How we carved out valleys in the price-mountains of our industry

A long, long time ago (2005), in a faraway land (Hamilton), there was a young entrepreneur named James who worked as a data recovery technician.

Now, these were the old, wild west days of data recovery. There were only a couple of players in the market. A typical job would have cost you more than $1,000—often lots more. And the lab he worked in had little in the way of tools—so success rates were poor.

Nonetheless, James learned a lot, including several foundational techniques he still uses today.

Around 2008, he was chatting to a customer who happened to own a business called Digital Recovery. This customer was moving on, and mentioned to James that his business was coming up for sale. James’ boss wasn’t interested…but James was.

So he scraped together some capital, and purchased Digital Recovery.

The company was in bad shape at the time—almost at the point of closing its doors. But James worked hard. He knew he could do as good a job as any other recovery company in the industry. And he also knew those companies were…over-charging. So with a combination of Kiwi ingenuity, hard work, and much fairer prices (often less than half the competition’s) he rebuilt Digital Recovery’s brand and reputation.

This in turn attracted Darren Hales-Owen, who came on board in 2010, bringing sales and marketing expertise to the business. With Darren’s arrival, the company was able to import its first top-shelf piece of recovery equipment, a PC-3000 kit. From there, Digital Recovery went into an upward cycle of better and better success rates with recoveries, in turn attracting more and more customers, which injected even more capital to buy better recovery equipment. As success rates increased, so did cashflow—thus leading to even better success rates.

All the while, James and Darren steadfastly refused to raise their prices more than was fair. Thus they carved a valley in the mountains. Gradually, other data recovery agencies were forced to compete with the fairer pricing, while always looking over their shoulders to up their game. Digital Recovery changed the landscape of the industry to one where the customer now benefits.

Since then, Digital Recovery has been providing Hamilton, the Waikato, New Zealand, Australia and the Islands with first-rate data recovery services. We’ve built up a formidable amount of knowledge, expertise, and custom recovery equipment, and we’re widely regarded as leaders in our industry.

And because we’re small, every customer is valuable to us—so we’ve also earned a reputation for pretty amazing customer service.