Leigh Owens (Universal Computer Solutions)
Fourteen months ago we acquired Universal Computer Solutions. For a business that had been serving Geelong and Ballarat for 27 years, that was no small thing. The easy thing would have been to treat it like most acquisitions work. New processes. New systems. New management. Roll everyone into the same machine and move on.
We didn’t do that. And honestly, it’s made all the difference.
When you buy a local business that’s been around for nearly three decades, you’re not really buying a business. You’re buying relationships. Trust. A way of doing things that customers have come to rely on – “The Universal Way”. You can kill that pretty quickly if you’re not careful. We wanted to preserve it.
That meant keeping the founder involved. Not pushing them out, but actually working with them to shape what comes next. It meant slowing down enough to understand how Universal did things before we started changing them. And it meant being straight with the team about what was happening. No corporate speak. Just honest conversations about roles, expectations, and what this meant for their future.
We’ve had the growing pains from 10 people to 30 in 14 month. Add that into a wider operation with SC Technology Group of 60 to 70 across the region and you’ve got real challenges. You can lose what made a place special pretty quickly when you’re scaling that fast. The only way through it is getting your people genuinely on board. If they don’t trust that you’re doing this right, nothing else matters.
We’ve brought on some serious customers now. Hamilton Group being one of them. That’s a big deal in Geelong. Those kinds of partnerships happen because people trust you to understand their business, understand their community, and actually look after them. Not just sell them something and move on.
That trust has given us room to lift standards right across the board with our customers. Cybersecurity, resilience, modern systems. We’re treating these as essentials now, not nice to haves. That’s what a trusted technology partner does.
The thing we keep coming back to is this: being local actually matters. Not as a slogan. As an actual advantage. We live here. We know the industries. We’re accountable to the same people we serve. That means something. City-based providers can’t replicate that, and honestly, the market’s starting to see the difference.
Where we’re heading is straightforward. We want to be one of the largest locally based technology employers in this region, delivering IT, print, and telecommunications as one unified service. One partner. One conversation. That’s it.
Fourteen months in, we’re measuring this acquisition’s success by one thing: do our customers wake up and get the same level of service they always had? Are we better at it? If we’re doing that, the rest follows. That’s the only number that actually matters.
Universal Computer Solutions are offering the Chamber community a 45 minute IT health check. To book yours, contact Leigh Owens at leigh.owens@universal.com.au
