Regional IT company named CBT Entrepreneur of Year

by David Reed

May 29,2009

Midwest CompuTech – which increased its revenue more than 400 percent, tripled its employment in the past four years, and launched a trio of complementary businesses – was selected CBT’s 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year.

The company started out in Sedalia as Young’s Typewriter in 1982 and evolved into a regional information technology company with offices in Columbia, Jefferson City, Lake Ozark and Sedalia.

President of Midwest Computech Greg Miller, left, and Vice President David Nivens, right, with their client Rick Hartford in the server room at KMIZ news station.

Current co-owners David Nivens and Greg Miller both started out as technology coordinators in school systems. They built their business around particularly stable customers, including school systems (which still provide 60-70 percent of revenue), local governments, banks, physicians and accounting firms.

Midwest CompuTech had five employees when Nivens started working for the company in 2001, 8-10 in 2004 when he became a co-owner and 28 this year.

Revenue has increased about 437 percent from fiscal 2004-05 to the fiscal year ending in July.

Midwest CompuTech specializes in computer network services, and one of the company’s primary evolutions came in 2002, when it moved from what Nivens called a “break/fix model” to a managed IT services model.

Rather than having technicians primarily responding to service calls and fixing “breaks” in technology, Nivens said Midwest CompuTech now contracts with customers to manage and maintain the equipment.

“We in effect become part of the company, as if we were a full-time employee,” Nivens said. “There is an assumption of risk,” Nivens said, when agreeing to keep the systems running without hourly rates. “We assume what a lot of other companies don’t.”

A recent example of the company’s response to adversity was to dramatically change the operations when gas costs rose significantly. The managers moved to primarily remote monitoring and service, and reduced visits to customers. The company’s gas bill dropped from $3,400 in December 2007 to $500 in December 2008. The change also allowed the company to monitor customers’ computer networks full-time, rather than just during service calls.

In the last six months, Midwest CompuTech has started offering a new way of delivering information technology to customers, with virtually all of the data residing on the server. That allows them to put all of the applications on a Web browser, rather than keeping individual applications loaded on individual computers.

Four years ago, Nivens and Miller launched a separate but complementary business, TruMark Services. A subsidiary company doing business as TruMark Capital arranges for schools and local governments to lease computer systems.

Within the past year, they have opened TruMark Consulting, which does security audits for banks to make sure they are in compliance with state and federal regulations in advance of government audits, and TruMark Hosting, which allows small companies that don’t want to incur the cost of an in-house server and computer system hardware to use a TruMark server.

Looking back, Miller said what “really kicked off” the business growth was the adoption of their Education Technology Assistance Program in schools in Higginsville and Concordia in 2001. They now have 20 schools using the program, including the original two where Nivens was the technician.