GearSource.com has been around since 2002, but the online global marketplace of equipment for the entertainment industry hasn’t thought of itself as a tech firm. But that’s changing now that GearSource is using a high-performance platform and preparing to roll out new services.

“I would say I wasn’t brought up as a tech founder, I was brought up as a pretty normal, boot-strapping business guy,” says chief executive Marcel Fairbairn, who launched the business in 2002.

That approach has worked well for GearSource, which gets 70% of its orders through online searches and the remaining 30% through live customer service. Relying mostly on email and word of mouth to build business, revenue growth averaged 5% to 7% annually without acquisitions, says Fairbairn, who won’t reveal actual numbers.

“Everything we’ve done is organic,” he says. “We’ve been profitable almost every year.” The only exceptions were in 2008 in the wake of the economic crash and more recently in the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.