-: My name is Gary Thomas.
And I own a I-T company here in Muncie, Indiana
called LEAP Managed IT.
So our family business started in 1930 by my grandfather
and he worked for the railroad.
And then he got let go during the Great Depression.
So then he was getting phone calls at home
and he started his typewriter business
out of his garage with him and my grandma.
So that's how they got started.
We have two divisions of our company.
One is, we're in the imaging business.
So big copier, and printer and scanner systems
that you would see in most
enterprise or office-level environments.
The other side is our Managed I-T division
which is our fastest growing division.
And we work very closely with leadership teams
of other organizations, ownership, presidents, CFOs,
and we turn their I-T deliverable
into a business model for them,
and treat their end users like clients
to make them more efficient.
So everything from backup, security, compliance.
Just alligning the business goals with technology
to figure out, how do we make it move faster
and do what they actually need it to do.
So, I do a lot of business development.
And also, too, from a leadership standpoint,
with our clients, sometimes I'm that point-of-contact
of having delicate conversations about the business,
where they're trying to go,
opportunities or challenges that they have.
Maybe they have to make an employee change
internally in their business.
They need a liaison to talk to say,
what's the impact if I have to get rid of my CFO tomorrow,
or make a change in an accounting firm,
or how this process flows and works.
They consult with us on that
and lot of times, it's just literally my cellphone
because they wanna have a peer conversation
with somebody that they can trust
and kind of vent a little bit to, and say,
okay, well how do we figure this out an solve it.
The other side of the business that I handle
and work with as a team is just the
leadership side of just running the organization itself.
So everything from assisting with H-R,
goals, objectives, key performance indicators,
what are we trying to tackle and accomplish,
vendor relationships,
sometimes a cheerleader internally.
Really, it's just the people side and running the business.
I just like to look at it as the technology
is just a tool, so we can't be so driven
that this technology is gonna continue to
solve a problem because tomorrow we could be like,
poof, there's a better cloud-based service out there.
You don't need servers in-house.
How does that impact and change the business goals?