By Geoff Kirbyson

Mike Stevens, one of the firm’s partners and president of its consulting group, says because it has just four partners, the firm is nimble enough to make decisions quickly and move into new areas without getting bogged down in bureaucracy.

“We’re not limited to a head office in Toronto or New York telling us what to do. We’re more business people than we are a pure chartered accounting firm,” he says.

Stevens says The Exchange Group’s diversified service offering, particularly its focus on small and medium-sized business clients, has helped it weather the current economic storm.

“We certainly haven’t seen the effects of the recession on our clients. We meet regularly to monitor the situation. It’s the larger companies, like Chrysler and Canwest (Global Communications Corp.) that are being hit hard by the recession. They’re being serviced by the larger professional service firms. The small to medium-sized client in Manitoba hasn’t been hit as hard by the recession so we haven’t been hit as hard,” he says.

Stevens says the accounting and data centre divisions continue to grow and staffing levels on the consulting side have remained consistent for the past two or three years so the firm isn’t feeling the pinch that has caused many companies to lay off employees or move to reduced work weeks.

The accounting division has clients of all sizes–ranging from one-person shops to multi-national corporations–across the country. Its bread and butter, however, is privately-owned owner-operated businesses.

“Our goal isn’t to do the Great-West Life’s and other enormous multi-nationals,” he says. The firm’s consulting clients are of all different sizes across Canada and the U.S. while its data centre business comes primarily from mid-market companies.

Stevens is particularly bullish on the latter division, which is known as “Exchange Global Server Centre” and which evolved from the firm’s acquisition of Idyia Inc. three years ago. It enables companies to host their servers there, either as their primary site or as a redundant location in case data at the first one is compromised. You might have heard of one of its largest clients–a little airline called Air Canada.

“We have much more hands-on service than the big guys do. We have clients who say they want to use our data centre because of our managed services. We have a number of clients around the world who say they like the (value of) the Canadian dollar, too. Winnipeg is a prime location,” he says.

Stevens says this division goes the extra mile to ensure client data is ultra secure. For example, under its headquarters in the Grain Exchange Building on Lombard Avenue are the major pipes of five North American Internet providers–MTS, Bell, Allstream, Shaw and Terago–which effectively gives backups to its backups.

“We have complete fail over. If we only had MTS coming in and their Internet connection got cut off, our clients couldn’t access their services. We’re the only ones in Manitoba with five providers,” he says.

The data centre is also able to offer customized products for clients, such as its voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) service called “Voicepeer.” Stevens says the company hosts the white label product, which can be fully integrated with e-mail as well as traditional phone systems, while resellers promote the benefits to customers. In addition to providing superior functionality than traditional wireless carriers, the technology can also result in significant cost savings, he says.

An added benefit of having its business driven by three operating units is it helps smooth out its income stream, he says.

“For most accounting firms, the peak of business is in the first six months of the year. Our revenue is spread out throughout the year,” he says.