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 (that’s me).

I 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 I worked in had little in the way of tools—so success rates were poor.

Nonetheless, I learned a lot, including several foundational techniques I still use today.

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

So I 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 I worked hard. I knew I could do as good a job as any other recovery company in the industry. And I 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) I rebuilt Digital Recovery’s brand and reputation.

Eventually I was able to import our 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—leading to even better success rates.

All the while, I steadfastly refused to raise my prices more than was fair. This carved out 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. Without tooting my own horn, I do believe 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.