UK IT Channel · Strategy · AI Systems
Forty years in the IT channel. Now building the AI systems that run it.
Channel development, sales automation and workflow systems for vendors, distributors and resellers. Built and run by one senior operator, from wherever the van is parked.
Sound familiar
The problems are commercial. The fixes are part strategy, part system.
Most channel businesses are not short of opportunity. They are short of route, time and pipeline. These are the conversations that usually start it.
No route into the UK channel
Strong product, credible brand, and years of hard road getting nowhere with distribution. The market rewards whoever shows up and makes it easy to buy.
Pipeline depends on one person's diary
New business happens when somebody finds the time. Which means it mostly does not happen, and the lapsed customers never hear from you at all.
Quoting and tenders eat the week
Hundreds of line items, dozens of suppliers, one bid window. Skilled people spending days on copy and paste work a system should be doing.
Everything lives in spreadsheets and hope
Quotes in one tool, orders in another, supplier pricing maintained by hand. Functional, fragile, and one mistyped cell from a bad day.
What I do
Three ways in. One operator across all of them.
Sometimes the answer is relationships and structure. Sometimes it is a system that removes the grunt work. Usually it is both, and it helps when the same person can do either.
01 · Channel
Channel development
Route to market builds for vendors entering or growing in the UK and Europe. Pricing architecture, distributor recruitment, reseller engagement and onboarding, using relationships built over a forty year career. I open the channel, document the playbook and hand it over.
Typical engagement: monthly retainer →
02 · Systems
AI and workflow systems
Working systems that take on the repetitive jobs: sales outreach that researches and drafts every morning, tender engines that price hundreds of lines, CRM and quoting platforms that replace the spreadsheet sprawl. A human approves everything that matters. Built, run and managed, not sold and abandoned.
Typical engagement: fixed price build plus retainer →
03 · Advisory
Training and advisory
Workshops and advisory for leadership teams on AI adoption that actually makes commercial sense, plus sales effectiveness and channel strategy built on three decades of doing the job rather than reading about it.
Typical engagement: workshop or day rate →
Not concepts. Live systems.
Two AI sales agents, working for real clients right now.
Both run every working day. Both write under a human persona from a named company mailbox. Both stage every email for human approval before anything sends. The difference is how deep they go.
The bespoke agent · built deep inside the business
The salesman who knows when to stay quiet.
A virtual member of a client's sales team, with his own mailbox and his own identity in the company CRM. He chases open quotes on a disciplined four touch cycle: a soft follow up, an expiry warning, a tidy up, a polite close. Before he drafts a word, he sweeps the mailboxes to check the customer isn't already mid conversation with a real person. If they are, he stays silent and logs it for the team instead.
- One morning's sweep pulled two drafts that would have stepped on live deals, and surfaced a quote north of £900k a customer had asked to close that was still sitting open
- Reads the CRM, resolves the original salesperson, references the actual products quoted
- Hard caps per day and per quote. Opt outs respected. Never touches pricing or quote records
THE FIT: FULL ACCESS BUILDS, SHAPED TO ONE BUSINESS
The repeatable engine · proven, redeployable
The SDR who never misses a morning.
Every working day it picks the prospects who are due a touch, researches each company, and writes individually tailored outreach from a named mailbox. No approval, nothing sends. Replies are sorted all day: routine questions answered, anything commercial escalated to a real person, and the week's numbers land in an email every Monday.
- First contact and follow ups on schedule, at a natural, deliverable pace. Not a spam engine
- Honest by design: asked if it's an AI, it says yes and hands over
- A proven workflow pattern, reconnected to your CRM, mailbox and prospect list in weeks
THE FIT: FAST, COSTED, RINSE AND REPEAT
Track record
Channels built and products sold for names you know.
“One of the few people able to connect sales, marketing, product managers and techies. A spider in the web with great communication skills, market knowledge and technical background. On top of that he is a great salesman.”
About
No suit. No office. No nonsense.
I'm Peter Airs. I spent forty years inside the UK IT channel: founding team of what became Exertis Enterprise, nearly nine years at Netgear across twenty seven countries, and a decade building Tripp Lite's UK channel from a standing start to eight figures. I've sat on every side of the table.
These days I work from a van with a springer spaniel for a colleague, parked wherever the view is best. The work ethic didn't change, the office did. I'm a self confessed workaholic with an unreasonable attention to detail, and the systems I sell are the systems I run my own businesses on. That's the whole point: no headcount, no overhead, results anyway.
If you're looking for a corporate haircut and a firm handshake in a glass meeting room, I'm genuinely not your man. If you want the job done properly, we should talk.
Start here
Tell me what's slowing you down.
A call costs nothing and I'll tell you straight if I'm not the right fit. If I am, you'll know exactly what happens next before we hang up.
BOOK A CALL