Vasil Dimovski opened a Cinch I.T. in Arizona, where he hopes to use his past experience to protect small business owners from digital threats.
Vasil Dimovski is a franchisee on a mission to protect small companies from cyber threats. With a wealth of experience from high profile roles held around the world and having already been an entrepreneur with one concept, Dimovski set out last year to become a Cinch I.T. operator.
Opening his unit in Tempe, Arizona, Dimovski said he wants to help small businesses, which are the most vulnerable to hacking.
Cinch I.T. was founded in 2004 and provides outsourced IT support. The brand has one company-owned unit and 12 franchised locations.
“I’ve always loved technology, so now it made sense to go off and take the experience I have from working internationally on a large scale and bring that to the local market,” Dimovski said. “They don’t have budgets like I’ve seen at bigger companies, they’re easier targets. That’s why I wanted to go this route, so I could provide that protection on a local scale.”
The experience Dimovski referenced included work in both private businesses and government agencies. His career began with BP, where he designed control systems for oil refineries, before becoming a control engineer at WorleyParsons in Saudi Arabia.
Dimovski continued working overseas, entering the government sector in the area of his birthplace. Dimovski was born in the nation formerly known as Yugoslavia, before his family moved to the U.S.
Dimovski returned to what had become the Republic of Macedonia to take the chief of staff position for the country’s Minister of Foreign Investments. After his work there, Dimovski went back to the U.S. to co-found Task Force in 2015.
Rick Porter
Task Force provides consulting and business support services to industries such as healthcare, insurance, logistics, accounting and finance. Dimovski said the company grew from five employees to about 1,600; he sold most of his shares in the last year when he made the move to open his Cinch I.T.
Rick Porter, Cinch I.T.’s CEO, called Dimovski a “rockstar.” “Not everybody is as qualified as Vasil,” Porter said. “He was a no-brainer to bring into our system.”
Going with a franchise model for his next business venture was a no-brainer for Dimovski, too, considering how much effort is needed to start something from scratch.
“It can be brutal doing something from out of nothing,” Dimovski said. “We had success, but the amount of work that was put in was insane. Not that running a franchise doesn’t take the same mentality and hard work, but at least you can get to market immediately. You don’t have to figure out the different processes and procedures.”
Franchising is relatively new for both parties in this case, as Cinch I.T. launched its program in 2019.
“We saw some great success in recent years and started to find customers from all over the United States,” Porter said. “Remote support we found was very easy when handling from a help desk. But there is a time when you need to troubleshoot equipment hands on, at the site, or install new equipment. It started to become difficult to manage clients quickly and efficiently all over the country.”
Porter said the company went forward with the franchise model because of the investment a franchisee will put into the brand. “I love the model, with the idea that any franchise partner I put in place is always going to outperform a manager that I put there because they have skin in the game,” Porter said.
One of the reasons Dimovski decided to buy a franchise was to gain access to the brand’s help desk, as it allows him to focus on onboarding more clients who need in-person services.
“The biggest thing I took away from it was they have everything centralized,” Dimovski said. “While we have our team on the ground that is customer-facing and providing local support, the majority of support for IT is on the help desk side, which can be done remotely. They manage the bulk of customer issues at headquarters, so it lets you really scale up in the market and take on multiple clients who need those local services.”
According to Porter, Cinch I.T. approves a maximum of six franchises per year. The investment range to open a location is between $101,000 and $125,000.