maybe less,” says Jacobellis. “And to have someone
who needed him all the time was far more predictable.
So he said, ‘Let’s start to focus on this.’ The number
of businesses that he worked with grew over three or
four years, from ’97, ’98 to 2001. As we got to 20, 25
of those recurring service businesses, we started to
refer away the home customers. Sometime in 2001,
we said, ‘We no longer service home clients.’ We were
all business.”
Today, Cal Net has replaced those former residential
customers with an equal number of business clients
throughout the L.A. and Orange County region, as well
as parts of San Bernardino and Ventura Counties. Ac-
cording to Jacobellis, about 400 of them are ‘man-
aged customers.’ “We have an ongoing, monthly rela-
tionship with them in some form,” he says.
Jacobellis explains how Cal Net differentiates itself
from its competitors in the Managed Service Provider
(MSP) industry: “First is our approach. Our traditional
and original business service mechanism was what
we call ‘the primary engineer model.’ At the time,
Zack, himself, as a technical person, would go to the
customer, onsite, and do the work that he needed to
do. So we would have, and today still have, a formi-
dable army of very skilled technical people who are in
front of our customers on a day-to-day basis; have built
relationships with them; and are technically superior
to the average tech you’ll see in an MSP. That’s one
TECHNOLOGY
