Day in the Life of Blair McKay, ASR Tech President & CEO
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When the Equipment Stops, the Pressure Starts
Every operations leader knows the feeling. A barcode scanner goes dark on the distribution floor. A POS register freezes mid-shift at a busy retail location. A mobile computer stops syncing in the middle of a warehouse cycle count. The equipment that was invisible five minutes ago is suddenly the only thing anyone is talking about.
Blair McKay has spent more than 30 years on the other side of that call: the person you need to reach when things stop working and the clock is already running.
As President and CEO of ASR Tech, Blair leads an IT hardware maintenance and support company built specifically for the kinds of businesses where downtime isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a cost. Retailers. Healthcare organizations. Distribution and fulfillment centers. Field service companies. Operations-heavy environments that depend on mobile computers, barcode scanners, thermal printers, POS systems, and dozens of other specialized devices to keep things moving every single day.
This is how he runs it.
The First Hour Sets the Standard
Blair’s day starts at 7:00 AM with black coffee, a glass of water with electrolytes, and a direct read on the business. Email first. Then a check-in on on-site service activity. Then, a look at where operations and sales stand before the day gets moving.
The discipline is intentional. In a service organization where a single equipment failure at a customer site can cascade quickly, the first hour either gets ahead of problems or chases them. Blair prefers the former.
When things are running smoothly, that first hour is a quiet temperature check: touching base with the team, confirming nothing’s off, thinking through what the day needs. When something is on fire? “I’m attacking that problem right away so we can see what we can do about it.”
That instinct, “ identify it, own it, move”, is the same standard ASR Tech holds for customer repair requests. When a device goes down at a grocery chain or a healthcare facility, the response is immediate. The goal is always to minimize the time between failure and resolution.
Service Operations Is the Job
Ask Blair where he spends the most time as CEO, and his answer doesn’t drift toward strategy or sales or board-level abstractions.
Service operations is our bread and butter. That’s what differentiates us from everyone else. The sales will come if we can perform. We just need to be able to perform
Most of his week is spent on the decisions that keep performance tight: units that need parts, service requests that need routing, customer situations that need a direct solution rather than a process. People bring Blair problems: equipment that won’t initialize, a configuration that’s throwing errors, a repair that’s taking longer than a customer’s spare pool can cover, and he works through them with the team until there’s an answer.
The thing that guides him is a lesson he learned the hard way over decades in the industry: never accept the first version of a story.
Rather than taking somebody’s word for it, it’s better to dive into the details to verify everything is correct. I’ve been caught off guard many times by people who said ‘this is how it’s going’ and then I find out it’s not. Just constantly asking questions to make sure you get to the right answer — the actual information you need to make the correct decision.
For customers evaluating an IT hardware maintenance and support partner, that detail orientation shows up directly in repair quality. It’s the difference between a technician who replaces a part and closes the ticket and one who traces the failure to its root cause, so it doesn’t come back.
What Keeps Blair Sharp
Outside the office, Blair plays pickleball two to four times a week, something he started with his wife and has turned into a consistent social rhythm in their neighborhood. It’s a sport that rewards quick reflexes, strategic positioning, and staying mentally engaged, which sounds about right for a CEO who runs on attention to detail.
Beyond that? Tinkering in the garage. Gardening. Keeping his hands and mind active.
Keeping fit is really important. Just keeping busy, keeping my mind busy.
What Quality Actually Means Here
Blair defines quality the way his customers experience it, not as a spec, but as an outcome.
It means equipment that works the way it’s supposed to. It means a repair that solves the actual problem, not just the surface symptom. And it means a service interaction that doesn’t add stress to an already difficult situation. “You don’t aggravate them. You figure out, ‘oh, it’s configured differently, that’s why it’s not working,’ and you just get to the bottom of it. The quicker you do that, the better they see you as a high-quality vendor.”
Turnaround time matters, but Blair is careful not to treat speed as the only metric. Sometimes the right answer takes longer, because the problem is bigger, or because the customer has enough spares in their pool to support a more thorough repair. Understanding that context, and communicating it clearly, is part of what separates a reactive repair shop from a real IT hardware maintenance partner.
Taco Tuesday Has a Track Record
Every Tuesday, Blair and a colleague head down the street to Avila’s El Ranchero, a Mexican restaurant in Lake Forest they’ve been going to for years, long before it became their unofficial client meeting spot.
“It brings us luck. For some reason, every time we go there, we come back with POs.” The owners know them. They walk in without a reservation. It’s the kind of place where business gets done because the relationship was already real before anyone sat down.
It’s a small detail. But it says something accurate about the culture at ASR Tech, one where customers aren’t kept at arm’s length, and deals are built on familiarity, not formality.
Who ASR Tech Is Built For
Part of running a focused service organization is knowing exactly who you’re not trying to serve. Blair is direct about this.
ASR Tech doesn’t chase single-device repair jobs or consumer-grade equipment. “The time spent on those is the same time I could spend with a customer that has 100 devices. It just eats up too much valuable time.” The company is built for enterprise and mid-market operations with complex, multi-device environments, organizations where a broken scanner isn’t just a broken scanner, it’s a bottleneck across an entire workflow.
That focus keeps ASR Tech sharp. With over 30 years of experience and partnerships with more than 50 OEM hardware manufacturers, including Zebra, Honeywell, and Motorola, the team supports hardware running on Microsoft, Apple, Android, and Linux across thousands of repair requests per month from its ISO-compliant repair facility in Irvine, California. All repairs are backed by a 90-day warranty.
Right now, the company is in a significant growth phase. Blair can’t share full details yet on a pending integration, but when it closes, ASR Tech’s operational capacity will nearly double. Longer term, the focus is on expanding reach across the United States and into Canada, with a particular emphasis on next-generation self-checkout systems and newer equipment repair capabilities.
Blair’s Advice for Extending Hardware Life and Reducing Downtime
For operations leaders trying to get more out of their IT equipment and reduce the cost of unexpected failures, Blair’s guidance is practical and direct.
Keep the equipment clean, for thermal printers, regular printhead maintenance alone can dramatically extend functional life. Beyond that, the biggest lever is having a service structure already in place before something breaks: advanced exchange programs, overnight spare management, and an IT hardware maintenance partner who can mobilize quickly. “Having your services set up so that you can immediately get an advanced exchange, so you can get back up and running quickly, is probably the best advice.”
The goal isn’t just faster repairs. It’s building a support model that makes downtime the exception rather than the rule.
What a Great Day Looks Like
The best day at ASR Tech, according to Blair, is when the team hits its revenue goals, and he gets to hand out bonus checks.
“That’s the best day — when you can give away money. It brings the team together so they’re all contributing.”
But there’s another version of a great day that happens out in the field, when a technician finishes a repair visit, uncovers a new opportunity for the customer, and comes back with something that helps the business grow. For Blair, those moments are a reminder that ASR Tech’s technicians aren’t just repair professionals. They’re the front line of a service relationship, and the ones who make the brand promise real every day.
If someone only remembers one thing about ASR Tech after reading this, Blair knows exactly what he wants it to be:
“These guys can fix anything.”
Work with a Team That Gets It
Whether you’re managing a fleet of barcode scanners across a distribution network, keeping POS systems running in a high-volume retail environment, or looking for a depot repair partner you can actually count on, ASR Tech is built for operations like yours.
Contact ASR Tech for a no-charge assessment.
About ASR Tech
ASR Tech specializes in the electronic repair and IT hardware maintenance and support of a wide range of devices, including mobile computers, barcode scanners, thermal and laser printers, POS systems, servers, touchscreen monitors, two-way radios, and more. With over 30 years of experience and partnerships with more than 50 OEM hardware manufacturers, ASR Tech serves large retailers, distribution and fulfillment centers, healthcare organizations, and field service companies across the United States. Services include on-site repair, depot repair, overnight spare management, and new and refurbished hardware sales, all backed by a 90-day warranty.